PortableLab: Implementation of a mobile remote laboratory for the Android platform

PortableLab: Implementation of a Mobile Remote Laboratory for the Android Platform

Marco André Guerra Instituto de Telecomunicações

Lisboa, Portugal [email protected]

Cláudia Mariline Francisco ESTSetúbal, IPS Setúbal, Portugal

[email protected]

Rui Neves Madeira DSI, ESTSetúbal, IPS

Setúbal, Portugal [email protected]

Abstract— Mobile learning has been receiving increased attention from diverse conferences and publications. The attention is well deserved because, if correctly implemented, it constitutes an efficient complementary tool to the traditional learning methods. Following this idea, we present PortableLab, a mobile learning system that integrates an application developed for mobile devices with Google Android operating system. PortableLab allows students to analyze several poor quality power supply occurrences. For this, the mobile remote laboratory has to connect to a database server where real-time measured data is stored by a local signal processing module. The mobile application was designed as a complementary mean to the classic laboratory lessons. The developed system is a step forward in the development of mobile learning courses, presenting new contents directed for a ‘hot’ platform. This paper describes the system, giving special focus on the system’s overall infrastructure and the chosen technical solutions for the mobile application implementation, as well as on some preliminary results.

Keywords- M-learning; power quality; android; remote laboratory; mobile interfaces.

I. INTRODUCTION Mobile learning (m-learning) is considered more innovative

and student-centered than typical e-learning or classic distance education methods, representing an effective pedagogical method as any other conventional learning method [1, 2]. This recent term has been receiving increased attention from conferences and publications, but there is still no common understanding for m-learning, without a consensus about the term itself [3]. Nonetheless, we consider that m-learning can be defined as “the exploitation of ubiquitous handheld technologies, together with wireless and mobile phone networks, to facilitate, support, enhance and extend the reach of teaching and learning” [4]. Moreover, “the lifelong learning is a requirement of this era and mobile technologies are helping to meet this challenge by offering the possibility of access to knowledge just-in-time” [5].

Mobile devices allow a higher portability and accessibility, but the real issue with the adoption of this methodology is still finding an efficient and suitable adaptation of the courses to means with clear restriction factors [6]. On the other hand, mobile devices are essential tools for our daily living, and with the evolution of their technologies, we see people adapting more easily to them. The mobile revolution is already here

because “wherever one looks, the evidence of mobile penetration and adoption is irrefutable”, and “no demographic is immune from this phenomenon” [7]. Despite the fact that they are seen as small computers, mobile devices are able to support different kinds of lessons, display animations, be used for polling and testing and have an important role as a gateway to larger learning resources.

The Department of Electrical Engineering of the Faculty of Science and Technology of the New University of Lisbon launched the PortableLab project in order to provide its students with greater study autonomy. It was decided to begin with the development of a remote laboratory with several interfaces for power quality assessment. Power quality is a generic term focusing on several issues, going from reliability to the quality of service provided by the energy supplier. It addresses limiting aspects such as harmonic distortion, flicker, sags, and swells, among others. It is important for the students to understand the differences between the large amounts of events that fit into poor power quality category. The main goal of PortableLab is to improve students’ interest and motivation and, additionally, to make resources available in any place, at almost any time. This mobile remote laboratory should be used as a complement to the usual classroom lessons.

Essentially, the developed system integrates a server with a data acquisition board and a central database to be accessed by the mobile applications, initially programmed for Google Android platform. The presented approach includes a collaborative learning module that it is essential for the growth of students. With the module, they can annotate contents to be seen by teachers and colleagues, giving additional information about their understandings or helping others in the learning process. PortableLab’s mobile laboratory tool support ranges from pure content delivery to content construction by the learners.

The paper is organized as follows. In Section II, we present related work regarding the learning methodology, the mobile operating system and projects. Section III focuses on the system’s supporting architecture and technological solutions used in the development process. In Section IV, the mobile application is described, including technical issues when developing an application for the very recent Android platform. Section V presents results obtained with the use of the system. Finally, in Section VI, conclusions are made and future work is presented.

