Interactive Lessons for Tablet-based Teaching

A Proposal for an Open Data Format

Heiko Weible

and Edgar Seemann

Visual Generation, Berlin, Germany

Furtwangen University, Furtwangen im Schwarzwald, Germany

Keywords:

Tablets, Schools, Teaching, Interactive, Android, iPad, Multimedia, Math, Foreign Languages.

Abstract:

Tablet devices like the Apple iPad are ideal for interactive learning content. Unfortunately, at the moment it is

still quite difﬁcult for authors to create interactive content. There are very few standards in the area of tablet

computing, in particular, if authors do not want to restrict themselves to a single platform e.g. iOS or Android.

In this paper we propose an open data format, which makes it easy for authors to create interactive content.

We achieve this by separating content description from the visual appearance and behaviour. Thus, allowing

to create interactive content without the need for complex tools or even programming skills. The data format

may be implemented for any of the leading platforms. Thus, giving content creators the control over the usage

and the distribution of their content.

1 INTRODUCTION

Computing devices are becoming more and more

popular in education. While previous efforts like the

One Laptop per Child project by Negroponte et al.

(Negroponte, 2006) have seen some success, there are

now two trends which are about to change our educa-

tion systems and our way of doing education.

These trends are, on the one hand, the ﬁeld of on-

line learning and on the other hand tablet-based teach-

ing with devices like the Apple iPad or comparable

Android tablet devices. Both ﬁelds are very new, but

exciting progress has been made in the past year.

In the ﬁeld of online learning, we have seen the

ﬁrst courses with tenths or thousands of participants,

something which was unimaginable a decade ago.

The Stanford university with their professors Thrun

and Norvig have been pioneering in this domain with

their artiﬁcial intelligence class (Thrun and Norvig,

2011). Since then we have seen the appearance of on-

line universities like Udacity (Thrun et al., 2012) and

Coursera (Ng and Koller, 2012).

Tablet devices have only been available for less

than two years. Yet we see a large number of deploy-

ments at schools in North America and Europe, for

example (Farias, 2011; Klinga, 2011). Touch-based

interaction is very well suited for educational content

and both teachers and students have been quite enthu-

siastic about the new possibilities.

Figure 1: Main screen of the developed tablet software for

high school students.

While these developments and adoption of new

technology is certainly welcome, standards have yet

to be established. In the ﬁeld of online learning e.g.

each individual player (e.g. Coursera, Udacity) has

its own teaching style and platform. For tablet-based

teaching, there are standards for electronic Books

(e.g. ePub, iBooks), but as far as truly interactive

content is concerned there are no established meth-

ods, learning styles or data formats available.

Based on our experience from tablet deployments

at various schools in Germany, we propose both a new

learning style for tablet-based teaching and an exten-

sible open data format, which may be freely imple-

Weible H. and Seemann E..

Interactive Lessons for Tablet-based Teaching - A Proposal for an Open Data Format.

DOI: 10.5220/0004350200640069

In Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Computer Supported Education (CSEDU-2013), pages 64-69

ISBN: 978-989-8565-53-2

 2013 SCITEPRESS (Science and Technology Publications, Lda.)

mented by educators.

Our proposition of a new learning style is dis-

cussed in detail in a separate paper (Weible and See-

mann, 2013). The contribution of this paper is there-

fore the proposal of a novel data format tailored to-

wards the requirements and properties of tablet-based

and online teaching. Our goal is to facilitate the distri-

bution of interactive learning content to all platforms

(e.g. iPad, Android, Windows).

In the following we will ﬁrst discuss related

projects, then continue to describe requirements for

tablet-based learning content. We continue with the

speciﬁcation of our open data format and conclude

with an outlook on future developments.

2 RELATED PROJECTS

The ﬁelds of online and tablet-based learning are

both rather new. Historically online learning started

with the distribution of conventional books and lec-

ture notes over the internet. Demonstations e.g. via

Java-Applets followed, but remained limited in scope.

In particular, there existed very few truly multimedia

or interactive content which covered a larger topic.

With the appearance of online video services like

e.g. Youtube online learning shifted to providing

video lectures. In the beginning, these lectures of-

ten were simple recordings of traditional university

lectures. With the success of Salman Khan’s video

tutorials on Youtube (Khan, 2006), the community re-

alized, that a different learning style is necessary and

that videos should be much shorter.

