Innovative Tools and Models for E-Learning in Romania

This article reports examples from new, ongoing distance learning activities in Romania that utilize state of the art digital media, tools, and methods. Examples include state of the art video tools, design of video infrastructure, and training courses employed for classroom modernisation, to address technological and pedagogical innovations in vocational education and training. The objective is to renovate the teaching infrastructure used by specialists in vocational education, and improve vocational training quality by providing more flexible trainings paths to the Romanian labor market. The latter includes dissemination of a new model for organizing and delivering professional vocational training comprising of competence transfer, competence export, building networks, and development of contacts with vocational schools within a regional development perspective. The training delivery utilizes state of the art ICT solutions, high definition video services, and blended learning frameworks.

A Mobile Learning Content-independent Versatile Ubiquitous System (CiVUS)

Mobile learning (m-learning) introduces the idea of learning from virtually anywhere, regardless of the in-motion learner. This paper presents the development and impact of m-learning system capable to deliver personalized contents to the learner, called Content-independent Versatile Ubiquitous System (CiVUS). This solution promotes communication between learners and their teachers by encouraging learners to share self-made multimedia contents. Enabling interactivity makes mobile devices suitable for the development of collaborative activities amongst engineering students. CiVUS intends to offer support for engineering subjects study. It can be used inside or outside classrooms by learners and teachers, due to the mobility of these devices, at the time they find more suitable. The system has been validated and evaluated through a real usage. The study group collected answers from 10 teachers and 87 engineering students of the University of Beira Interior, Portugal and the University of Valladolid, Spain. The results demonstrate that the majority of the inquired people totally agree (all items over 72% for professors and 74% for students).

A Robust and Scalable RESTful Web Service for Collecting Student Responses

This paper discusses a model for a RESTful (Representational State Transfer) web service used in education. The “Student Response System” (SRS) has been developed and tested in classrooms for two years within the EduMecca project. The SRS provides a response system, accessible through mobile devices allowing students to submit virtually anonymous responses, i.e., other students are not able to see individual submissions. The system makes strong use of open and flexible standards to allow for external software to control the service with use-case specific interfaces. It is aimed to support as many students using the service in parallel as possible. In this paper, the main performance bottleneck of the system is examined in detail. In order to provide an easy-to-use interface, the mobile devices of the students need to be notified by the service about real-time changes of the data. The benchmark results indicate a high user capacity of the service. It is also a robust approach able to recover quickly after an unusual high request peak.

Using an Application of Mobile and Wireless Technology in Arabic Learning System

Mobile and Wireless technologies has been used in various areas, and it begins to have a huge impact on how education takes place in several disciplines. This technology has been improved considerably, making mobile devices extraordinarily suitable and reasonable in M-Learning a reality. Wireless Response System (WRS) is a developed generation of Student Response System (SRS). It uses devices that enable students and trainers to provide definite responses to many questions during the lesson with an immediate feedback to the students about their level of knowledge and understanding. However, teaching in Arabic language needs some specific features which have been included in the existing WRS and the steps of implementing them are considered in this paper. The developed version of WRS seeks to increase the users’ interactions and engagement through adding a new function to WRS which is Arabic language. Nevertheless, some universities and institutes in Arab world signed strategic corporations with mobile service providers to start this type of services for their education branches. This paper contains an analysis of ICT penetration and the level of m-learning environments in Arabic countries.

Development of an Extended Information Quality Framework for E-Learning System Content for Engineering Education Courses (EECs)

Poor integration of pedagogical and technological learning elements within teaching and learning methodologies may have substantial impacts on the effectiveness of learning. Although educational institutions are improving their courses, teaching and learning methodologies and assessment strategies with tailored approaches, their efforts at improvement tend to focus narrowly on academic results. The authors believe that educational courses should give priority to educational goals and labour market expectations (industrial companies’ requirements) in devising the methodology of teaching and learning. The technology based learning system has a capability to comply with diverse requirements as mentioned. The purpose of this paper is to develop an extended information quality framework to measure the effectiveness of e-learning content for technology based learning system for engineering education courses (EECs) in Technical and Vocational Education (TVE) in Bahrain. The model incorporates the requirements of educational goals (TVE goals) and modern industrial needs and integrates these with existing information quality frameworks. The extended model incorporates pedagogical and technological elements, is consistent with the educational objectives and industrial requirements, and can be used as guidelines for measuring the effectiveness of e-learning packages delivered in EECs.