978-1-61284-641-5/11/$26.00 ©2011 IEEE 2011 IEEE Global Engineering Education Conference (EDUCON) – "Learning Environments and Ecosystems in Engineering Education"

April 4 - 6, 2010, Amman, Jordan

Page 983

II. RELATED WORK This Section has the purpose of contextualizing the

PortableLab project, regarding the learning methodology, the target platform and related projects.

A. The Learning Methodology There are, nowadays, many different methods of learning

throughout the world. However, and since this project falls within the distance education (or learning) hat, we carried out a study on distance education versus classroom learning.

Education institutions are responsible for finding a balance that benefits all agents involved in the learning process, making available diverse learning options. It should be the students to, directly or indirectly, choose the learning method that best fits according to their standards, their way of life and living in society. The student must also compare the advantages and disadvantages of each learning method to make a decision. While in the classroom, the student is required to meet schedules and is restricted to the physical space (often limiting the presence of some students). At distance, the study material can be accessed anytime, anywhere, if available in a functional way. While a student in the classroom is often a passive participant, in distance education the focus is on making the student more interested and proactive. Many times, students, especially those with employee-student status, have no time to take the necessary trips to the university. On the other hand, in distance education such trips are not necessary, which makes it a method with lower costs.

Learning in the classroom depends on the interaction of time and place and learning time are equal to the whole class [8]. Distance learning consists of modules, making it an "application" easy to maintain, promoting the rapid updating of data and its permanent availability [9], and with students becoming critical thinkers. If with distance learning students can feel isolated, because they can be alone while studying, the classroom learning promotes the inclusion of individuals [9], as well as personal and social development [10]. Distance learning requires more time for preparation and more care with the design of lessons, providing asynchronous communication, in opposition to the synchronous communication of the classroom [9].

The present teaching also creates feelings of self-esteem, patterns of self-confidence and security [10] and greater motivation [11], while distance education requires that the individual has a large auto-motivation and self-discipline [9]. Classroom learning also allows the individual to acquire habits of coexistence, understanding and skills to meet the demands of day-to-day, being followed throughout their school career [10]. It also promotes self-control and self-discipline, losing inhibition, creativity [11], participation and commitment.

Distance learning has higher costs that initially exceed the costs of classroom teaching, such as the need to have and prepare a secure Web server. There may be difficulties of access and communication failure, download time is required to access the documentation and, finally, the need to have some computer skills, which is sometimes an obstacle [9].

Despite all the constraints, it is clear that the advantages of mounting a distance learning system, more particularly an m-learning methodology which is where PortableLAB fits in, will benefit nowadays students’ learning process.

M-learning is characterized by mobility and accessibility, since it focuses on the use of handheld mobile devices. These equipments have become very popular, especially among young people who use them not only for communication but also as a tool for other activities. In Portugal, the rate of people who own a mobile phone is more than 120%. There are almost one and a half billion mobile phones in operation around the world, and a large percentage of them are in the hands of students. In the coming 10 years, whether educators want it or not, more and more students will bring computing devices into the classrooms [2].

Through m-learning, learning can occur anywhere at any time, thus expanding the traditional learning environments. This type of learning enables users to study in classrooms and in workplaces, at home, in transit, among many other places. M-learning involves connectivity for downloading/uploading and/or work online through wireless networks, as well as, the increasingly ubiquitous, mobile devices such as mobile phones, smartphones, PDA's and netbooks. Therefore, m-learning can be seen as the exploitation of ubiquitous technologies, along with mobile networks in order to support, strengthen and extend the reach of learning.

B. “Going Android” For the development of the current project, it is important

to have in mind that sophisticated smart phones are increasing their sales in comparison to the basic cell phones [2].

It is common sense that telecommunications market is booming, as well as mobile operating systems. In 2008, the mobile devices with the Google Android operating system accounted for only 0.5% of smart phones’ market share of global sales, while Apple’s iPhone contained 8,2% of that market. The more usual system, Symbian, represented 52.4% of those sales [12]. In 2009, the mobile devices with the Google Android operating system accounted for 3.9% of the market share’s global sales. Apple’s iPhone also had an increase, reaching 14,4% of that market and Symbian decreased already to 46.9%. Until August 2010, the mobile devices with Google Android platform reached 17% of the smart phones’ global sales. Apple’s iPhone kept 14% of the sales while Symbian reached 41% of sales, still decreasing.

