A Proposal of an Architecture for Educational

Environments

Juan Enrique Garrido

, Víctor M. R. Penichet

and María D. Lozano

Computer Science Research Institute, University of Castilla-La Mancha,

02071 Albacete, Spain

Computer Systems Department, University of Castilla-La Mancha,

02071 Albacete, Spain

Abstract. Current technology allows educational environments to offer teachers

and students the functionality and the information required at any time, which-

ever place and circumstance. Concretely, these environments mix three remark-

able features: ubiquity, context-awareness and collaboration. In this way, the

system to be deployed can avoid oversights when performing tasks. In addition,

students can be motivated through technologies that they usually use in their

daily life. In this paper, we present the definition of a system architecture,

which is the first step to obtain the proposed environment. The architecture pre-

sents both a software architecture and a hardware architecture. The software ar-

chitecture shows the layers in which the system distributes functionality and in-

formation.The hardware architecture shows the hardware components to be

used, such as smartphones, server, communication elements, etc.

1 Introduction

Computer users do not use systems in order to know their functionality but to perform

their tasks. Users need systems with a simple and easy way of work; they automatical-

ly give increasingly more importance to systems that provide help to complete tasks.

To this respect, the present technology allows to offer environments with systems

where users can automatically obtain information and functionality based on their

state (i.e. location, current task, etc.). In this way, we propose a collaborative ubiqui-

tous and context-aware system which will allow users the possibility to access the

necessary information and functionality at any place and any time.

Daily needs make educational tasks management essential for the proper work in

the educational centre. Teachers and students can be affected negatively without a

correct management of their tasks. In this sense, a collaborative, ubiquitous and con-

text-aware system will help them with the adequate protocols’ tracking which users

have to complete in any situation and task. The system will allow users to perform

their tasks collaboratively [7, 10]. Collaboration will unify efforts and will improve

the coordination between students and teachers. Ubiquity [4] will allow to access to

information and functionality offered by the system at any place and any circum-

stance. Context-awareness [2] will provide the system with the capacity of adapting

its functionality and content based on the user´s context. They will not be required to

Garrido J., R. Penichet V. and D. Lozano M..

A Proposal of an Architecture for Educational Environments.

DOI: 10.5220/0004101000900099

In Proceedings of the 1st International Workshop on Interaction Design in Educational Environments (IDEE-2012), pages 90-99

ISBN: 978-989-8565-17-4

 2012 SCITEPRESS (Science and Technology Publications, Lda.)

have exhaustive knowledge of the operation of the system; it will help and guide them

every time by offering the functionality and information that users need according to

their location and current task. For example, if a student cannot find the book he

needs or he has doubts about his current homework, the system will indicate him the

teachers or classmates who can help and the way to contact them.

Considering how the proposed system can help in educational environments for

everyday operation, these have been selected as the adequate environment for this

system application for several benefits and reasons. (1) First, teachers have to manage

the evolution of their classes and students. They need a high level of collaboration

with students and workmates in order to complete the educational process. (2) Then,

ubiquitous systems facilitate educational environments management. Students and

teachers will be able to access any information or functionality they need at any time

and any place. In their devices, users will always have the adequate functionality for

their current tasks or location. (3) Besides, users will be able to know what is happen-

ing in the system every moment, what other users are doing, and the resources state.

Awareness [3, 6] means knowing what is going on, which is essential in a collabora-

tive environment. Teachers can know how each student evolves. In addition, the stu-

dents are able to know who can complete tasks with him or who can help. (4) Moreo-

ver, the system will reduce human errors and oversights related to task, timetable,

tutorials, etc. For example, it will remember important tasks and the steps to be fol-

lowed. The purpose will be always to improve the operation of such environments.

The system is able to motivate students in their studies through new technologies,

which can be a friendly and well-known way of working.

In order to be able to develop the proposed system, a previous definition of archi-

tecture is essential, which will be based on its development. This paper describes an

architecture proposal carried out by the authors. Two parts compose the architecture:

the hardware architecture, which describes the hardware distribution; and the software

architecture, which shows the layer distribution of the components’ system where

each layer has its own information and functionality.

