UTiLearn: A Personalised Ubiquitous Teaching and Learning System for Smart Societies

Abstract

The education industry around the globe is undergoing major transformations. Organizations, such as Coursera are advancing new business models for education. A number of major industries have dropped degrees from the job requirements. While the economics of higher education institutions are under threat in a continuing gloomy global economy, digital and lifelong learners are increasingly demanding new teaching and learning paradigms from educational institutions. There is an urgent need to transform teaching and learning landscape in order to drive global economic growth. The use of distance eTeaching and eLearning (DTL) is on the rise among digital natives alongside our evolution toward smart societies. However, the DTL systems today lack the necessary sophistication due to several challenges including data analysis and management, learner-system interactivity, system cognition, resource planning, agility, and scalability. This paper proposes a personalised Ubiquitous eTeaching & eLearning (UTiLearn) framework that leverages Internet of Things, big data, supercomputing, and deep learning to provide enhanced development, management, and delivery of teaching and learning in smart society settings. A proof of concept UTiLearn system has been developed based on the framework. A detailed design, implementation, and evaluation of the UTiLearn system, including its five components, are provided using 11 widely used datasets.