Given these results, it is clear an increasingly acquisition of Android-based mobile devices by people. On the other hand, the Google software is booming, and, presently, is one of the major references in the areas of information technology.

C. Related Projects It has to be noted that, nowadays, m-learning is a very

active research field, with the development of important and interesting projects. In [3], Frohberg et al. made a deep and critical analysis of mobile learning projects published before the end of 2007. Mobile learning is rapidly growing from a set of research projects into worldwide deployment of services for

978-1-61284-641-5/11/$26.00 ©2011 IEEE 2011 IEEE Global Engineering Education Conference (EDUCON) – "Learning Environments and Ecosystems in Engineering Education"

April 4 - 6, 2010, Amman, Jordan

Page 984

classrooms, field trips, workplace training and informal education, among other areas. Major projects have concentrated on the generic platforms development for m-learning and explored new supports for a kind of technology-mediated learning across locations and life transitions [13, 14]. Smaller projects are more directed to develop new pedagogical solutions for specific cases and to explore how learning on handheld mobile devices interweaves with personal interests and individual learning needs [15].

It is important to know projects like MOBIlearn [16] since it pretends to deliver a generic m-learning architecture to support creation, brokerage, delivery and tracking of learning and information contents, using ambient intelligence, location-dependence, personalization, multimedia, instant messaging (text, video) and distributed databases. Another proposal, MADEE [17], is an execution environment and application development tool that supports and makes easier the development of mobile and wireless information systems that run on handheld devices, allowing communication and information sharing among users in an organization.

Although we did not find m-learning applications delivering the pretended contents and functionalities to complement power quality assessment lessons, there is LabVIEW mobile module for handheld devices (LV mobile) [18] that can be used as an alternative to PortableLab. LV mobile is an enterprise application from National Instruments (NI) that includes features similar to those provided by our application. PortableLab is designed and tailored to the needs of its users, making it very accessible, while LV mobile has too many features to the customer’s needs, making it too complex and distracting. It is important to refer that PortableLab does not require any loyalty to any entity, but only an inscription on the right course. On the other side, an LV mobile user must imperatively be loyal for a year in the Standard Service program. Finally, PortableLab is a free tool, while LV mobile has an acquisition cost, which is very high and varies depending on the required modules to be implemented.

III. THE PORTABLELAB SYSTEM DEVELOPMENT The current Section presents the PortableLab system,

highlighting the main requirements, the supporting architecture and technologies used in the implementation.

A. Requirements We have to establish essential principles and requirements

when implementing a new methodology and designing a new system. The conception of PortableLab demanded the following main requirements:

a) Creation of user accounts for Teachers and Students and validation of account data;

b) Connection of the mobile device application to a remote server;

c) Server must extract data from a data acquisition board and must have a database where collected data must be stored;

d) Mobile device application must have access to the database server;

e) Synchronization between a mobile (local) database and the remote database;

f) Reproduction of information on the mobile device from the data of one of the databases;

g) Allow to choose the work mode (online or offline): the online mode should operate under a remote database and the offline mode should operate under the local database;

h) Visualization of information at the level of harnomic, power and voltage values (harmonic charts, voltage and power graphics);

i) Search of power readings, made on the server side - must be carried out by differents criteria, like date, time or both;

j) Insertion of annotations/comments/questions on each data reading and view specific comments to a particular data reading;

k) Deployment for the Android platform.

B. System’s Architecture The proposal can be seen as typical client/server

architecture (see Figure 1).

Figure 1. Overall System Architecture

The data acquisition is done by current and voltage sensors that send signals to a data acquisition board, which is connected to a server that runs signals processing and data management modules. These modules store the received data in a database located on the server side. This database is updated every time new values are read, independently of the requests of the mobile clients. Apart from the existence of the server database (remote to the mobile user), the user can also choose to use a (local) database, located inside the mobile device application.

