MOBILE FEEDBACK SYSTEM FOR SUPPORTING
INTERACTIVE LEARNING
Harri Hämäläinen, Tomi Ruuska and Ari Happonen
Lappeenranta University of Technology, P.O. Box 20, FIN-53850 Lappeenranta, Finland
Keywords: Virtual Learning Environment, Wireless Service Platform, Interactive Learning.
Abstract: Nowadays in some environments cases the lack of interaction between teacher and students is a huge
challenge. Because of this the teachers may have difficulties to diagnose the level and preliminary
knowledge of the students. In this paper we take a look at the wireless web-based education system
supporting the traditional learning environment. We have earlier developed a pilot that can be used to
develop the interaction between different parties. First virtual learning applications have had an approach
where studying is independent from time and place. The goal for our application instead was to develop the
current learning event and lecture. Our solution is founded on a WWW-based service. Students have access
to the application for participating using their devices. Teachers as well as students have their own
interfaces. Based on a questionnaire we completed, there is a need for these types of applications. This
paper introduces a pilot application and its usage in a Wireless Service Platform. The platform gives
completely new possibilities for taking advantage of the eLearning application. Lack of end-user devices is
still a limiting factor but this solution at least reduces the need for existing network infrastructure.
1 INTRODUCTION
Online learning and different applications related to
it have been hot topics for years. Currently there are
numerous virtual learning environments
implemented and being used. Most of them aim to
make the learning insignificant from place and time.
In these systems the material, including presentation
slides and maybe even video or audio recordings, is
stored in the network and the students can have
access to this source anywhere they want through
the Internet. Students can also access the material
any time they want during the period when the
virtual course is set to be online. Students may have
to do some homeworks or they may have to fill in
quizzes from time to time. This may be the only
choice for many busy people who may be studying
in addition to their everyday work. Distance-
education course designers face the challenge of
replicating the in-lab experience over the Internet, in
a manner of speaking (Leitner, Lee J, 2005). One
thing is often missing from this kind of approach:
real-life interaction.
The application that we describe in this paper
was implemented during the year 2002. The biggest
problem that we considered at the time was the lack
of end-user devices. The belief was that the number
of handheld devices providing access to the Internet
with reasonable price would increase more rapidly
than it has. Consequently although the amount of
wireless devices has increased the situation is more
or less as it was a few years ago.
New and more developed approach is to use a
wireless service platform to provide a mobile
WLAN (Wireless Local Area Network) at the space
where the actual event is taking place. Although the
application was originally developed to support
teaching it has several other targets where it can
provide added value for the participants. Taking
conferences as an example; Most of the participants
are carrying a laptop with an easily accessible
network connection, but these locations are often
missing an Internet connection. Conference
presentations are normally not interrupted and the
questions will take place at the end of the
presentation. With this kind of an approach, listeners
are able to send the questions for the presenter at the
time when the question is current. If the presenter
has a view for the given feedback in real time, he
can respond to these issues if it fits the current topic
or he can leave the answering to these questions at
the end of his presentation. However, this type of
446
Hämäläinen H., Ruuska T. and Happonen A. (2007).
MOBILE FEEDBACK SYSTEM FOR SUPPORTING INTERACTIVE LEARNING.
In Proceedings of the Third International Conference on Web Information Systems and Technologies - Society, e-Business and e-Government /
e-Learning, pages 446-451
DOI: 10.5220/0001284004460451
Copyright
c
SciTePress
interactive presentation requires much more
attention from the presenter.
In this paper we take a look at the “ITSE”
(Interactive Teaching Support Environment)
application and take a look at its operation as a part
of a Wireless Service Platform. In chapter 2 we
present the current situation as well as the opinions
of the interviewed actors in teaching. In chapter 3
we take a look at the application itself, its features
and usability. In chapter 4 we present the Wireless
Service Platform concept where the application can
be installed in. In the last chapter we summarize the
whole system and the possibilities that it can
provide.
