ISBN 978-3-8439-2350-7

978-3-8439-2350-7, Reihe Informatik

Adam Giemza
Generic Approaches for Creating and Conducting Mobile Field Trip Scenarios

221 Seiten, Dissertation Universität Duisburg-Essen (2015), Hardcover, B5

Zusammenfassung / Abstract

This thesis presents mobile learning applications for creating and conducting field trip scenarios based on a generic approach. The main objective is to provide simple and flexible means for teachers, researchers as well as students to create educational scenarios for mobile supported field trips, to run such scenarios on mobile devices and finally to support post-trip activities based on the field trips. All developed applications within this thesis support the three field trip phases, i.e. the pre-trip phase, the trip phase and the post-trip phase. These phases are defined in a generic workflow model for field trip applications and are reflected in the software tools.

This thesis defines a workflow and data flow model for the general approach - including roles of users in each phase - and component models for applications for each phase of the workflow. These models define the main components that can be implemented in order to provide appropriate support to users. They can be seen as a tool box for mobile field trip applications. The focus is on an open and generic design of the components to allow for technical as well as pedagogical interoperability.

Four technical case studies have been developed based on the conceptual framework and further evaluated with respect to the defined research goals for supporting simple and rich full cycle field trip creation and execution. The technical case studies addressed different challenges concerning mobile learning application focusing on outdoor activities. This thesis introduces all four case studies and gives details on implementation aspects with respect to the generic component model. To demonstrate the simplicity and versatility of the developed software systems, several formative evaluation studies have been conducted targeting different guiding questions on different levels. The results of the evaluation confirm that the presented approach and the developed applications are suitable for the design and implementation of mobile learning field trip scenarios. Furthermore the systems are flexible and generic enough to be used in many domains. The thesis concludes with a summary and an outlook of ongoing and future work related to the results of this thesis.