The document is organized as follows: the next section presents some related

works with close architectures to the proposed one. The third section explains the

architecture proposal for educational environments. Finally, the last section presents

conclusions and future works.

2 Related Works

The authors have studied some several architectures proposed during the last years

and have selected proposals which are described together with possible improve-

ments. The selection criteria was if they provided an important diversity source and if

they implied remarkable terms, conditions which contributed to formalize the pro-

posal presented in this paper.

One of the most interesting proposals [9] gives automatic feedback through the

gathering of health vital signals. The architecture is focused on an ubiquitous envi-

ronment and is composed of two layers: the smart objects layer and the user layer.

The user layer is considered as a simple tag (e.g. RFID) that allows the initial interac-

tion with the system. Therefore, the smart objects layer is responsible for the main

part of the architecture. This layer is based on three components which offer services

to smart objects and localize devices. (1) Devices interface: it presents information to

the devices. (2) Application core: it is responsible for running every function that the

user application may contain. (3) Tracking component: it detects and identifies users.

This work can be improved adding a new layer (parallel to user one) to manage sensor

data. Proposed improvement will speed up the management of environment data,

which usually has an important volume. Sensor layer can obtain and organize data

from the environment and it can examine the information filtering errors. Additional-

ly, the main objective of the architecture can be increased using collected data to

obtain extra useful information for the users: localization of other users and resources,

state of resources, availability of needed users, etc.

Another architecture [5] based on ubiquitous and context-aware systems is distrib-

uted in three layers: application, context-aware and detection/monitoring. As a wire-

less Bluetooth network performs communication in mobile nodes, improving that

communication using Wi-Fi could be interesting. A new network will mean less con-

nectivity problems in long distances.

An outstanding proposal [1] consists in an architecture (applied to context-aware

environments) based on client-server relationship and on LOCA (Location-based

Context Aware) framework, which is described in the same article as the architecture.

Three components make up the framework and the architecture: request service, serv-

er service and agent service.The architecture operation is based on the interaction

between the different components where the agent service is the main element. That

element receives a request from the request service and searches for the nearest server

service able to offer a correct response. An improvement of this architecture would be

the incorporation of collaborative capacities between users and between request ser-

vices.

NARF [8] is an architecture based on ubiquitous environments with a different

structure from previous related works. Two main blocks define the architecture: the

Runtime System and the Development Tools. Context recognition guides the architec-

ture functionality in a real system allowing applications (external to the architecture)

to obtain context features and to be informed about context changes. In order to facili-

tate updating methods, the development tools are able to reuse the recognition logic

previously used. These tools will help to accelerate the resolution process of certain

situations if they could be added to the runtime system.

Finally, the last remarkable related work [11] describes an architecture oriented to

ubiquitous and context-aware environments. As the previous one, this architecture is

structured in a different way from most of the studied related works. The architecture

is composed of the following elements: web application, BPEL (Business Process

Execution Language) processing service, reasoning engine, user detection service and

additional utilities as web services. The Web application allows users to interact with

the system and the reasoning engine contains the logic of the application, therefore, it

is responsible for the architecture behaviour. The detection service is a multimedia

service used to detect images with people faces.People are very important in the ar-

chitecture so an improvement would be to incorporate the possibility to collaborate. In

this sense, the architecture will have a new dimension and then, a new functionality

that would make it applicable to more environments and fields.

The related works show that there is great interest to find an adequate architecture

for ubiquitous and context-aware environments. Multiple possibilities exist to select

technologies in order to obtain the correct architecture, for example web services,

which are an important element in environments where mobility means more than just

a simple feature. Regarding all the concepts, ideas and technologies used in the relat-

ed works, the authors have developed an architecture proposal focused on context-

aware, ubiquitous and collaborative environments. Concerning suggested improve-

ments to each related work solving found gaps, proposed architecture includes fea-

tures in order to consider them. This proposal is explained next.