2 CURRENT STATE FOR THE
NEED OF APPLICATIONS
We completed a quick research over the virtual
learning applications. The research was performed
among different actors in education in Finland,
mainly at the university level. Based on the results,
there seems to be a real need for virtual learning
tools. Although several applications have existed in
this field for a long time, they are poorly known.
Thus, there is not a single application that has
dominating market position. The reasons why these
applications have not come off so far in Finnish
universities are probably be diverse.
2.1 Interaction in Teaching
According to many experienced teachers one of the
biggest differences between younger and older
students is the level of interaction. For the more
experienced ones teachers may only give some
topics for discussion and based on their knowledge
the students take care of sharing the information
themselves. The experienced participants are not shy
to express their opinions or ask questions. The
freshmen in universities instead are often insecure
about their knowledge and do not have a courage to
take part or ask questions in fear of loss of face.
Technical solutions can give added value for these
kinds of environments.
Our approach is not to affect on the information
and material that is presented or how it is presented
in the lectures, but to strengthen the current learning
atmosphere and give better pedagogical tools for the
teachers. The main idea of our approach is to take
away the boundaries between the different actors
and to make the students to participate actively in
the session.
2.2 Current Applications
There are lots of implementations in this field but
most of them have not concerned the support for the
real-time activities. The early systems, such as
“Classroom Communication System”, (Dufresne et
al., 1996) were hardly hardware dependent. Latter
web-based systems were more or less platform
independent requiring only a web-browser in the
client side. "Student Response System" (Numina,
2003) and “ActiveClass” (Trompler et al., 2002)
have these features and are clearly not designed for
distance learning. As usual,
2.3 Survey for Demand
The feedback that we got from the questionnaire was
encouraging. Almost 90% of the interviewed
persons would be interested in using this type of
application to support their presentations. Over 80%
of them had no experience of these types of
applications of supporting the teaching. One issue
they pointed out was the chance of storing the
feedback into a database. This gives a possibility to
answer the questions later and to make a good use of
those to improve their presentations for future
purposes. This way the participants would have a
chance to get the correct answers afterwards.
The main problems and challenges according to
this research are the lack of devices and the missing
tradition from this kind of interaction. One of the
interesting questions is the listeners’ attitude towards
this kind of technology. Does it possibly require too
much attention to type a question with a handheld
device causing disturbance in ability to concentrate?
Does this set the students in different position
depending if they have the equipment or not and
does this in the end decrease the interaction from
earlier? It is definitely not suitable for all kinds of
environments, but in some cases it may give totally
new potential for the interaction.
3 SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS
The goal of the project was to create an application
that is as easy to use as possible and for as many
people as possible. The client application is ran on
users’ own portable devices (e.g. PDAs, laptops and
even mobile phones), not with just some standard
equipment provided by the event or lecture
MOBILE FEEDBACK SYSTEM FOR SUPPORTING INTERACTIVE LEARNING
447
organizer. Therefore we ended up implementing a
WWW-based application.
Before the system was implemented there were
some factors that had to be concerned as a guideline
in design. The most important of these were
platform independency, scalability and usability of
the application to give the possibility to use for as
many people as possible
3.1 Platform Independency
Presumably this kind of an application is used with
variety kinds of devices, operating systems and
platforms. Therefore the solution has to be on as
high level as possible. There is no sense for
implementing separate software for each device and
consumers are rarely willing or even capable to
install any additional software into their devices. For
this purpose we considered a pure HTML-based web
application as the most functional solution. Since the
devices have different types and versions of web-
browsers, the implementation has to be based on
common standards and has to be simple enough to
guarantee the functionality on each device.
3.2 Scalability
Selecting the technique as common as possible does
not guarantee the scalability on each device. Smaller
devices have very limited screen resolution and the
shape of display device may be dissimilar. Therefore
scalability is also an important factor to be
concerned.
