J.A. Jacko (Ed.): Human-Computer Interaction, Part IV, HCII 2009, LNCS 5613, pp. 217–225, 2009.
© Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2009
Supporting End-User Development of
Personalized Mobile Learning Tools
Marco de Sá and Luís Carriço
LaSIGE & University of Lisbon
Campo-Grande, 1749-016, Lisboa, Portugal
{marcosa,lmc}@di.fc.ul.pt
Abstract. Mobile devices present great features for the support of pervasive
learning and content personalization. This paper presents a framework which
takes advantage of these features and supports end-users while creating their
customized tools for their students. Additionally, the framework comprises
means for teachers to include persuasive and motivational mechanisms and
hints, promoting student engagement while pursuing their learning activities.
We describe the framework’s architecture, its features, including the supporting
guidelines and development process, and detail some of the already developed
material and the results that emerged during initial trials and case studies, also
stressing their contributions to the field of m-learning.
Keywords: Mobile devices, personalization, multimedia content.
1 Introduction
With the rapid development of mobile technology and the ever growing amount of
capabilities that mobile devices possess, the transition from e-learning to mobile
learning has been gradually taking place [8]. Taking advantage of their hardware
characteristics, mobile devices are ideal tools to support the learning process, espe-
cially given their pervasive nature and personal use. As they are carried with users
throughout most of their daily lives, they offer the opportunity to provide support to
learning activities regardless of the users’ location and can be used in concert and as a
complement to other materials. Moreover, the inclusion of multimedia and multimo-
dalities extend their reach to different domains and users, with different backgrounds
and ages and with or without disabilities.
With this in mind, there has been a recent momentum towards the development of
tools that support mobile learning and in particular mobile evaluation [1,2]. Existing
examples range from tests and questionnaires that target specific contents or subjects
[3,5], some tutorials, digital books and learning material with augmented content [6,
7]and annotations tools. However, most of these are usually restricted to particular
subjects or content [9], do not consider the inclusion of different educational activities
and, most importantly, do not offer power-users/teachers the ability to configure the
provided material according to different dimensions that better suit the needs of their
students. The few tools that provide some degree of flexibility [1] either require con-
nections to remote servers or do not offer the ability to adjust the resulting interfaces