Eleni Malliou, Antonis Miliarakis, Savvas Stavros,
Sofoklis A. Sotiriou, Manolis Stratakis:
 
 

ABSTRACT

I. INTRODUCTION

The system aims to present linguistic content embedded in its cultural context furthering the understanding of European's cultural and multilingual diversity. It is proven that the mutual understanding in the communication process depends not only on linguistic competence but also on the awareness and perception of cultural behaviour, cultural differences and similarities. Only the need and wish to communicate in a foreign country, motivates individuals to learn a language or at least acquire specific limited language skills, but usually in travel situations no learning tool is available and back home often lack of time and appropriate learning material absents individuals from language studies. Increasing mobility of individuals, either for business, training or educational purposes, indicates the need for innovative, flexible, fast retrievable and user-friendly language learning tools, catering the needs of the modern 'mobile' European, who does not have the time or intention for in-depth involvement and requires an immediate limited information.

The AD-HOC project's objectives are to encourage linguistic diversity throughout the EU and support the 'life-long learning' by motivating and aiding individuals to learn languages any time and in any place through the development of an innovative language learning tool, which serves the specific needs of travellers through:

• The presentation of authentic communication and real life situations in the cultural context.
• Its ad-hoc availability on travel occasions.
• The offer of different, basic levels, based on the survival level.
• The choice of thematic fields for the acquisition of language skills for requirements of specific situations and specific purposes (business travel, travelling of young people etc).
• The choice for acquisition of only partial competencies, e.g. oral comprehension and expression.

II. USABILITY ISSUES

A key problem for handheld devices is usability: the screens are too small, they don't have keyboards but scribble pads, and the available speech recognition programs do not really work. 

The small glass displays of the current handheld devices essentially limit how much information can be presented at one time. Lack of screen space is not a problem that can easily be improved with technological advances; the screen must fit on the device and the device must be small; screen space will always be in short supply. A second usability problem is represented by the fact that presenting dynamic information on devices with small displays is difficult. Techniques for large displays again do not generalize well to small ones. 

Given these limitations, "mobilizing" existing PC-based e-learning applications can result in a frustrating or nearly unusable mobile service. The solution exists in taking a different approach to how the information is streamlined and targeted to the user. The first step toward this solution is to integrate a user centered investigation into the e-learning system's development cycle.

According to the 1998 ISO 9241 standard for usability^[6] one must include the following parameters in system's usability, usefulness, functionality, learnability, memorability, effectiveness, efficiency and desirability. Even with such a checklist, it is still very easy for a designer to make a tool, which is quite unusable. This is partially because design is not sequential process - design decisions affect which people can use a tool, thus requiring the original design to be rethought, and partially because designers are not the potential users and driven by other forces such as a love for technology. Nevertheless there is hope. There comes a time when the design of a system is no longer driven by technological advances, but instead drawn forward by the users who have expectations of usability and take for granted the basic performance. The methodological approach of the AD-HOC project plays a fundamental role for the development of such a system: user-centered design^[7] and scenario based design^[8] are means for assuring that the final system is appropriate to the user and to the context of use.

The AD-HOC system will fulfil the following general requirements: 

Interactivity: it should provide means of communication between learners and teachers. It should allow for feedback by the teachers that will be accessible to learners.

Interdisciplinarity: Content should be presented in an interdisciplinary way incorporating information of different disciplines, thus promoting the idea of informal learning.

Unobtrusiveness: so that the student can capture situations and retrieve knowledge without technology obtruding on the situation.

Availability: its functions should be available anywhere and it should provide seamless communication inside and outside buildings.

Adaptability: it should adapt to the learners' evolving skills and knowledge.

Usefulness: it should be suited to everyday needs for communication, reference, and learning

Suitability: Content should be corresponding to specific learning needs of users, e.g. content for the same subject should be presented in several ways and provided according to the specific users' profile;

Easy to use: it should be intuitively easy to use, by users with no computer experience.

III. TECHNICAL DESCRIPTION OF THE AD-HOC SYSTEM

Another important objective of the AD-HOC project is to develop and evaluate communication patterns and possible infrastructures for interconnected embedded technologies among devices. Communication between devices can take place by using RF technologies like Bluetooth or 802.11b. The utilization of Bluetooth seems to be a good option, as it is low power and cost, with data as well as speech transmission capabilities, although there are some important open issues. Problems like power consumption of Bluetooth devices, their integration in embedded systems with tight memory capabilities and successive devices management have to be researched and dealt with.

