Ubiquitous learning website: Scaffold learners by mobile devices with information-aware techniques

The portability and immediate communication properties of mobile devices influence the learning processes in interacting with peers, accessing resources and transferring data. For example, the short message and browsing functions in a cell phone provide users with timely and adaptive information access. Although many studies of mobile learning indicate the pedagogical potential of mobile devices, the screen size, computational power, battery capacity, input interfaces, and network bandwidth are too restricted to develop acceptable functionality for the entire learning processes in a handheld device. Therefore, mobile devices can be adopted to fill the gap between Web-based learning and ubiquitous mobile learning. This study first creates a website, providing functions enabling learning to take place anytime and anywhere with any available learning device, for ubiquitous learning according to various properties of mobile devices. Nowadays, learners’ behaviors on a website can be recorded as learning portfolios and analyzed for behavioral diagnosis or instructional planning. A student model is then built according to the analytical results of learning portfolios and a concept map of the learning domain. Based on the student model and learners’ available learning devices, three modules are developed to build a ubiquitous learning environment to enhance learning performance via learning status awareness, schedule reminders and mentor recommendation. Finally, an experiment is conducted with 54 college students after implementation of the ubiquitous learning website. Experimental results indicate that the proposed system can enhance three learning performance indicators, namely academic performance, task accomplishment rates, and learning goals achievement rates. 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.