3 Architecture Proposal

The general aim of this work is to propose a context-aware, collaborative and ubiqui-

tous system applied to a real educational environment. In this section, we present the

architecture we have defined to support this kind of systems. More specifically, we

have defined two base architectures: the hardware architecture and the software archi-

tecture. The former focuses on the way the different elements used for the implemen-

tation of the system are distributed in the educational environment. The latter defines

how the different elements needed to handle the system are organized according to a

set of layers defined on the basis of its functionality.

3.1 Hardware Architecture

The hardware architecture defines the hardware elements that make up the proposed

system and their interconnections (see Figure 1). Thanks to the technological advanc-

es in the last years, the possibilities of hardware selection in the proposed system are

very wide. This architecture is divided into different blocks to offer a distribution as

clear as possible, where each block contains a concrete functionality that distinguishes

from the rest of them. The functionality will depend basically on the capabilities of

the elements of each block. The blocks composing the hardware architecture are de-

scribed next:

− Server. Its function is to analyze the information of the users´ environment stored

in the database. The outcome of the analysis will allow to offer the students and

teachers the functionality and information they need at any moment. It is important

to note that the information or functionality could be required by the user or by the

software application that s/he is using in his mobile device. In the first case, a stu-

dent or teacher may require certain information or functionality by means of the

different options the software application offers. Nevertheless, the second case can

be when the software application offers certain information or functionality to the

user in an automatic way, thus making the system context-aware. This feature im-

plies that the system may offer the proper functionality and information according

to the user context, with no previous explicit action by the user. As the system is

ubiquitous and allows the access to the information at any place and circumstances

thanks to the technology available throughout the environment, the software appli-

cation will be able to request the needed information and functionality to the server

by itself.

The server will analyze, for both requests, all the appropriate information coming

from the environment where the user is located at that moment, together with the

significant information from the user involved. The information regarding the us-

er´s environment is wide and diverse: user location, other users´ location that may

be useful, resources needed, state of the different resources needed, resources loca-

tion, functionalities offered by the system which may help the user to perform his

task, complete information on the task to be performed (steps to follow, re-

strictions) and so on.

A key point of any system of this nature is efficiency. The system requires a high

level of efficiency, besides offering the required functionality. For this reason, the

information analyzed by the server in each case must be accurately defined. This

definition consists on several fields and parameters that refer to the information of

the educational environment. This is important because this way the server will lo-

calize the information in a rapid and concise way, based on the content and type of

parameters and the searches in the database, which is the main source of infor-

mation, are improved. All this process of reducing data processing is very im-

portant because the server will not only receive requests from a single user but

from any of the active users in the system and at any time instant. Therefore, a user

must receive the needed information and the adequate functionality in the shortest

possible time in such a way that it is useful and can be used according to his cur-

rent state and not to a past state. Otherwise, it will useless or even more, totally in-

convenient or disturbing for the performance of the tasks.

− Database. Basically it contains the information regarding the current state of the

environment where the system is deployed. Its structure must allow simple and

rapid content searches. It must relate, by means of the proper fields, each user with

the tasks s/he is involved and in turn, the tasks with the context information and the

required functionality in each case. Additionally, the database must offer stored

procedures and functions that facilitate access and management with the aim to

provide a data system as accessible as possible. We have to consider that the in-

formation stored is private in many cases. The data stored in the database is not on-

ly regarding users’ tasks but also regarding their address, contact persons, marks,

etc. This way, the database must include an access and security system as reliable

as possible.

− Mobile Devices. They offer all the users of the system the mobility they need

throughout the educational environment. They are essential for the system to be

considered as ubiquitous. They allow users to have access to the system and enable

the system to offer users the information and functionality they need in any place

and at any time. The mobile devices included in this component may be a PDA, an

Smartphone, an IPhone, an IPad and Laptops. These devices have to allow connec-

tivity via Bluetooth, Wi-Fi and RFID in order to be able to use any functionality.