The layout of the client software was designed as
simple as possible. It was necessary to avoid
techniques that are not necessarily supported by each
client, such as JavaScript. Simplicity often improves
also the learnability, one of the most important
factors in a field of usability in this field.
3.3 Usability
Before paying any attention to the usability
components, the presumable users and user groups
had to be defined. Probably most of the potential
users are newbies and they may also be non-
technology oriented. This sets some headlines for
the usability. Nielsen defines the usability by five
quality components:
Learnability: How easy is it for users to
accomplish basic tasks the first time they
encounter the design?
Efficiency: Once users have learned the
design, how quickly can they perform
tasks?
Memorability: When users return to the
design after a period of not using it, how
easily can they reestablish proficiency?
Errors: How many errors do users make,
how severe are these errors, and how easily
can they recover from the errors?
Satisfaction: How pleasant is it to use the
design? (Nielsen, 2003)
We came into conclusion that the application has
to be as easy to use and learn as possible. Therefore
we paid most attention into the learnability at the
cost of other factors. While simplifying the system
there is also less need for memorability. In courses
the students may be using the application constantly,
but e.g. in conferences there may be only one
instance of use requiring rapid learnability.
4 THE “ITSE”-APPLICATION
Students in some cultures are too shy to ask
questions publicly in front of hundreds of people.
Therefore one of our ideas has been anonymity
towards other students. It may also cause misuse of
the system. Therefore all the users may be required
to log in. Even though the feedback they give is
anonymous publicly, teacher or service
administrator has access to the information through
which user account each message has been sent.
The current system consists of different features
that are implemented as separate modules and each
of them are used optionally. These modules enable
Sending real-time feedback and question for the
teachers. Students can write text and send it to
the server. The questions and comments can
be presented publicly for all the audience via a
data projector. These comments are shown
anonymously to the public so everyone should
have courage to send questions in any level.
These questions are also stored in the database
and the teacher has access to this information
also later on.
Evaluating lecture and quick-quizzes. A simple
tool gives the users a chance to vote one of the
pre-defined options. This tool can be used for
evaluating the current presentation or to guide
the presenter to specify the presentation. It can
also be used to ask the students to answer
multiple-choice questions while the options
are given orally.
WEBIST 2007 - International Conference on Web Information Systems and Technologies
448
Quizzes. Students can be asked to answer the
pre-implemented quizzes. The questions may
be multiple-choice questions where the
alternatives of answers have been listed before
or open questions with a demand to give
answers by their own. Using this tool teacher
can more easily order some quick exams and
analyzing the results, especially of those
ready-given alternatives, is efficient. The
quizzes can be used to get a general overview
of the knowledge or even to evaluate single
student’s know-how.
Sharing files. Nowadays most of the material
and presentation are stored in electronic
format. Even now there are many cases where
the lecturers who have no deeper knowledge
of computer systems experience it hard to
maintain the course web-page and to add files
to be uploaded. If a teacher is using our
feedback system in his lectures, its also easy
to upload the material related to the course. As
well as the students have access to the
functionality being offered, they also can
download the material to their devices from
the same service easily.
0,00 %
5,00 %
10,00 %
15,00 %
20,00 %
25,00 %
30,00 %
35,00 %
40,00 %
45,00 %
50,00 %
12345
Importance
Grammar Voting Questions Sharing Files Anonymity
Figure 1: Evaluation of the usability of the implemented
features in teaching.
We asked the need and usability of these
features in our questionnaire and the results are
presented in Figure 1. We can perceive from the
table that the respondent have positive attitude
towards the use technological instruments in
teaching. Actually the interest towards more
interactive learning processes is higher than we even
expected. We can also see that they see some
features more usable than the others. Anonymity
was the one that caused most clearly differences in
respondent’s opinions.
Figure 2: Application platform and modules.