Developing and Evaluating Practical Methodological Guidelines for use of Student Response System in Teaching

This article presents methodological experiences and evaluation results obtained during introduction and testing of a new online student response system (SRS) for modern mobile devices at Sør-Trøndelag University College, in Norway. The aim of the test period was methodological development, based on student evaluation. Using in-depth interviews with students, awareness of how SRS was comprehended by the students in their learning process increased. Several methodological choices and practical challenges were faced when introducing SRS. The procedures and methodological choices were based on published experience and the authors’ assumptions. However, what was believed to be important pedagogical, were among the students perceived as positive but not in the way expected. The students have a clear perspective on their own learning process and gave insight into how SRS fit into their own learning process. Students’ perceptions regarding methodology, in combination with their own experience of learning, appear as a necessary ingredient for an appropriate implementation and use of SRS in teaching.

Designing and Developing a Student Response System for Mobile Internet Devices

The authors present a Student Response System for modern Internet-capable mobile devices, which was developed in a European R&D project, co-funded by the European Commission. The goal was to make a system that is designed for speed, ease of use, and flexibility for use in lectures. The authors have tried to make a time efficient and intuitive system that does not compromise flexibility and that enables the teacher to use any lecture format he/she sees fit. The only requirement is a computer with an Internet connection; the teacher is not bound to specific presentation software. The system is Web-based, enabling students to use their own mobile device or computer. The cost for both educational institutions and students is kept at a minimum, lowering the threshold for using the system in education. As of today, the program is free of charge and can be found at histproject.no.

Preliminary Analysis of Using Games in Problem Based Learning in Learning Mathematics

The growing awareness of mathematic competency in education and careers has been as an important agenda among parents and students nowadays. Thus, teaching mathematic effectively is a challenge to educators in schools and higher institution. The combination of Problem Based Learning method and game in mathematic environment can be synchronizing to help students mastering mathematic knowledge heuristically. The objective of this paper is to highlight the literature review and the preliminary analysis done in the early phase of the research of Using Game in Problem Based Learning in Learning Mathematic. The paper also discusses the research framework that is divided into 3 parts; control mode, development, and testing.

Environmental Education through Envkids Didactical Framework and ICT Tools

Global awareness on the need to change everyday behavior towards some more environmentally friendly practices has been on the rise over the last few years in the face of emerging phenomena such as global temperature rising, desertification, extreme weather, sea water level rising, and the potential resulting disruption to everyday life for large populations. Even if in most European countries a certain amount of environmental objectives for primary education are defined, teachers in the field feel a substantial lack of supporting implementation guidelines, especially for digital deployment in the classroom. Addressing this need, the work presented in this paper aims at the development of blended learning activities that deploy an explorative and collaborative didactical framework towards environmental sustainability training for primary education through a combination of in-class instruction, virtual experimentation, storytelling practices, and on-line collaboration. The validation activities carried out so far demonstrate a positive teacher and learner reaction and an easy integration of the methodologies and demonstrators into existing school practices.

Mobile Exam System – MES

As the mobile applications are constantly facing a rapid development in the recent years especially in the academic environment such as student response system (Lópeza, Royoa, Labordab, & Calvoa, 2009; Ngai & Gunasekaran, 2007; Mary & Biju, 2008; Nayak & Erinjeri, 2008; Roth, Ivanchenko, & Record, 2008; Lu, Stav, & Pein, 2009; Lu, 2009; Turning Technologies, 2010) used in universities and other educational institutions; However, an effective and scalable Database Management System to support fast and reliable data storage and retrieval is missing. This paper presents Database Management Architecture for an Innovative Evaluation System based on Mobile Learning Applications. The need for a relatively stable, independent, and extensible data model for faster data storage and retrieval is analyzed and investigated. Finally a case study to prove the concept of the urgent need for the system is proposed. It concludes that the system is important by emphasizing further investigation to support multimedia data types, such as video clips, images and documents in near future.