The platform services will be delivered via an advanced user-interface, where the user will have to log in. The first major component of the user-interface will be the Personal Learner's apprentice : This is the core software agent of the system and the main part of the user-interface. It is responsible for interacting with the user. It will: 

• Manage the user-system dialogue
• Support students in declaring their goals, by using each user's personal ontology and the domain ontology
• Perform skills gap analysis by matching the user profile and personal ontology against the domain ontology 
• Pro-actively suggest content to the student, based on his/her profile and ontology, the domain ontology and the available educational modules
• Attend to users queries about content and suggest modules that meet his/her declared needs, based on the available educational modules
• Decompose the user queries and goals into sub-goals to be met by the system and then co-operate with the response planner in order to compile a list of suggestions
• Monitor the correct delivery of courses and record user's learning behaviour in order to update his/her profile
• Optimize the delivery of content with respect to momentary network availability and device capabilities

Figure 1: The platform services will be delivered to the user via an advanced user-interface. The main components of the user-interface will be the Personal Learner's apprentice and the Multimedia Messaging Platform

A Multimedia Messaging Platform (MMP) will be developed that will provide two-way communication. The MMP will be the second major component of the user-interface. A web-based application will provide the interface for the delivery of the multimedia messages. A web server will be used to collect user responses either through the web or directly from the mobile network. Certain work can be delivered to learners using this platform and questions or feedback can be collected from them. Collaboration among the learners will be enhanced with such a service that allows for easy and immediate exchange of information (transmission of quality photographs, sound and video will be possible enabling instant, high quality collaboration among the users.

IV. EDUCATIONAL CONTENT

• Decompose a query issued by the learner into educational sub-goals, or perform an analysis of his/her skills profile
• Retrieve the appropriate educational modules from the database
• Synthesize the modules into a Personalized Virtual Document (PVD) based on a methodology that will be developed during the project. The methodology will take into account the user's context of learning, his/her personal ontology and his/her goals, and will implement an appropriate instructional strategy 

The approach, which will be adopted in the framework of the project, is to use scenario-based design methods [8] as a means of defining suitable educational applications of the mobile technology. Scenario building is one of the partnerships main design techniques to explore new forms of interaction in which the physical environment is able to react to human behavior, using handheld devices as a mediator. In the framework of the AD-HOC project a series of scenarios will be developed describing different situations. Language will be presented through written text, audio and, where applicable, through animations or video. The language modules will be divided in very limited sub-modules to help the learner in the fast access to the specific language patterns he/she is looking for. The learner will receive choices for links to little scenes, to the cultural context, to grammar explanations and to interactive exercises, also to similar language content/scenes/cultural context in the other languages. The interactive exercises will allow for voice recognition and will offer the option for correction and reply. In this way the learner will be able to create a live dialogue or even use the device as assistant during his/her communication with another user.

V. CURRENT STATUS

Using Embedded Visual Tools like Embedded Visual Basic 3.0 and Embedded Visual C++ we develop testing applications from scratch, to take full advantage not only of the mobility of the device but mainly of the exploitation of all multimedia capabilities, like download and reproduce audio and video files.

Moreover, we are not only examining mobile Internet connectivity but we are extensively research for different download methods. In these methods the content is pushed to the PDA whenever the user "syncs" the device with the AD-HOC system. Another programming challenge on which we are working is the availability of "device-to-device" networking using Blue tooth. So there is already under development a Blue tooth wireless LAN for testing wireless communications and downloads using some exemplary AD-HOC scenarios.

The piloting of the application is taking place in repeated cycles of learner-centered trials in Greece, Italy, Austria and Germany. Each cycle includes the design, the development, the trials and the evaluation, which is the input for the next cycle in the student-centered product's development approach. The in-situ trials are not only meant for evaluation purposes but involve both students and teachers offering them the chance to provide feedback to the project and its technical and pedagogical aspects. 

VI. CONCLUSIONS - FUTURE WORK

During the application an extensive usability evaluation that will offer the guidelines for the human computer interaction and psychological contents required for the development of the final version of the AD-HOC system

The consortium aims to investigate the impact that handheld technology has on how final users experience wireless e-learning applications.

REFERENCES

[2] A. Aviram, International Review of Education 39(5), 1993, pp 419-433.

[3] J.Fleischman, Going Mobile: New Technologies in Education, Converge Magazine, May 2001, www.convergemag.com

[4] J.R. Anderson, L.M. Reder, & H.A. Simon, Situated learning and education, Educational Researcher, 25(4), 1996, pp 5-11

[5] Learning's WWW, Web based learning, Wap based learning, Web mining, Proceedings of CAPS'3, Ed. K. Zreik, ISBN 2-909-285-18-9.

[6] G. Casteli, Universal mobile Telecommunication system: terminals and applications in Communications through virtual technologies, Ed. G.Riva, IOS Press,2001

[7] D.A.Norman, The invisible computer, MIT Press, 1999, ISBN 0-262-14065-9.

[8] G. Ringland, Scenario Planning: Managing for the future, Chichester: John Wiley and Sons, 1998.

* The AD-HOC project is a European cooperation project (2000-2002), co-financed from the European Commission, DG Education and Culture.