Only recently, we see interactive courses, which

combine short video clips with online questions and

exercises. In particular, the online universities Cours-

era and Udacity (Ng and Koller, 2012; Thrun et al.,

2012) use this new online learning style. Even though

these platforms build on web technologies, there is no

common data format underlying these courses. It is

also not possible to work with the interactive mate-

rial when no internet connection is available. How-

ever, we start to see cooperations on data format and

platform usage. Most importantly edX has recently

been founded as a joint project by MIT, Harvard, UC

Berkeley and the University of Texas.

Google has also recognized the need for a com-

mon platform and recently released a course builder

to create online courses (Google, 2012).

For tablet-based teaching there are even less com-

mon standards available. Firstly, there is no estab-

lished learning style and publishers seem to feel a dis-

tinct uncertainty how tablet-optimized content should

look like. Moreover, the competing platforms (iOS,

Android) require both educators and publishers to

make a choice which to support. The past two years

have been too short for researchers to tackle the prob-

lem and there is unfortunately very little research

available (see e.g. (Isabwe et al., 2012)). We see,

however, two developments. On the one hand there

are data formats for electronic books (e.g. ePub,

iBooks). On the other hand, interactive educational

apps appear, which cover a certain educational topic.

While iBooks is a speciﬁed standard which may

be used by publishers and educators, it has various re-

strictions. Firstly, it is a proprietary standard, which

cannot be adapted or extended to support additional

features. Secondly, distribution is exclusive to Ap-

ple’s Appstore for iOS devices. Publishers in some

countries have therefore been reluctant to Apple’s

iBooks standard. Interactive educational apps, on the

other hand, share no common learning style or data.

They are also difﬁcult to develop and differ very much

in terms of user experience. A common standard data

format along with a reference implementation would

be certainly welcome by many educators.

3 REQUIREMENTS FOR

TABLET-BASED TEACHING

Tablet devices provide a set of beneﬁts compared to

both desktop computers and laptops. First, they are

typically smaller and easier to handle. This is not

only true for the actual hardware, but also the included

software.

For the learning experience touch screens are cru-

cial since they allow more natural and quicker interac-

tion with the device. A survey conducted after the ﬁrst

months of our tablet deployments clearly showed this.

In fact, we were surprised by how few students missed

a physical keyboard or mouse (Weible and Seemann,

2013).

Based on the experiences from online learning and

the positive effect of touch interaction, we believe that

learning content for tablets should exhibit the follow-

ing characteristics.

Content should be divided into small manageable

parts. It should be presented in a way, which allows

the student to see, hear and interact with the content.

The interaction is accomplished via touch-based ex-

ercises or questions. An example, could be a cloze

procedure, where possible responses can be dragged

into position with ﬁnger touches.

Content Creation. In some sense, developing such

interactive content is quite similar to game develop-

ment. In order to allow educators to create content

InteractiveLessonsforTablet-basedTeaching-AProposalforanOpenDataFormat

without special knowledge like programming skills,

we need a data format, which abstracts this complex-

ity. That is, the educators deﬁne the content only. The

behaviour may be created in a reference implemen-

tation by a programmer. Thus, educators can reuse

these reference implementations for different styles

of exercises and questions (for more detailed infor-

mation see section 4).

A common open data format would allow edu-

cators to share their content and remix other exist-

ing contents. Additionally, programmers could pro-

vide implementations for various operating systems

or adapt the visual appearance and behaviour of the

content to improve the learning experience.

Ofﬂine Content. Another hurdle for the deploy-

ment of learning content in schools is the lack of in-

ternet connection. Even in developed countries inter-

net access in every classroom is not available. Thus,

learning content needs to be available ofﬂine, which

eliminates the use of many great online resources.

Again, if the content, which is available online would

be in a standardized format, it could be easily trans-

fered to tablet devices (this applies to free content e.g.

released and creative commons licenses or paid con-

tent).

Self-learning. Tablet-based teaching should focus

on self-learning. That is, students should be able to

work through the content on their own. As it is the

case for online learning (e.g. Udacity, Coursera) this

will drastically change who can participate in educa-

tion and what students are able to learn. In our opin-

ion, this is one of the greatest strength of tablet-based

teaching to empower the students to better learn for

themselves.

4 PROPOSED DATA FORMAT

As pointed out in the previous section the data format

should describe the actual content. The visual appear-

ance of this content is part of a reference implemen-

tation, which is independent of the underlying data

format. That is, similar to a graphics format, which

may be displayed with various image viewers.

