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

 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

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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.

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 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.

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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

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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.

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