AN INTERACTIVE MOBILE LEARNING TOOL FOR LARGE

CLASS-ROOM TEACHING AND ASSESSMENT

S.W. Cheung and Jade Wong

Department of Electrical & Electronic Engineering

The University of Hong Kong, Pokfulam, Hong Kong

Keywords: Interactive m-learning tool, m-learning System, Large class-room teaching, Large class-room assessment,

Wireless applications.

Abstract: This paper presents a simple interactive m-learning tool for large class-room teaching and assessment. The

problems occur in teaching a large class are discussed and using the m-learning tool presented is proposed

as a solution. In teaching large classes, the teachers very often find it very difficult to know how much the

students have learnt and their levels of understanding in the class. With the use of the m-learning tool,

teachers can monitor the progress of students during class and know what the students need, hence adjust

their teaching pace to adapt the students’ learning ability. To access some of the effects, the m-learning tool

has been modified to be used in a mobile quiz contest with participation of 17 secondary and primary

schools. Feedbacks in the events are very encouraging.

1 INTRODUCTION

Over the past years, e-learning has adapted different

advanced technologies such as using different

learning platforms as learning tools or virtual class-

rooms to provide students with different ways of

learning. Some technologies have been used for

interactive mobile learning (m-learning) (Zurita,

2008. Chang, 2008. Tao, 2008. Qi. 2008), but very

few are dealing with the outcome and monitoring of

students’ learning progress during large class

teaching. The Electronic Student Response Devices

(Clickers) is an excellent tool for these (Goff, 2008).

Mobile phone is becoming a necessity for people

in many places of the world. Many people carry their

mobile phones all time and spend a lot of time on

talking to someone using their mobile phones.

Currently, the penetration of mobile subscribers in

Hong Kong is over 150% which means that there are

more mobile subscribers than the whole population.

In view of these, few years ago, Cheung

conceptualized the idea to design an interactive

mobile learning tool so that mobile subscribers could

use their mobile phones very conveniently to

improve their learning in various subject areas such

as Mathematics, Chinese or English, etc. anywhere

and at anytime. The mobile learning tool must be

interesting to students and could be used very

conveniently by mobile subscribers who may be

school or university students to improve their

learning. As a result, a project was proposed to

design and implement a simple wireless interactive

tool or “game” for use in mobile devices. Since

students normally find it boring in the learning

process, one of the important objectives of the

project was to help students learn through playing

games. Then a project called Wisdom was

successfully developed by an undergraduate

supervised by Cheung (Ko, 2007). The technology

used was simple and just a web-based system based

on using the 2G/2.5G/3G networks

With the introduction of eduroam (EDUcation

ROAMing) (EDUROM website, 2008) researchers,

teachers, students, staff from different institutions

over the world can easily and securely access the

Internet from any eduroam-enabled institution. Then

in Hong Kong, the Government has proposed a WiFi

Programme to implement hundreds of hotspots for

free and convenient WiFi access to the public,

making headways toward becoming a ubiquitous

society. Currently, hundreds of hotspots have been

set up all over the Hong Kong for the programme.

Y5ZONE is a company providing Broadband

Wireless (WiFi) connectivity in Hong Kong

(Y5ZONE website, 2008). It has over 2000 hotspots

serving wide range of users, including mobile

Cheung S. and Wong J. (2009).

AN INTERACTIVE MOBILE LEARNING TOOL FOR LARGE CLASS-ROOM TEACHING AND ASSESSMENT.

In Proceedings of the First International Conference on Computer Supported Education, pages 47-53

DOI: 10.5220/0001959400470053

 SciTePress

workers, students, professionals and roam-in

business travellers. WiFi users can stay connected in

popular shopping malls, restaurant outlets or fast

food chains. In collaboration with The University of

Hong Kong, Y5ZONE has agreed to provide free

WiFi service to the university staff and students at

their WiFi hotspots throughout Hong Kong. So

university students and staff can have free WiFi

service with any WiFi enabled devices at Y5ZONE

WiFi hotspots. In return, Y5ZONE WiFi customers

will have free WiFi service at the University of

Hong Kong. PCCW is also a WiFi access provider in

Hong Kong and has built more than 3,000 WiFi

hotspots throughout Hong Kong, including

entertainment and leisure stores, coffee shops, fast

food chains, the airport, restaurants, shopping malls

and MTR stations (PCCW website, 2008). In

collaboration with The University of Hong Kong,

PCCW has also agreed to provide WiFi access to the

university staff and students at their WiFi hotspots.

