Development and Evaluation of an Active Learning Support System for Context-Aware Ubiquitous Learning

Abstract

Situating students to learn from the real world has been recognized as an important and challenging issue. However, in a real-world learning environment, there are usually many physical constraints that affect the learning performance of students, such as the total learning time, the limitation of the number of students who can visit a learning target, and the time needed for moving from one learning location to another. It is essential to guide the students along an efficient learning path to maximize their learning performance according to the current situation. In this paper, an active learning support system (ALESS) for context-aware ubiquitous learning environments is designed and developed. ALESS can provide learning guidance when conducting ubiquitous learning activities. A great deal of context information is used in ALESS, including the location, the current capacity of the learning object, the time available, etc. ALESS is able to actively provide the required learning support to individual students when they approach the corresponding real-world learning targets. To evaluate the performance of ALESS, an experiment was conducted in the National Science Museum of Taiwan. The experimental results showed that, with the help of ALESS, the students learned more efficiently, and achieved better learning performance.