As described in figure 2, all the modules are
separate from each other. The “ITSE”-platform offer
the common functions for all the modules such as
identification and session management. Each of the
new services can be added later to the system. The
platform also includes the different templates that
are being used to present the information for the
students via teachers interface depending on the
chosen modules that are being used. Information
related to the user accounts and configuration is
stored in SQL database. The modules may also use
separate databases to store the related information
into it. This database is nevertheless virtually
separated from the database of the platform, as
presented in figure 2, to prevent errors and to
increase the security and data controllability. The
platform also includes the general layout, such as
placement of each feature in the screen, for all the
different user groups.
System has originally been designed to be run in
its own window when all the questions and
summaries are shown to everyone including the
audience. However often there are no two separate
data projectors in use so the application must be ran
on the same computer as the presentation. In this
case there are two possibilities. Speaker can run the
system in a separate web-browser and run the
presentation on the top. This case does not give the
interaction and instant feedback to him, since the
summary is hidden from him as well as the
audience. So another possibility is to run the
presentation through the application in its own frame
as presented in Figure 3. This both minimizes the
need for speaker’s equipment but still gives a change
to access and see the feedback instantly.
MOBILE FEEDBACK SYSTEM FOR SUPPORTING INTERACTIVE LEARNING
449
Figure 3: A screenshot of the shared user interface with
presentation, feedback and voting features.
The application can be used as an ASP
(Application Service Provider) service. In this case
the “ITSE”-application is installed in a server
located on the Internet. The users can have access to
the same information all over the network and the
access is independent from the technology that is
being used. The other option is to use a Wireless
Service Platform.
5 UTILIZATION OF THE
WIRELESS SERVICE
PLATFORM
In this work, we utilized the Wireless Service
Platform concept for the original “ITSE”-
application. The Wireless Service Platform concept
consists of a basic, off-the-shelf wireless router as a
basis for the wireless service platform and a suitable
custom firmware for the service delivery. The
wireless service platform consists of a wireless
router and optionally some external peripheral mass
storage components (memory stick, external hard
drive) connected most commonly as a USB-
peripheral (Universal Serial Bus) bus to allow more
number of versatile wireless service applications to
be deployed for the platform and to extend the
scarce resources of the wireless router device itself.
The wireless router environment and the related
peripherals are presented in figure 4. The wireless
router hardware used in this work was Asus WL-
500gP including 802.11b/g WLAN-adapter with 5
port 100Mb Ethernet LAN switch, 32Mb RAM
(Random Access Memory) and 16Mb Flash
memories connected to 1Gb external memory stick
through of the two included USB-bus connectors
(Asustek, 2006).
The system kernel and operating system
software platform is based on OpenWrt firmware
(OpenWrt, 2006), which provides customizable and
highly modifiable and modular core software
platform for the provision of different wireless
services for different communities. OpenWrt-project
is creating a Linux-kernel based open, GPL-licensed
(General Public Licence) firmware, which is highly
customizable while offering the flexibility and the
modern features of the Linux kernel. Currently
OpenWrt-firmware is applicable only to the certain
Broadcom-chipset based wireless routers but the aim
of the project is to extend the support for as many
different wireless router hardware platforms as
possible in its upcoming firmware versions. The
OpenWrt-project offers currently four different
firmware images for flashing the compatible routers.
It also includes packet managing system for easy
packet installation and removal along with a few
other features for easy utilization of the platform.
OpenWrt-project provides a reasonable number of
installable packets, and there are more to come in
the future. In addition, the project offers the
OpenWrt SDK (Software Development Kit), custom
firmware image builder and the system buildroot to
cross-compile custom applications for the platform.
The firmware was chosen to the work for its basic
principle features and technical properties, which
were suitable and compatible for the initial idea of
the wireless service platform concept.
Figure 4: Access point and samples of peripherals that can
be attached and used.
While utilizing the “ITSE”-application for the
wireless service platform, only little essential core
networking software is required. These include all
the core software for the basic operation of the
platform, e.g. DNS (Domain Name System), DHCP
(Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol) and other
basic networking services for the fundamental
operation of a wireless network. In addition for the
WEBIST 2007 - International Conference on Web Information Systems and Technologies
450
application itself, a PHP-interpreter was installed on
the wireless service platform. The database backend
for the system was based on SQLite-database
(SQLite, 2006). Among the other features the access
point is naturally also able to provide Internet
connection through different wired and wireless
network interfaces that are shared between the users.