All these are providing a very good background for

wireless applications. With all these WiFi

infrastructures being made in placed, students in

Hong Kong basically will have free access to the

internet anywhere via WiFi hotspots using their

WiFi-enabled devices. As a result, following the

concept and design of the interactive m-learning

game “wisdom”, an “Interactive Wireless Mobile

Learning System” is developed to facilitate large

class-room teaching and assessment.

The rest of this paper is organized as follows.

The problems of large class-room teaching and

advantages of using m-learning in large class-room

teaching are discussed in section 2. The challenges

of designing m-learning tools for handsets are

described in section 3. The system descriptions and

architectures of the interactive m-learning game,

Wisdom, are described in section 4. The system

descriptions and architectures, together with the

useful features for large class-room teaching, of the

interactive m-learning tool, are given in section 5.

Section 6 is Conclusions.

2 ADVANTAGES OF PROPOSED

m-LEARNING TOOL IN LARGE

CLASSES

In the old days, lectures and tutorials were given to

only small classes of students and there was strong

interaction between teachers and students.

Nowadays, we have large lecture theatres which can

accommodate hundreds of students. In teaching or

lecturing such large classes, there is always a lack of

student exchange, interaction and feedback. Studies

have shown that the failures of the first year students

in Electrical Engineering were linked to an almost

complete absence of feedback on progress during the

first term of study (Entwistle, 1989). However, it is

not easy for teachers to know how much the students

have learned and what the students’ level of

understanding are during large-class teaching. Is the

teaching pace too slow or too fast? Are the materials

too difficult for the students to understand? How

much of the materials that the students have

understood? Do the students feel easy about the

lectures, etc? To find out the answers for all these

questions, the teachers will have to ask students

some quiz questions related to the materials taught in

the class and analyse the answers from the students.

In Hong Kong (probably in some other countries as

well), students somehow tend to be a little bit shy

and are afraid of being looked stupid or ignorant.

They are reluctant to answer questions to the

teachers directly in a large class. Thus asking

students quiz questions in a class may not always

work. Another possible method to assess the students

learning performance during large class teaching is

to spend some of the teaching time to perform a

written test/quiz. The problem with this method is

that it will unavoidably distract the teachers’

concentration and students’ attention. Moreover,

after the written test/quiz, the teachers will have to

devote a lot of time to mark and analyse the answers.

In a large class, this will create much more workload

for the already extremely busy teachers. The results

obtained are not interactive. The teachers know the

results after marking the test/quiz and analysing the

results, so they can only take appropriate actions

such as repeating the chapters or topics in the next

class which may be a week, a month or even longer

later. When repeating, the teachers will also have to

spend some time to refresh the students’ minds on

these chapters and topics, significantly slowing

down the teaching progress.

The m-learning tool proposed here can help

teachers to perform simple tests/quizzes during large

class-room teaching and assess the students’

performances immediately after the tests/quizzes in a

convenient way. Thus teachers can use the tool to

closely monitor the learning progress of the students

in the class, indentify any possible problems

encountered if occur, and take appropriate actions

needed. For example, if it is found that some topics

or concepts, etc, which are misunderstood by many

students in the class, the teacher can give further

detailed explanations on them immediately to make

CSEDU 2009 - International Conference on Computer Supported Education

sure that the students understand them thoroughly.

The standards of admitted students in different

departments of universities vary from year to year,

e.g. the standards of students admitted to do

engineering in universities nowadays are not as good

as those ten years ago. Teachers need to know their

standards as soon as possible in order to adjust their

teaching pace to adapt to the students’ standards.

The proposed m-learning tool will be very useful for

this.