The design of our data format follows the subse-

quent design goals.

Interactive Content should be Easy to Produce.

For educators it is hard to produce multimedia con-

tent. They have to record audio, video and sub-

sequently process this raw material. This often re-

quires complex software (e.g. video editing software),

which combines video, audio, images and text. The

involved software is not only difﬁcult to learn, but the

content generation is a time-consuming process.

It is getting even more difﬁcult, when the con-

tent should be interactive. In online scenarios, this is

mostly accomplished through programming via e.g.

HTML5/JavaScript, Java Applets or Adobe Flash.

In order to allow the generation of multimedia and

interactive content with minimal effort, our data for-

mat divides content in small chunks or frames, which

can be described through simple text. These frames

may contain videos, images, audio and even interac-

tive exercises.

All content within such a frame is played at once.

That is, on opening the frame e.g., the text is dis-

played and read to the student and an additional vi-

sualization in the form of an image or video is dis-

played.

An example would be:

(01) Not far from River Rhine, not far

from the Swiss town Schaffhausen is a

small cave called "Kesslerloch".

<Kesslerloch.jpg top>

Here the number (01) speciﬁes the frame number.

It is followed by a text, which will be displayed on the

screen. An audio track which possibly reads this in-

formation to the student does not have to be speciﬁed

explicitly. Since the audio belongs to a speciﬁc frame,

we can associate its ﬁle name with the frame number.

In the above case 01.mp3. In many cases, e.g. for-

eign language education, the content author and the

speaker are not the same person. The above naming

convention allows both content authors and possible

speakers not to worry about ﬁle names. Associated

media ﬁles are speciﬁed in brackets. Here a JPG ﬁle

is used as an illustration at the top of the frame.

Note, that the splitting in more manageable frames

also removes the need of alignment of media ﬁles and

text, which typically requires a lot of effort in video

editing.

Obviously, such a simple format restricts the pos-

sibilities a teacher has, when creating content. This is

intentional. On the one hand, we want the content to

be clean, i.e. there should not be an overﬂow of infor-

mation or clutter. On the other hand, there is a trade-

off between simplicity and speed of creation and ﬂex-

ibility. As we will see in the subsequent paragraphs,

however, the data format contains a set of predeﬁned

templates, which can be used. Thus, allowing a wider

variety of ways to present content and to include in-

teractive elements.

Note, in particular that the content may even be

CSEDU2013-5thInternationalConferenceonComputerSupportedEducation

created without the need for a development environ-

ment with a standard text editor.

Data Format should be Human Readable. All

content should be described in human readable form.

This has various advantages. Firstly, it allows a

speaker to read through the data ﬁles and record the

respective audio tracks without special tools. A for-

eign language teacher can e.g. create a lesson, save

it in the above data format and have a native speaker

dub the content. Note, that content, which needs to

be skipped by the speaker is always in parantheses

(e.g. the frame numbers or the media ﬁles). XML

ﬁles, which are often used for data storage are mostly

human readable as well, but they are visually much

harder to process by the human eye. This is especially

true for speakers, which are typically not familiar with

XML, at all.

The XML and other ﬁle formats are optimized to

make it easy for a computer to process the data. In

our ﬁle format, we want to make it easy for humans

(either authors or speakers) to create and process the

content. In some cases, this means, that a parser for

the format is slightly more complicated to implement,

but that is a one time effort. whereas content genera-

tion is a continuous process.

For our deployments at high schools in Germany

(Weible and Seemann, 2013) we have already created

a parser and reference implementations of a learning

environment based on this data format for all major

platforms (iOS, Android, Windows).

4.1 Interactive Elements

Our data format describes a set of interactive ele-

ments, which may be used by content creators. Again,

the actual visual implementation is part of a reference

implementation, not of the data format itself.

Shufﬂed Letters. The ﬁrst type of interactive exer-

cise is called shufﬂed letters. It is intended to bet-

ter recall newly learned words and to remember their

spelling. The main application is in the area of for-

eign languages, but it is also applicable to learn terms

in the ﬁelds business or engineering. An example for

the description of such an exercise is depicted below:

(02) In our Solar System, there are many

...

