Mobile eLearning System Employing a Jini-Agent Fourth International Conference on eLearning for Knowledge-Based Society, November 18-19, 2007, Bangkok, Thailand 37.1 Mobile eLearning System Employing a Jini-Agent Sang Tae Kim, Asif Iqbal, Byoung-Ju Yun, Jonghun Baek, and Hyun Deok Kim School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Kyungpook National University South Korea hyundkim@ee.knu.ac.kr Abstract A mobile eLearning system employing a Jini-agent technology has been proposed and demonstrated to realize anywhere, anytime and anyone learning. It enables the users to utilize the eLearning system through a resource-limited mobile device without any client program installation in it. It also automatically finds and provides the users the lists of the services and contents available on various networks. The proposed eLearning system can realize a seamless eLearning service over wired and wireless networks. 1. Introduction The mobile eLearning system using portable devices such as portable digital assistants (PDAs), smart phones and portable multimedia players (PMPs) can realize “anywhere, anytime” learning. Furthermore, since most of peoples own mobile devices anyone can easily utilize the eLearning system by using various mobile devices. To realize the mobile eLearning system, the mobile device should interact with other electronic devices such as servers, desktop personal computers (PCs) and peripheral devices such as printer and scanner. Since the mobile device and the other electronic devices are usually implemented based on different operating systems and platforms depending on the manufacturers, it is difficult to realize the interoperation between the devices. Thus the middleware plays a key role to provide the interoperation between the devices with different platforms. Especially, the Jini is one of the widely used middlewares and provides the plug and play operation, which is essential to the users not familiar to the electronic devices. It also provides a seamless interoperation between the devices with different platforms. However, the Jini technology can not be applied directly to the mobile devices since the resources of the mobile devices such as the processing power and the storage size are not sufficient to support a Java virtual machine (JVM). In this paper, we propose and demonstrate a novel mobile eLearning system by using a Jini-agent. Two exemplary eLearning services are demonstrated by using the Jini-agent and PDAs. One is the file transfer from a client mobile device to a server and the other is the remote submission of the assignment in the form of a printed paper. We demonstrate that the user of the mobile device can submit the assignment by printing it using the printer located at the teacher’s side without printer driver installation in mobile device.