3 CHALLENGES IN DESIGN

Mobile handsets are usually small in sizes. For the

reason of easy carrying, they are getting even

smaller. As a result, small screen sizes are always

the major challenge in designing applications for

mobile handsets. How can we fit all the materials

onto the small screens of the mobile handsets? The

resolution of the mobile handset screens has no

standard. How can we display the same image file on

screens with different resolutions without getting

distortion of the image? The keypad of a mobile

handset has very limited number of keys, so

inputting text is not an easy task. How can we

simplify this process? It is nice to have visual

richness, colours, animation and sound effects etc. to

arise interests of the learners, but all these requires

powerful CPU to run. Moreover, the large file sizes

for these features take up too much bandwidth and

too long to send to the mobile devices. How can we

reduce the file sizes? Having considered these

questions in details, we found that the answer to all

these questions was to use questions in text and in

the form of simple multiple choices.

To design the m-learning game “wisdom”, we

had considered using the following technologies:

Multimedia Messaging System (MMS), Short

Messaging System (SMS). Extensible HyperText

Markup Languague (XHTML), Wireless Application

Protocol (WAP), Java 2 Platfotm, Mobile Edition

(J2ME), JavaScript and Flash. Finally, we decided to

use J2ME to design the software for the mobile

devices because it is the most common language

currently used in mobile phones and also there are

many free simulation tools available for developing

applications using J2ME. Unfortunately, although

J2ME is a standard, it is well known that the

software developed using J2ME does not guarantee

it can be operated in all devices supporting J2ME. In

fact, with our experience, we can say that it is highly

probable that it will not.

4 A INTERACTIVE m-LEARNING

GAME - WISDOM

4.1 System Description

Wisdom is an interactive m-learning game which

can accommodate a large number of interactive

students via the 2G/2.5G/3G mobile networks. In

wisdom, learning is performed in a form of game so

that student will find it more interesting to learn. To

play the game, students are required to pre-register

with the game and have their mobile devices such as

mobile phones or PDAs, etc. loaded with a client

interface program written in J2ME. Students use

their mobile devices to login the game, as shown in

Fig. 1a, via the 2G/2.5G/3G mobile network in order

to enter and play the game. A number of quiz

questions in the form of multiple choices in different

subjects such as Mathematics, English, etc., are

prepared for the game and stored in a database of the

server. In playing the game, all students will receive

a set of about 30 questions, as shown in Fig. 1b, in

text one after the other, each having 4 possible

answers as multiple choices. Students have to select

the correct answers from these choices within a

limited period of time, say, 30 secs. If they select the

correct answer, they stay on; otherwise they lose and

are gone. The one who correctly and continuously

answer the most quizzes is the winner. Since

students can access the game via the internet in

anywhere and at anytime, it is possible that they can

be competing against tens or hundreds of students

simultaneously over the world. This makes the game

much more interesting and exciting than the

traditional mobile quiz games.

Figure 1: a) login screen b) question screen.

To make the game even more interesting, before

answering each question, each student is given 3

options to choose: Option 1) “Skipping”, i.e. if the

student is not sure about all the answers, he/she can

AN INTERACTIVE MOBILE LEARNING TOOL FOR LARGE CLASS-ROOM TEACHING AND ASSESSMENT

select this option to skip the question; Option 2)

“50:50”, i.e. if the student is not sure about the some

of answers given, by selection this option, two

incorrect answers (50%) out of the 4 given are

removed so the student has a better chance to answer

the quiz correctly; and Option 3) “Prolonging the

Time Limit” which doubles the time limit to 60 sec.

so that the student can have more time to answer the

current question. All students will only have a

limited number, say 5 times out of 30 questions, of

having this option. At the end of each question, the

correct answer will be displayed on their mobile

devices, thus they can learn from this.

4.2 System Architecture

The wisdom system consists of the following

components:

a) a game web server;

b) a number of mobile phones installed with a

J2ME client interface program; and

c) an administration console.

The system architecture of wisdom is shown Fig. 2.

Students use their mobile handsets installed with a

client interface program to access the game server

via a 2G/2.5G/3G mobile network.

Figure 2: System architecture of Wisdom.

