In recent years, many efforts have been undertaken in order to design and deploy learning activities that make use ofmodern mobile devices, like smartphones and tablet PC’s. Hence, new possibilities for supporting these so-called mobilelearning scenarios have risen. One of the major benefits of these kinds of learning scenarios is the possibility of a learnerto have access to learning content independent of time and place and therefore, enabling learners to learn in very differentsituations. In order to support learning across different settings, this paper discusses an approach that allows identifying abest fitting format of a Learning Object (LO) with respect to the current situation of the learner. This approach allows todelivering learning content in a format that may suit the current context of the learner and therefore, it enables seamlesslearning.

Substantial research in the field of mobile learning has explored aspects related to contextualized learning scenarios. Nevertheless, the current context of a mobile learner has been often limited to his/her current position, neglecting the possibilities offered by modern mobile devices of providing a much richer representation of the current learner´s context. In this paper, we show that a detailed contextualization of the learner may provide benefits in mobile learning scenarios. In order to validate this claim, we implemented a mobile learning scenario based on an approach that allows for a very rich and detailed contextualization of the mobile learner. The scenario that we implemented allowed exchange students to be guided at Linnaeus University in Växjö, Sweden in order to get familiar with the campus and prominent institutions on it. We carried out a study including two groups; one that performed learning activities with contextualization support and one other without it. The results of our evaluation showed significantly better results for the contextualized approach, especially with respect to the acceptance of the Perceived Ease of Use.

In this paper we present an approach for People- to-People recommendations based on a Rich Context Model (RCM). We consider personal user information as contextual information used for our recommendations. The evaluation of our recommendation approach was performed on a social network of students. The obtained results do show a significant increase in performance while, at the same time, a slight increase in quality in comparison to a manual matching process. The proposed approach is flexible enough to handle different data types of contextual information and easy adaptable to other recommendation domains. 

This chapter describes our research efforts related to the design of mobile learning (m-learning) applications in cloud-computing (CC) environments. Many cloud-based services can be used/integrated in m-learning scenarios, hence, there is a rich source of applications that could easily be applied to design and deploy those within the context of cloud-based services. Here, we present two cloud-based approaches—a flexible framework for an easy generation and deployment of mobile learning applications for teachers, and a flexible contextualization service to support personalized learning environment for mobile learners. The framework provides a flexible approach that supports teachers in designing mobile applications and automatically deploys those in order to allow teachers to create their own m-learning activities supported by mobile devices. The contextualization service is proposed to improve the content delivery of learning objects (LOs). This service allows adapting the learning content and the mobile user interface (UI) to the current context of the user. Together, this leads to a powerful and flexible framework for the provisioning of potentially ad hoc mobile learning scenarios. We provide a description of the design and implementation of two proposed cloud-based approaches together with scenario examples. Furthermore, we discuss the benefits of using flexible and contextualized cloud applications in mobile learning scenarios. Hereby, we contribute to this growing field of research by exploring new ways for designing and using flexible and contextualized cloud-based applications that support m-learning.

In this paper we present an approach for contextual big data analytics in social networks, particularly in Twitter. The combination of a Rich Context Model (RCM) with machine learning is used in order to improve the quality of the data mining techniques. We propose the algorithm and architecture of our approach for real-time contextual analysis of tweets. The proposed approach can be used to enrich and empower the predictive analytics or to provide relevant context-aware recommendations.

Cognitive pre-requisites should be taken into consideration when providing personalized and adaptive digital content in web-based learning platforms. In order to achieve this it should be possible to extract these cognitive characteristics based on students´ study behavior. Working memory capacity (WMC) is one of the cognitive characteristics that affect students’ performance and their academic achievements. However, traditional approaches to measuring WMC are cognitively demanding and time consuming. In order to simplify these measures, Chang et al. (2015) proposed an approach that can automatically identify students’ WMC based on their study behavior patterns. The intriguing question is then whether there are study behavior characteristics that correspond to the students’ WMC? This work explores to what extent it is possible to map individual WMC data onto individual patterns of learning by correlating working memory capacity with learners´ study behavior in an adaptive web-based learning system. Several machine learning models together with a rich context model have been applied to identify the most relevant study behavior characteristics and to predict students’ WMC. The evaluation was performed based on data collected from 122 students during a period of 2 years using a web-based learning platform. The initial results show that there is no linear correlation with learners´ study behavior and their WMC.

Estimating students´ knowledge and performance, modeling their learning behaviors, and discovering and analyzing their different characteristics are some of the main tasks in the field of research called educational data mining (EDM). According to Chounta (2017), the predicted probabilities that a student will answer a question correctly can provide some insights into the student´s knowledge. Based on this point of departure, the main objective of this paper is to apply different data mining techniques to predict the probabilities that students will answer questions correctly by using their interaction records with a web-based learning platform called Hypocampus. Five different machine learning algorithms and a rich context model were used on the Hypocampus dataset. The results of our evaluation indicate that the gradient-boosted tree and the XGboost algorithms are best in predicting the correctness of the student’s answer

The advent of commodity 3D sensor technology enabled, amongst other things, the efficient and effective assessment of human movements. Statistical and machine learning approaches map recorded movement instances to expert scores to train models for the automated assessment of new movements. However, there are many variations in selecting the approaches and setting the parameters for achieving high performance, i.e., high accuracy and low response time. The present paper researches the design space and the impact of approaches of statistical and machine learning on accuracy and response time in human movement assessment. Results show that a random forest regression approach outperforms linear regression, support vector regression and neuronal network approaches. Since the results do not rely on the movement specifics, they can help improving the performance of automated human movement assessment, in general.

Mobile devices, in the form of smartphones, are endowed with rich capabilities in terms of multimedia, sensors and connectivity. The wide adoption of these devices allows using them across different settings and situations. One area in which mobile devices become more and more prominent is within the field of mobile learning. Here, mobile devices provide rich possibilities for the contextualization of the learner, by using the set of sensors available in the device. On the one hand, the usage of mobile devices enables participation in learning activities independent of time and space. Nevertheless, developing mobile learning applications for the heterogeneity of mobile devices available in the market becomes a challenge. Not only this is a problem related to form factor aspects, but also the large number of different operating systems, platforms and app infrastructures (app stores) are aspects to be considered. In this paper we present our initial efforts with regard to the development of cross-platform mobile applications to support the contextualization of learning content. 

Recommender systems have become an important application domain related to the development of personalized mobile services. Thus, various recommender mechanisms have been developed for filtering and delivering relevant information to mobile users. This paper presents a rich context model to provide the relevant content of news to the current context of mobile users. The proposed rich context model allows not only providing relevant news with respect to the user’s current context but, at the same time, also determines a convenient representation format of news suitable for mobile devices.

This chapter describes our current research efforts related to the contextualization of learners in mobile learning activities. Substantial research in the field of mobile learning has explored aspects related to contextualized learning scenarios. However, new ways of interpretation and consideration of contextual information of mobile learners are necessary. This chapter provides an overview regarding the state of the art of innovative approaches for supporting contextualization in mobile learning. Additionally, we provide the description of the design and implementation of a flexible multi-dimensional vector space model to organize and process contextual data together with visualization tools for further analysis and interpretation. We also present a study with outcomes and insights on the usage of the contextualization support for mobile learners. To conlcude, we discuss the benefits of using contextualization models for learners in different use-cases. Moreover, a description is presented in order to illustrate how the proposed contextual model can easily be adapted and reused for different use-cases in mobile learning scenarios and potentially other mobile fields.