HYBRID MOBILE LEARNING ARCHITECTURE FOR HIGHER EDUCATION

Abstract

Mobile phones are primarily designed for enabling communication over wireless network infrastructure like cellular network through audio calling. In addition to this, now days, they are getting smarter and becoming the center of entertainments by running different applications for gaming, playing audio to video data formats with facilities comparable to PCs. As the devices are very much portable to the day to day activities of the public, their usage can further be exploited in the education industry. This can be realized by designing a specific architecture for developing apps like Mobile learning applications. Technically, the mobile learning concept is one aspect of mobile computing applied in the education domain. This approach was attempted to make the traditional classroom confined learning experiences very flexible and independent of time and location. According to literatures in the area, through distance learning and electronic learning, there has been a significant effort of extending learning delivery out of a classroom. Since e-learning was primarily intended for higher capacity computing nodes like desktops and laptops via wired network, it is mostly location dependent. To overcome this issue, the usability aspect of mobile devices in their wireless connectivity, popularity and mobile nature have been tried to be utilized through native and client-server architecture based mobile learning apps. In this study, hybrid architecture is proposed for higher education mobile learning scenario. This architecture is used to combine the strength of both the native and web apps in order to make the mobile learning app on time through push notification. Basically it includes mobile devices, mobile app, mobile devices optimized web app, cloud services and data based server as major component. Mobile apps developed in hybrid architecture are installable and can pull content from Internet independent of browsers. Generally, by designing the whole systems physical architecture, a prototype implementation was made in agile process model. Finally the prototype was evaluated and validated to perform well for the core functionalities stipulated as usage scenarios.