At the beginning of the game, the server waits until

all clients have logged and then prompts all the

clients with a question in the form of multiple

choices. When the answers from all students are

received, the server checks the returned answers

against the correct ones stored in the data and sends

the correct answer to the clients. The students with

wrong answers will be stopped from playing the

game further. When there is only one left in the

game, it is the winner.

5 INTERACTIVE m-LEARNING

TOOL

5.1 System Description

To facilitate interactive large class-room learning

and assessment, the interactive m-learning game,

wisdom, was modified to an interactive m-learning

tool. The design of Wisdom was based on the

2G/2.5G/3G mobile networks which cost money to

use. This will deter students from using it. Thus the

interactive m-learning tool for large class-room

teaching is designed for use in different wireless

networks. Students still can login the system using

their 2G/2.5G/3G mobile phones via the mobile

networks. In addition, students can also login the

system using WiFi-devices such as WiFi-enabled

mobile phones, laptops, PSP or PDAs etc. via any

access points inside and outside the campus.

5.2 Useful Features for Large

Class-room Teaching

5.2.1 Pre-registration

To use the m-learning tool for large class-room

teaching, the students enrolled for the course are

required to pre-register with the m-learning system.

The name lists with passwords of the pre-registered

students are stored in an excel file and then stored in

the database of the system. The students are given

the usernames and passwords in order to login the

system. This prevents un-registered students to enter

the system.

5.2.2 Monitoring Attendance

In many universities such as the University of Hong

Kong, students’ attendance to classes is not

compulsory. However, our experiences have shown

that students with more than 75% attendance to

classes normally perform much better than those

with less than 25% attendance in the examinations.

In small classes, it is easy for teachers to know who

are absent from the classes, so students tend to make

efforts to attend the classes. However, in large

classes, it is very difficult for teachers to know who

are present in or absent from the classes without

taking attendances. As a result, some students tend to

escape from large classes. Of course, teachers can

always encourage students to attend classes by

taking attendance in each class, but for large classes,

taking attendance will take up some of the teaching

time and also distract the teachers’ concentration and

2G/2.5G/3G mobile network

Internet

PDA

Server

Database

MySQL)

Administration

Console

(Java Program)

Mobile Phone

CSEDU 2009 - International Conference on Computer Supported Education

students’ attention. When using this m-learning tool,

students have to register with the system at the

beginning of the class, so attendance with time-

stamp is taken by the system automatically.

5.2.3 Easy Input of Prepared Questions and

Answers

Teachers can prepare the test/quiz questions in the

form of multiple choices beforehand and store them

with the corresponding answers in different columns

of an excel file which is used as the input file to the

m-learning system. Different sets of test/quiz

questions can easily be inputted to the corresponding

excel files and stored in the database server

implemented using an Apple Computer.

5.2.4 Automatic Marking

Since the system stores the answers as well as the

questions in the database, during the test, after

receiving the answers from students, it can check the

answers and hence marks them. If a written test/quiz

were used in large classes, the teachers would have

needed to spend a lot of time to mark them.

However, the proposed m-learning tool can provide

the marks of individual students immediately after

each question or test. In addition, it can also compute

the distributions of answers for each question and

display them on the computer screen for the teachers

to analyse.

5.2.5 Monitoring Students’ Progress in

Large Classes

The forms of tests and quizzes can also be set in

different forms and levels to serve different

purposes. For example, teachers can prepare a whole

set of questions and use it as a formal test. A time

limit can be set to allow the students to complete the

test. For tests/quizzes given to large classes and held

in lecture halls, it is very difficult to prevent students

from copying answers from their neighbors. The m-

learning tool can be used to send the same set of

questions to students in a random manner, stopping

them from copying answers from neighbors. At the

end of the test, the teacher can assess the students’

learning performances through the scores obtained

for individual students immediately.

Teachers can use regular tests/quizzes to monitor

the students’ performances through out the year and

decide if the teaching pace is too slow or too fast.

5.2.6 Closely Monitoring of Students in

Large Classes

Feedback on students’ progress is an important

factor for quality teaching (Entwistle. 1989). Small-

class students tend to be satisfied with the feedback

they received (Søndergaard. 2004). For large classes,

students' satisfaction tends to fall.