-> Correct! In our Solar System there

are many

planets

From the above data, the computer automatically

generates an anagram of the solution, which is in this

case the word “planets”. The student has to then to

use touch interaction to reorder the different charac-

ters.

The corresponding frame as implemented in our

own reference implementation looks as follows:

Remember, the design goal has been to make it

easy to create content. In this case, an author just has

to provide a sentence, which needs to be completed

(denoted by the ellipsis). The success message starts

with an text arrow. This part is, obviously, only dis-

played once the student has found the correct solution.

The corresponding audio tracks need to be stored in

ﬁles named 02.mp3 for the ﬁrst part and 02b.mp3 for

the success message. If an audio track for the success

message exists, the message will not be displayed, but

only read to the student. The correct solution is spec-

iﬁed in the success message by surrounding it with

stars. The same technique is commonly used in e-

mails to highlight a word. As can be seen, it is ex-

tremely easy and fast to create such an interactive ex-

ercise with the above scheme.

Shufﬂed Words. In a similar way, we can create

other exercises like shufﬂed words. The main appli-

cation here is to learn the grammar of a foreign lan-

guage by bringing the words of a sentence into the

correct order. For this, we specify the words or parts

of the sentence in square brackets and separate them

by commas. Alternatives from which a student has to

choose (e.g. does versus do) are deﬁned by a slash.

An example is:

(03) [how, long, does/do, the journey,

take/takes]

-> Correct! The answer is

how long

does the journey take

Note again that the author does not have to shufﬂe

the words manually, as the computer can shufﬂe them

automatically at run-time. This procedure is also less

error-prone, since it makes the exercise more readable

for the author. When shuffeling words manually, au-

thors sometimes tend to forget to specify one of the

words in the sentence.

InteractiveLessonsforTablet-basedTeaching-AProposalforanOpenDataFormat

Multiple Choice Multiple choice exercises are the

most commonly used type of question. In our data

format the questions may be speciﬁed in the following

manner:

(04) How many planets are in our solar

system?

- 5 planets

- 6 planets

- 7 planets

- 8 planets

-> Our solar system contains

planets

. You’re right!

-> There are actually

8 planets

our solar system. Mercury, Venus, Earth,

Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and

Neptune.

Note, in particular, that there are two lines start-

ing with text arrows. Next to the success message, a

result message is added when the student has picked

the incorrect answer. Following our naming scheme

for the audio tracks, a speaker would store the ques-

tion text in a ﬁle 04.mp3, and the two result messages

in the ﬁles 04b.mp3 and 04c.mp3.

In our reference implementation, the above ques-

tion is displayed as follows:

Numeric Computations. In math education as well

as in other technical disciplines, most exercises re-

quire the user to enter the result of a numeric com-

putation. This application is also speciﬁed in our data

format.

An example would be:

(05) Marc is giving two pieces of

chocolate to his brother and keeps three

pieces for himself.

3 pieces of 5 pieces = ?%

-> Correct! He is keeping

-> Try again, 50% are half of the pieces

and four pieces constitute 80%.

Again, it is extremely easy for an author to cre-

ate such an exercise. A question mark with a leading

white space character is used to indicate, that the stu-

dent should ﬁll the answer at the corresponding po-

sition. For tablet devices a custom virtual keyboard

is displayed to allow the student to conveniently enter

the result.

Further Elements. In a similar fashion further in-

teractive elements can be speciﬁed e.g. ﬁll in the

blanks style exercises. We have currently integrated

twelve styles of exercises and plan to expand this in

future versions.

The full speciﬁcation and feature set of the ﬁrst

version of our data format will be ﬁnalized and re-

leased to the public on http://scoolbook.org.

5 CONCLUSIONS

Tablet-based teaching will become pervasive in the

next few years. There is demand for content, which

is tailored towards this new style of teaching and self-

learing. Currently, there is no standard for this new

type of content. In this paper, we have proposed a

simple, open data format, which may be adopted by

authors to create interactive content.

The format is extremely easy to use and imple-

ment. In various tablet deployments at schools in Ger-

many, we are already working with a reference im-

plementation for this data format. Our feedback from

teachers working to create new content has been very

positive. In fact, interviews with authors has shown,

that especially non-technical authors very much pre-

fer this format over XML-based formats.

We encourage the community to contribute further

ideas for this data format, create content based on it

and adopt it in other deployments.

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InteractiveLessonsforTablet-basedTeaching-AProposalforanOpenDataFormat