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Abstract
In recent years, there has been a dramatic proliferation of research concerned with the ubiquitous learning (u-learning). The u-learning systems have to be continuously evaluated and improved for ensuring the system reliability. Therefore, this work based on meaningful learning aspect to propose a u-learning evaluation model. The model blends features of u-learning and meaningful learning to construct a hierarchy decision model. According to the hierarchy structure, domain experts can develop AHP-based questionnaire survey to collect learners opinions. Following that, system developers can realize the relative strength and weakness of the u-learning system from a meaningful learning viewpoint by analyzing the surveyed data, and they can further to improve and refine current u-learning systems accordingly. Consequently, existing u-learning systems can be revalidated by our evaluation model, and then based on the produced suggestions to improve toward the meaningful learning.
1. Introduction
Advances in ubiquitous computing technologies have furnished teachers with the opportunity of engaging in novel educational processes. Along with these novelties, they not only affect our life but also shift our ways of learning. Nowadays, researches in terms of ubiquitous learning (u-learning) are also being stimulated by these changes. The u-learning environment provided an interoperable, pervasive, interactivity, and seamless learning architecture to integrate, connect, and share learning resources among appropriate identities [1][2]. The major characteristic of u-learning is context-aware that can sense the learners information and the information around the learners in the real world, and then to provide personalized services accordingly [3]. Therefore, learners can learn the knowledge, skills and problem solving abilities while interacting with the real world by authentic settings. Last few years, the u-learning has been extensively
investigated and applied to domain knowledge training, such as history, linguistic, nature science, and so on[4]. For reliability, these u-learning applications have to be evaluated and improved constantly by learners, instructors and domain experts to ensure their academic performances [5][6]. To this end, a systematic evaluation method is needed to evaluate these u-learning works. Since u-learning has its own unique characteristics, it cannot direct apply previous evaluation methodologies which were used to evaluate e-learning systems, to evaluate it. In order to objectively evaluate u-learning systems, this study bases on meaningful learning and introduces a systematic evaluation approach for u-learning environment. A learning activity/system conforms to meaningful learning must keep following principles [7][8]: active, authentic, constructive, cooperative, and integrated, which are the fundamentals of the meaningful learning and are considered as criteria to evaluate u-learning systems. Based on these criteria, we can have an insight into whether the ubiquitous computing technologies can play a harmony with pedagogies in u-learning environment. In this study, we have developed an evaluation model based on both the principles of meaningful and ubiquitous learning. In order to take the two sets of principle into account simultaneously, the analytic hierarchy process (AHP) [9] has been utilized to perform a systematic fusion. The AHP is usually adopted to perform multi-criteria decision making. In addition, during the decision process, the critical/relative important criterion which can affect the decision goal can be found. Based on such property, we raise a research hypothesis to help us to develop a u-learning evaluation method by using AHP model. It assumes that the learners thought one system function is relative important means that the design of the function is better than other system functions, and vice versa. Based on the hypothesis, u-learning developers can realize the relative strength and weakness of their u-learning systems according to the evaluation model. Moreover, the evaluation result will also indicate the clearly refinement directions for developers to work toward better meaningful learning based u-learning environment.
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In the final stage of this study, a case study, the ubiquitous tree-watching activity, is developed and conducted to make this work more comprehensible. During Mar.-May 2007, six teachers and sixty-one fifth grade students in an elementary school in southern Taiwan were engaged in the ubiquitous tree-watching activity and they were then surveyed by our AHP-based questionnaire. The evaluative results show that the tree-watching activity is performed better in authentic and integrated dimensions of the meaningful learning, but the cooperative is relatively weak and needs developers to pay more efforts for improvement. The remainder of this article is organized as follows. In Section 2, we survey the relevant literatures. According to previous results, Sections 3 introduces our evaluation model, and the corresponding case study has been drawn in Section 4. Subsequently, Section 5 shows the evaluation result derived from the case study, and finally, Section 6 shows the research limitations and sums up this study, as well as pointing out the future direction.