The basic idea of utilization of the Wireless
Service Platform was to ease the general deployment
of the learning environment where no network
infrastructure is available. The hardware of the
wireless service platform provides almost all the
required hardware components, only the audio-
visual component (e.g. video projector) is needed in
addition. The utilization of the wireless service
platform provides an easy to use and affordable
solution when deploying the learning environment,
where no external network (usually Internet)
connection is available. In addition to the basic
software, data encryption, authentication and
authorization can be added to the platform for better
security and for restricting and controlling the
permitted clients.
The practical results from the utilization of the
Wireless Service Platform indicated that the
resources available at the wireless router device used
in the tests (Asus WL-500gP with the peripherals)
were sufficient for the application. The tests with the
Wireless Service Platform are supposed to be
arranged to make the final conclusions about the
usability and applicability of the platform.
6 CONCLUSIONS
Based on our research there is a need for this type of
application we presented in this paper. Some basic
principles have not to be forgotten. First of all, all
the features that are included in the application must
serve the eventual target: support the lecturing. All
kinds of fancy features could be added, but this may
easily cause a circumstance when the features are
overlapping the features of another online education
application already being used or disrupt the
teaching in another ways.
By making this service more independent from
the network infrastructure by using Wireless Service
Platform, the utilization is easier and the service can
be accessible in different kinds of environments. The
“ITSE”-application can really gain benefits of the
mobility that is made possible. However, the original
purpose of the router devices must be kept in mind:
the capability of the device hardware is often suited
to serve the purposes of the basic networking
functions and thus is sets severe restrictions about
the service usability. Thus the device is best suited
only to sufficiently low resource consuming
services, where more heavy-weight services require
more hardware resources to be available.
Mobile phones with GPRS and WLAN
interfaces and web-browsers are becoming more and
more common all the time. To install the “ITSE”-
application into the Wireless Service Platform does
not bind the application into a certain technology but
utilizes the existing technology and its best sides to
make the life of the user more comfortable and less
demanding.
REFERENCES
ASUSTeK Computer Inc. Asus WL-500g Premium
Wireless Router. Website. Available at
http://www.asus.com/products4.aspx?modelmenu=2&
model=1121&l1=12&l2=43&l3=0, referenced
10.11.2006.
Dufresne, Robert J; Gerace, William J.; Leonard, William
J. ; Mestre, Jose P. and Wenk, Laura, 1996. Classtalk:
A Classroom Communication System for Active
Learning. Journal of Computing in Higher Education.
7 (2), 3-47.
Leitner, Lee J; Cane, John W. A Virtual Laboratory
Environment for Online IT Education. Proceedings of
the Conference On Information Technology
Education. Newark, NJ, USA. pp 283-289. 2005.
Nielsen, Jacob. Designing Web Usability: The Practice of
Simplicity. Indianapolis: New Riders Publishing, 2000.
ISBN 1-56205-810-X.
SQLite Database. Website. Available at www.sqlite.org,
referenced 30.11.2006.
The OpenWrt Firmware Project. Website. Available at
http://www.openwrt.org, referenced 28.10.2006.
Trompler, Christoph; Muhlhauser, Max and Wegner,
Witold, 2002. Open Client Lecture Interaction: An
Approach to Wireless Learners-in-the-Loop.
Proceedings of 4th International Conference on New
Educational Environment.
University of North Carolina at Wilmington, Pearson
Education and Hypercube, 2000-2003. Numina II
Student Response System. Available at
http://aa.uncwil.edu/numina/srs/, referenced
13.1.2007.
MOBILE FEEDBACK SYSTEM FOR SUPPORTING INTERACTIVE LEARNING
451