In using the m-learning tool, question can be set

to closely monitor the progress of students during

teaching, e.g., to test if the students have understood

the concepts of certain principles just taught, then a

few easy and short questions could be enough. The

questions can be presented to students one after the

other and step by step in a logical way. When the

answers are received back from all students (which

can be checked by the system), the teacher can check

the distribution of answers for each question and

hence decide whether more detailed explanations or

additional lectures are required for a particular topic

of the course.

A user-friendly interface program has been

developed for teachers to retrieve individual scores

from the database and hence to check the

performances of individual students during teaching.

5.2.7 Engaging Students

Student engagement is a big challenge for quality

teaching in large classes. When teaching large

classes, it is not easy to generate in-class interaction

with the students. The m-learning tool proposed here

can be used to design different methods to get the

students interact with the teaching materials. For

example, quizzes can be set in a form of

competition. Students who score the highest marks at

the end of the class can win prizes. Their names can

be displayed in the course website pages. Their

scores can be accumulated until the end of the year

and contribute to the final marks of the course.

5.3 System Architecture

Figure 3 shows that system architecture which

consists of the following components:

a) the Mobile learning platform server;

b) Administration Console Portal (a web

portal); and

c) A number of WiFi Access points.

d) A display program to display the percentage

of correct answer for each questions and

marks scored by each student.

AN INTERACTIVE MOBILE LEARNING TOOL FOR LARGE CLASS-ROOM TEACHING AND ASSESSMENT

Administration Console

(Java Program)

Figure 3: System architecture of Interactive Mobile

Learning system.

Students use their mobile devices installed with an

interface program, their usernames and passwords to

access the system server via any WiFi access point

in the campus or theoretically any mobile networks

(which should be seldom used due to the high cost).

For security reasons, the MAC addresses of the

WiFi-enabled devices are also needed to register in

order to gain access to the WiFi access points in the

campus.

To promote m-learning and celebrate the Beijing

2008 Olympics and also, at the same time, assess the

effects of the proposed m-learning tool, an Inter-

school Mobile Quiz Contest was organised in July

2008. We modified the Interactive Mobile Learning

Tool to be used in this contest which was held in The

University of Hong Kong. There were more than 200

students and teachers from 17 secondary and

primary schools participating in the contest. They

were all seating in the same hall of about 250 seats.

The contest was divided into three quiz question

sessions, with each having a specific theme. They

were about the general knowledge on the Olympic

Games, the Equestrian and The University of Hong

Kong. Each school could nominate 4-6 students as

the contestants to participate in each question

session. These students were all pre-registered with

the m-learning system. In each question session,

there were about 25-30 quiz questions in the form of

multiple choices and the contestants (students) were

given 5-10 mins to complete all the answers. The

quiz questions could be purely texts, with or without

pictures. The contestant who could answer most

questions was the Champion of the session.

Although the m-learning tool could support different

kinds of wireless devices such as PDA, mobile

handsets, PSP, etc. The contestants were all given

the same type of WiFi-enabled device, a Sony PSP,

to use in the contest, thus the contestants could not

complaint that their different wireless devices

affected their performances. To reduce the delays of

sending the questions to the contestants due to

congestion, three different access points with

different operating frequencies were setup in the hall

for the contestants to access the m-learning system.

During the quiz session, the scores for each of the

contestants were displayed on a big screen in real

time so that their supporters could see. This made the

contest a very exciting event. We could see students

stand up, shouting and screaming to support their

school-mates who were playing the game.

At the end of the contest, students found the

game very interesting and exciting to play. Teachers

said the system would be a very useful tool to

monitor the learning progress of the students during

teaching.

6 CONCLUSIONS

In this paper, we have presented the design of an m-

learning tool for large class-room teaching and

assessment. The tool has different features targeted

at large class-room teaching. The system has been

used in an Inter-school Mobile Quiz Contest for

more 200 students and teachers from 17 secondary

and primary schools. Very good comments have

been given by the students and teachers.

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AN INTERACTIVE MOBILE LEARNING TOOL FOR LARGE CLASS-ROOM TEACHING AND ASSESSMENT