Energy-Aware Mobile Learning:Opportunities and Challenges

As mobile devices are becoming more powerful and affordable they are increasingly used for mobile learning activities. By enabling learners' access to educational content anywhere and anytime, mobile learning has both the potential to provide online learners with new opportunities, and to reach less privileged categories of learners that lack access to traditional e-learning services. Among the many challenges with mobile learning, the battery-powered nature of mobile devices and in particular their limited battery life, stands out as one issue that can significantly limit learners' access to educational content while on the move. Adaptation and personalisation solutions have widely been considered for overcoming the differences between learners and between the characteristics of their mobile devices. However, while various energy saving solutions have been proposed in order to provide mobile users with extended device usage time, the areas of adaptive mobile learning and energy conservation in wireless communications failed to meet under the same umbrella. This paper bridges the two areas by presenting an overview of adaptive mobile learning systems as well as how these can be extended to make them energy-aware. Furthermore, the paper surveys various approaches for energy measurement, modelling and adaptation, three major aspects that have to be considered in order to deploy energy-aware mobile learning systems. Discussions on the applicability and limitations of these approaches for mobile learning are also provided

Navigation Support for Mobile Learning

Mobile learning exposes learning to the natural environment. If this environment is large, the learners have to navigate to find the learning objects or to explore the environment. Current mobile learning systems provide only minimal navigational support. Prior studies report that conventional pedestrian information systems are not suited to mobile learning, as the learners focus too much on the navigation system. In this paper we analyze issues in navigational support and provide evidence for the lack of support in current systems. Then we propose and evaluate how mobile learning systems can not only provide better navigation support, but also prevent the focus problem. The tested concepts include using an aura to visualize the accuracy, using history visualization for orientation and browsing support, and using information pull to focus more on the environment. Recommendations for further research conclude the paper