Supporting Online Coordination of Learning Teams through Mobile Devices

One important field of application of mobile computing systems is that of supporting online learning teams working together to accomplish a common learning goal. The traditional web-based online learning systems used to support online teams are being extended to support mobile clients and thus many of the features of collaborative learning should also be available to mobile clients. In this work, we present a prototype of a web-based application supporting mobile clients with features of coordination through a common contacts information and calendar of tasks to support different pedagogical models based on collaborative learning. The main objective is to support online mobile clients with ongoing changes in the web-based system and thus to shorten the time-to know and time-to-response among mobile clients during the team work. Additionally, our system is meant for mutual support of members as well as to support decision taking regarding learning task accomplishment. The system is based on event definition related to workspace artefacts (contacts, tasks, etc.) that observe and inform about the changes in the system. We present the main requirement analysis, the building blocks of the architecture for efficient event management and the prototype implementation that facilitates the collaborative learning activity.