To access the remote database, mobile devices need to use a PHP API through HTTP connections to obtain the necessary

978-1-61284-641-5/11/$26.00 ©2011 IEEE 2011 IEEE Global Engineering Education Conference (EDUCON) – "Learning Environments and Ecosystems in Engineering Education"

April 4 - 6, 2010, Amman, Jordan

Page 985

information for the reproduction of various types of graphs, including graphs of harmonic content, voltage, and current. This API is also used to synchronize information between the two databases, being the communication made in a bidirectional way.

C. Technologies To implement such a project like PortableLab, which

involves a series of new concepts, it is necessary to integrate various technologies so that everything combines to the desired end product. Figure 2 presents the logical architecture involving used technologies in each layer.

Figure 2. Logical Architecture

MySQL: To create the remote database, standard SQL language was used since it was decided to use the MySQL DBMS (Database Management System). It allows the creation and management of databases in a simple and free way, being very robust and having all the necessary professional features.

LabVIEW: This technology is used on the server side where there are applications developed in LabVIEW that collect and process the data coming from the data acquisition board, which is connected to the server, or network. Basically, these LabVIEW modules receive the necessary data for the representation of various types of graphs and store this information in the database, also located on the server layer.

PHP: To link the application on the mobile device to the remote database on the server, it was decided to develop an PHP API (a set of PHP scripts) to communicate with the remote database through HTTP connections.

JSON: It was also used the JSON programming language to encode the content of the tables from the remote database and extract it from the Java code using PHP scripts. These scripts run on the server side and the mobile application, through the HTTP connections, can receive the contents from the remote database.

Android SDK: It is a software development kit for Android since it contains all the standard software classes and libraries indispensable for android programming.

Java: It was chosen the Java programming language to develop the Android-based mobile application because it is open source and it is the most suitable in such applications as it is object-oriented.

Eclipse Galileo: It is a development environment that provides tight integration with the Google Android operating system, providing a special plug-in, called ADT, developed for programming on Android-operated devices.

AChartEngine: This is an open source graphical software library for android applications, which meets all the pre-requisites needed to develop this type of applications. This library was selected to enable the representation of various kinds of charts required for course contents visualization.

SQLite: For the creation of the local (mobile) database, it was chosen to use SQLite since this library is already included in the Android SDK and enables seamless integration with Android applications. This is a "light" library to be used in mobile devices with low storage capacity (compared with PC).

XML: It was also decided to make use of XML (eXtended Markup Language) to handle the user interface and to store some global variables that remain with the values defined in the last time the application was executed, even after stopping the application execution.

IV. PORTABLELAB’S ANDROID MOBILE APPLICATION This Section presents issues about programming for the

Android platform and examples of the developed mobile application interfaces.

A. Main Development Issues In this project, the developed software is the product

resulting from the interconnection and integration of several technologies, already focused in previous Section, each with specific functions and being essential to the global functioning of the application.

First of all, as stated before, the code was developed in Java, using the libraries provided by the Android SDK and the AChartEngine library, which provides the graphical functionalities needed to reproduce the various types of charts. One of the major classes provided by the Android library is the Activity class, since the majority of the developed classes in the project inherit all methods and attributes from this class. Each "page" of an Android application is called activity and each activity may initiate another one, either through the click of a button or through automated methods of the class itself. In addition, each activity can trigger confirmation or progress dialogs as needed by the program. Beyond that, each activity can contain various components that make the "page" interface, such as buttons, labels, text boxes, images, among others. This interface is based on XML files that are editable in the development environment.

978-1-61284-641-5/11/$26.00 ©2011 IEEE 2011 IEEE Global Engineering Education Conference (EDUCON) – "Learning Environments and Ecosystems in Engineering Education"

April 4 - 6, 2010, Amman, Jordan

Page 986

In relation to the AChartEngine graphics library, it provides a series of classes that allow graphical representation of various types of graphics such as bar charts (horizontal and vertical), linear graphs, time lines, among others. In the case of PortableLAB, there were only two kinds of implemented charts: vertical bar chart (using BarChart class), to represent graphs of harmonic content and linear chart (using LineChart class) for representation of voltage and currents. To insert serial values to represent in the graphs, either these are points in XX and YY or bars measured through the YY axis.