− Static Devices. Due to the fact that not all the users require mobility in their actions

(for instance, teachers who are preparing an exam in their office) considering static

devices in the architecture is a necessity. The most common static device is the

Personal Computer. Nevertheless, we also consider wall screens, last generation

televisions placed throughout the environment. The aim of these screens is to offer

the users certain important information in certain areas, with important data for the

performance of their tasks: exam marks, information about the following class, in-

formation regarding the state of other pending tasks, timetables, maps showing the

user’s current situation in the educational environment and the path or route to fol-

low, if necessary.The most suitable places to place this type of devices are the us-

ers´ common areas and those areas where it is difficult to establish wireless con-

nectivity, as for instance a lift, corridors, dining hall, etc.

Fig. 1. Hardware architecture for a collaborative, ubiquitous and context-aware system.

− The Sensors Network. It is a set of sensors distributed throughout the environment

which enables to obtain information on the state of the environment itself at any

time, which is essential for any context aware system: users in the system and their

location, resources location, etc. This information is stored in the database and will

be analyzed by the server with the aim of offering the adequate information and

functionality to system users. The sensors network is made up of two types of sen-

sors: (1) static sensors that are located in specific areas and control and collect in-

formation on events in that area; (2) dynamic sensors which are moving in the en-

vironment. Mobile devices are closely linked to them, as they may become sensors

in specific moments. All mobile devices incorporated in the system use Bluetooth

and Wi-Fi technology; therefore, the client application uses them to capture the in-

formation on the environment. Concerning RFID technology, a sensor can be a

PDA with a RFID reader. Beside the RFID sensor, it requires RDIF cards (with

RFID tabs) which allow to obtain information on the user or element to which they

belong just by simply reading their tab.

− Interconnection Network. This is a necessary component so that all devices can be

interconnected. It allows users to get the information offered by the system and al-

so the possibility to communicate among them. The component is made up of a lo-

cal network with the participation of all the physical elements of the system, from a

PDA to the server itself. The local network is a cable network (for static devices)

together with a WLAN network (for mobile devices).

3.2 Software Architecture

The software architecture allows to visualize the system structure by means of a group

of layers which are interconnected (see Figure 2). These layers show the way in which

the information and the functionality offered by the system proposed is distributed in

different levels, each offering specific treatment of the information. This structure is

based on four concepts, which represent the functionality of each layer: (1) interac-

tion, concerning the way the system is used by users and how the information on the

environment is obtained by the system; (2) management of the information on the

environment and the users´ requests; (3) ubiquitous context aware collaborative ap-

plication that generates responses to users´ requests. It involves the study and analysis

of the information on the environment aimed at offering users the necessary function-

ality and information; (4) information that is the representation of the current state of

the environment in the system as a database.

Fig. 2. Software architecture for a collaborative, ubiquitous and context-aware system.

Taking into account the previous basic concepts, the layers which make up the

software architecture are next described:

− Interactive Layer. It represents the interaction of the educational center´s user with

the system, as well as the interaction of the system with the users. Thus, interaction

is bidirectional pursuing to offer an ubiquitous and context aware system. Obvious-

ly, users must be able to interact with the system through a client application offer-

ing the functionality and information required. But, since the system must be ubiq-

uitous and context aware, the system plays an important role in the interactive lay-

er. It must be capable of interacting on its own with the users and with the envi-

ronment in general to be able to obtain relevant information (through the applica-

tion and the sensors present in the environment). The information obtained will be

the state of the environment, which, after being analyzed, will allow to offer users

the information and functionality required at each specific moment. This is the es-

sence of any context-aware environment: the system is able to automatically pro-

vide what is needed, depending on the user´ needs and their environment.

− Management Layer. This element receives the users´ requests (requests manager).

They are classified depending on the user and the parameters of the request. Those

parameters mainly represent the objective of the request: functionality or infor-

mation request, task start or end verification, timetable, etc. Once the request has

been classified, it is sent to the management layer. This pre-processing facilitates

the search for the information related in the next layer. Consequently, the achieve-

ment of request solution is improved and more rapid.

