Smart devices such as smartphones and tablets have, arguably, become nearly perfect devices for distance learning. What keeps them from being perfect is their capability to store and process multimedia content and their battery life, which are, and will always be, limited.
Aleksandar Karadimce and Danco Davcev from the University Ss Cyril and Methodius in Skopje have set out to make smart devices more suitable for m-learning. They take both the Quality of Service and the Quality of Experience into consideration and see collaborating with the users and adapting to their needs as crucial. Based on the assumption that adapting the multimedia contents to the users preferred learning style, and device, increases the perceived quality of learning experience, they propose doing just that.
Their theoretical solution is cloud-based and thus offloads the mobile device. It is capable of delivering multimedia content to mobile devices with various capacity and capability, and it uses an intelligent engine to create an adjustable personalised learning plan. In short, it takes the cognitive learning style of the user and the technical capabilities of their device into account, and the researchers believe that this should not only facilitate the delivery of multimedia content to mobile devices but also enhance the users’ mobile-learning experience.
The paper was presented at the COLLABORATECOM conference in 2014 that took place in Miami, and can now be read in full here.
