Aoife Brady, Owen Conlan, Vincent Wade

Dynamic Composition and Personalization of PDA-based eLearning – Personalized mLearning

Knowledge and Data Engineering Group
Department of Computer Science
Trinity College Dublin

With the increasingly demanding schedules of formal and casual learners and the proliferation of terminal devices available for content delivery, learners are demanding ubiquitous access to their learning. The multi-modal nature of the variety of devices employed by these learners will necessitate that learning experiences can be started on one device and transitioned seamlessly to another as the learner changes the context of their learning. This movement of learning experience between devices, which may have dramatically different capabilities, presents a usability challenge to ensure our learners do not feel their learning experience has been adversely affected. Personalized eLearning offerings can be tailored not only to the learner, but also to the device they are using. Generally, the evaluations that have been carried out of personalized eLearning systems have concentrated on systems that are delivered via devices, such as desktop computers, that have generous screen real estate available for rendering the personalized courses. When screen real estate and characteristics such as bandwidth are limited appropriate personalization becomes much more important. This paper examines the usability of dynamically composed eLearning experiences on Personal Digital Assistant (PDA) devices.