Another task of the management layer is receiving and transforming the incoming

information from the sensors through the interactive layer (sensors information

manager). This transformation is necessary before accomplishing data analysis and

study. It involves eliminating useless or repeated information and gives it the ap-

propriate format to be inserted in the database. The format will be in relation to the

set of parameters which characterize each register in the database. These parame-

ters make the search for information more dynamic, especially when working with

large amounts of data.

− CUCA (Collaborative Ubiquitous and Context Aware) Application Layer. Its ob-

jective is to analyze requests and their environment to offer the functionality and

information each user may require at each specific moment. The process is as fol-

lows: (1) the layer receives a request from an user or from the application automat-

ically; (2) the system analyzes the state of the context in relation to the request; (3)

based on the analysis performed, the system makes a decision, which will be the

functionality to be run or the information to be displayed; (4) finally, if the deci-

sion implies a change in the system, it is reflected in the database. Its implementa-

tion will be distributed between the server and a set of intelligent agents. The

agents –distributed throughout the environment devices- allow the possibility to of-

fer some functionality on the part of the system with no need to access the server.

So that its functionality can be implemented, the CUCA application layer contains

three elements: context reader, decision manager and updating system. The context

reader is the tool responsible for reading the information which is relevant for the

current environment context, based on the parameters received as input, sent by the

decision manager. The input enables selecting the information required by the

manager from the database to be able to make a decision on the request under con-

sideration at that moment. The decision manager is the component that receives re-

quests from the requests manager on specific information or functionality of the

system from the users or from the applications they are using. In order to respond

to the request, the information on the current context which will help to decide on

the request is in turn requested to the context reader. When the information re-

quested is received, the component studies the current context and collects the in-

formation to be displayed and/or the functionality to be used by the user. Finally,

the updating system applies changes in the database. If the decision implies a

change in the system, the fields associated in the database will have to be modified

and should, subsequently, present an updated state to be able to take decisions in

accordance with the state of the system.

− Information Management Layer. This layer is made up of a database which stores

the system information (concerning users, timetables, resources, tasks and loca-

tions) and the tools required to access that information (whether writing or reading

tools).

4 Conclusions and Future Work

Nowadays, current technology eases to create environments where users can collabo-

rate and access to needed information and functionality based on their context. In this

way, it is possible to mix collaboration, ubiquity and context-awareness in the same

system in order to improve the management of educational environments. This im-

provement allows students and teachers to perform their tasks avoiding oversights

and, more specifically, to perform adequately the educational process. These kind of

environments motivate students in their daily work because they can use their

smartphones, mobile devices, PDAs and laptops; something that can establish a

friendly way of study.

In this paper we have presented an architecture proposal as previous necessary and

complementary step to the development of a collaborative, context-aware and ubiqui-

tous system in an educational environment. Concretely, two parts composed the pro-

posal: hardware architecture and software architecture.The first one shows the distri-

bution of the hardware devices as blocks offering different functionality: server, da-

tabase, mobile devices, fixed devices, the sensor network and the interconnection

network. Then, the software architecture describes the layers in which the information

and the functionality offered by the system proposed, is distributed in different levels.

The layers are as follows: (1) the interactive layer that manage the interaction be-

tween the system and users, which is bidirectional; (2) the management layer which

classifies each received request in order to facilitate the search of the answers; (3)

CUCA application layer that is responsible of analyzing each request and take deci-

sions; and finally, (4) the data management layer which works directly on the data-

base.

We are currently working on the design of a system in a real case study consider-

ing the aforementioned architectures and concepts regarding awareness. The deploy-

ment will consider user tests and evaluations based on the knowledge and the use of

the system by the students and the teachers. New technological proposals to be in-

cluded will be studied in order to improve the management and the use of the system,

as well as the user experience.

Acknowledgements

We would like to acknowledge the project CICYT TIN2011-27767-C02-01 from the

Spanish Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación and the Regional Government: Junta de

Comunidades de Castilla-La Mancha PPII10-0300-4174 and PII2C09-0185-1030

projects for partially funding this work.

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