Portable assessment: towards ubiquitous education

International Journal of Electrical Engineering Education, Jan 2005 by Trinder, J J, Magill, J V, Roy, S

Abstract

This paper reports on the progress of a project conducted at the University of Glasgow to investigate the benefits of Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs) as teaching, learning and formative assessment tools and the practicalities of deploying PDAs and assessing their use. Students from both electronics and electrical engineering degree courses and from summer schools were involved. Benefits included an increase in off-campus learning opportunities, in collaborative learning and in engagement with the course material.

Keywords assessment; CAA; engineering; mobile; PDA; portable

For several years staff in the Departments of Electronics and Electrical Engineering and the Robert Clark Centre for Technological Education at the University of Glasgow have been collaborating on projects to enhance access to, and provide effective delivery of, university course material. The work has previously focused on the application of computer-based learning and assessment methods to a range of undergraduate courses. The results have demonstrated that the use of regular formative assessments and appropriate student feedback can have a marked effect on overall course results.

We wanted to enhance access to assessment and learning materials by utilising portable devices to increase accessibility and flexibility of learning for students.

With many students needing to work part-time their available spare time for study has been reduced. Any learning resource that can be utilised during the rare gaps in contemporary students' busy schedules is a valuable asset to them.

The handheld computer or PDA is an ideal platform to facilitate such a task. The immediate readiness of PDAs (switch on and use, no boot up time) makes them ideal to grab a few moments of useful working time at times and in locations where even a laptop would not be useful. A PDA may bring additional benefits to a student. The organisational, diary and note-taking tools that are built into most PDAs may help the student to develop better organisational skills.

Portable devices are becoming increasingly important within education and it is recognised that 'mobile devices can become efficient and effective teaching and learning tools' .4 PDAs provide computing performance comparable to previous generation laptop PCs, with constrained display size, whilst benefiting from battery lifetimes measured in weeks, and prices some twenty times less than modern desktop systems.

Assessment is an important component of education as it provides feedback to the student: according to Brown et al., 'The role of assessment in the learning experience is crucial.1 Computer-aided assessment (CAA) can provide the opportunity for rapid feedback, while additional benefits of PDAs are 'on-demand' assessment with which students can test their knowledge in a regular and flexible manner, enabling them to direct their studies to areas where they have identified a gap in their knowledge.

Other studies have noted the importance of portable systems to provide opportunities for learning: Our team carried out a detailed study of how radiology is taught and practised. One clear finding was that trainees have very little spare time. They can't take the time to sit in libraries or computer labs, and so any computer-based learning must fit into the gaps in their busy schedule - in the hospital, at home, when travelling - which means a personal and portable system.'5

The importance of PDAs being at hand has been highlighted by users in other studies, a typical student comment being that a PDA is something that is 'unobtrusive and neat and that could always be ready at hand'.1

Project description

The one-year pilot project was funded by a Learning and Teaching Support Network (LTSN) mini-project grant. The mini-project was titled 'Portable Learning and Assessment - Towards Ubiquitous Education'. The budget of �3000 was used to purchase 25 basic PDAs plus spare parts, software and batteries.

The students involved in the project were from a level-three course in electronic system design which is part of the degree of electronics and electrical engineering. In addition, the PDAs were used during the university summer schools for school leavers.

As well as evaluating the PDA's potential as a CAA platform, the other benefits that the PDA may bring are also important. We also considered it essential to evaluate the research process and the performance of the measuring tools used in the project as follows:

* Evaluate whether a PDA can help student learning;

* Monitor when PDAs are used by students and for what purpose;

* Investigate interface and usability limitations within the educational context;

* Identify mechanisms to evaluate the use of PDAs in education;

* Identify practical problems of PDA use in education.

In other studies, reports of how and when PDAs are used have relied on observations of how the PDA appears to be used and on feedback, via questionnaires, asking participants what applications they used. The reliance on questionnaires makes the data potentially unreliable as it relies on the participants' memory. We choose to use an automatic logging mechanism. Automatic logging also allows the collection of other information such as when the PDA has been 'hotsynced' to a desktop machine, or when the student has used the 'beam' facility to exchange items with another PDA.