Mobile Versus Desktop Educational Applications
Software that is meant to help an educational process can be considered successful only if it is accepted and approved by the interacting targeted participants. For educational software, there are two basic groups of users who use it, namely instructors a
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Mobile Versus Desktop Educational Applications
Abstract Software that is meant to help an educational process can be considered successful only if it is accepted and approved by the interacting targeted participants. For educational software, there are two basic groups of users who use it, namely instructors and students. As a result, in this chapter, we try to find out how helpful our mobile learning software might be for human instructors and also how educationally beneficial it is to their students. On a second level, our evaluation is targeted to measure the effectiveness of a mobile approach to learning compared with the ‘‘traditional’’ computer based, e-learning process.
6.1 Introduction Educational applications constitute a special category of software that needs to model and assist many aspects of the cognitive processes of humans whether these are learners or instructors. Formative evaluation is one of the most critical steps in the development of learning materials because it helps the designer improve the cost-effectiveness of the software and this increases the likelihood that the final product will achieve its stated goals (Chou 1999). In the literature there are evaluation methods that are completely specialized to educational software. One such evaluation framework outlines three basic dimensions that need to be evaluated: (i) context; (ii) interactions; and (iii) attitudes and outcomes (Jones et al. 1999). The context determines the reason why the educational software is adopted in the first place, i.e. the underlying rationale for its development and use; different rationales require different evaluation approaches. Students’ interactions with the software reveal information about the students’ learning processes. The ‘‘outcomes’’ stage examines information from a variety of sources, such as pre and post-achievement tests, interviews and questionnaires with students and tutors. This framework has been used for the evaluation of our mobile learning software platform MAT, that was presented in Chap. 4.
E. Alepis and M. Virvou, Object-Oriented User Interfaces for Personalized Mobile Learning, Intelligent Systems Reference Library 64, DOI: 10.1007/978-3-642-53851-3_6, Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2014
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6 Mobile Versus Desktop Educational Applications
The underlying rationale of MAT involves offering more convenience with respect to time, place and kind of device to its users (instructors and learners), therefore the context of the evaluation required an emphasis on the mobile aspect of the application. Then, students’ interactions with the software were evaluated with respect to the students’ learning processes while they used mobile devices. Finally, the ‘‘outcomes’’ stage involved pre and post-achievement tests before and after the use of a mobile device. In addition, it involved many interviews of students and instructors, which focused mainly on evaluating the use of mobile devices. In view of these, the evaluation of Mobile Authoring Tool (MAT) involved both instructors and stu
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