Integrating Technical Advance in Mobile Devices to Enhance the Information Retrieval in Mobile Learning

It has been a long time since the wireless technologies are used in learning activities to promote the interaction between teacher and learners. The recent advance in the mobile technologies has created new chances improving the flexibility, efficiency, and functionality of the learning interaction systems. This investigation identifies the weakness of the existing systems, and integrates the emerging mobile technologies to establish an open interaction framework to effectively enhance the interaction using students faced mobile devices and public wireless infrastructure. The main work of this investigation contains: (1) a teacher-learner response model for mobile based interaction is proposed and described with state machine logic; (2) a presentation-content retrieval mechanism is designed to efficiently utilise the limited computation resource; (3) device independence and context-aware techniques are integrated to created cross-platform application with mobile device features; (4) an open media framework is built for flexible learning material distribution and question organization. A lightweight mobile oriented Web-based Wireless Response System (mobile-WRS) is implemented as a case study. In-house testing and classroom application of the mobile-WRS in universities demonstrate that the proposed system outperforms the peer works in usability, interface, operational efficiency, learning material distribution, results presentation, and performance assessment, etc.