Establishing Requirements for a Mobile Learning System

MOBIlearn was a large, multinational European-funded research and development project that explored new ways to use mobile environments to meet the needs of learners, working by themselves and with others. The aim of the project was to develop a new m-learning architecture for a pedagogically-sound mobile learning environment, and to evaluate an instantiation of that architecture using existing technologies. A user-centred approach was taken to the project, based on sociocognitive engineering (Sharples et al, 2002) and embedded in ISO 13407. The project team consisted of representatives from more than 15 organisations from seven European countries plus one Middle Eastern country. Establishing the requirements for such a project was a complex task, involving many methods and notations. The project produced several documents and results; some of these are available at http://www.mobilearn.org. Publications specifically related to mobile learning are available at http://iet.open.ac.uk/pp/j.taylor/.