Mobile eLearning Content on Demand

Abstract

Advanced mobile devices suitable for rich media content reception escort a strong majority of the people. Mobile information technologies today are pervasive and prevalent across most generations and countries and augur well for knowledge reception and learning processes within everyday life. In ubiquitously advising life long learning opportunities the paradigm of mobile users questions our common approaches of implementing teaching and learning: Mobile use patterns are short and fast, they frequently interrupt established contexts while nomadic users commonly are on edge with multiple activities taking place in parallel. Handheld devices in addition admit specific, non standard designs and are considered personal companions. In this paper we present an approach to dynamic, 'on demand' production of content, which is personalized and specifically adapted to dedicated mobile devices. Starting from IEEE LOM eLearning Objects, i.e., small standardized self consistent knowledge entities; we process formats, appearance and contextual structures to transform re-usable content objects into the desired target context. Beside Web data for mobile browsers we will detail out an example of feeding the specific iPod potentials, i.e., its navigation, and a handheld Sony gaming station. All implementations are based on the educational content management system hylOs, which we will briefly introduce. Enabled through an advanced authoring toolset, hylOs allows defining contextual hyperlink overlays, as well as instructional overlays of a given eLearning object mesh. Based on a powerful Ontological Evaluation Layer, additional meaningful overlay relations between knowledge objects are derived autonomously within hylOs. These resulting semantic nets form a basis for perpetuating contexts, when mobile users re-access interrupted learning sessions.