A database in MySQL was created since one of the requirements of the project was the storage of data in a remote server connected to the acquisition board. On the other hand, a mobile database, using the same relational model, was created with the SQLite library that is available within the Android SDK libraries. However, the master database is always the remote database, since it will store the real-time measured data. Its contents are copied to the mobile database every time the user chooses to synchronize both databases.

The solution to make the connection between the mobile device and the master database was the creation of a PHP API (a middleware), which allows the manipulation of the database. This API is located on the server side along with the database and each PHP script is executed from the Java code in the mobile application. This is made through HTTP connections and responses are returned with the desired content encoded in JSON language. This content is then decoded in the Java classes and used for various purposes, such as displaying the existing readings, or synchronizing the databases, as needed by the application or the user.

Still regarding the PHP API, for example, for the validation of access, when a user logs on (see Figure 3), the application performs the login.php script that checks the username and password in the login table of the database. If there is a record that corresponds to the passed parameters, the user is authenticated and it is made an update to the user’s device ID on the database - this data will be used to know the frequency at which a user (usually, a student) connects to the PortableLab.

Figure 3. Mobile application’s initial screen (running on a HTC device).

Otherwise it returns an error. To access the remote database, each PHP script uses specific functions to access MySQL, such as: mysql_connect(server, username, password); mysql_select_db(db_name); mysql_query(sql_statement); or json_encode(variable) that encodes the variable, which can be a vector containing the records of a particular table.

XML was used for the storage of some global variables of the application. XML files store these variables to maintain, even after closing the application, values registered in the latest application usage. To access these files, the Java code uses the SharedPreferences class, which is already included in the Android SDK, with the use of some specific functions:

• getSharedPreferences(filename,reading_mode): returns an instance of the SharedPreferences class representing the XML file being accessed.

• edit(): returns an instance of the SharedPreferences.Editor class that represents an editor to manipulate the contents of the XML file.

• putString(var_name, var_value): to insert or change content of a given variable.

• commit( ): allows saving changes to an XML file.

B. Mobile Laboratory Interfaces In this Subsection, some main functionalities and interfaces

of the Android-based application are presented.

The first screen to show up is the responsible for the login, where the user, a student or teacher, has to authenticate to the system (Figure 4, left image). After a successful login, the user finds the main screen where can choose the visualization of charts with the most recent reads related with power quality (Figure 4, right image at bottom). Another functionality included in this screen is the search of reads by date, time, or both.

Figure 4. Mobile application’s initial screens (in portuguese).

Figure 5, left image, shows an example of a search with the returned results appearing below the search. In this case, only a voltage chart was returned. The right image presents the visualization of the chart.

978-1-61284-641-5/11/$26.00 ©2011 IEEE 2011 IEEE Global Engineering Education Conference (EDUCON) – "Learning Environments and Ecosystems in Engineering Education"

April 4 - 6, 2010, Amman, Jordan

Page 987

The application presents other functionalities such as, for example, the application’s operation mode configurations, the user personal data and the user authentication definitions.

Figure 5. Mobile application’s screens: (left) search example and (right) visualization of a voltage chart (in portuguese).

Figure 6 presents how the PortableLab’s m-learning application appears in a real device in terms of presentation of different types of charts.

Figure 6. Mobile application’s screens on a HTC device: charts visualization (in portuguese).

Below the charts is possible to see the comments made by the users, illustrating the collaborative role of the tool (Figure 7, left image). A student can use this collaborative functionality to annotate some results, put questions to teachers, or help other students. A teacher can use it to respond to students or to accentuate an idea about the results. Depending on the user profile, other options are available, such as the possibility of

seeing a detailed list of users that have used the system. Only teachers have access to this screen (Figure 7, right image).

Figure 7. Mobile application’s screens on a HTC device: (left) annotations on a chart and (right) list of recent connected users (in portuguese).

V. PRELIMINARY RESULTS We carried out a questionnaire survey in order to determine

user’s satisfaction and opinions regarding the use of PortableLab. The questionnaire had eight questions:

1) How much do you like it? 2) How useful is it? 3) How functional is the mobile laboratory application? 4) How good is the help provided by the collaborative

functionality? 5) How much do you like to annotate contents? 6) How much do you want to maintain this learning

methodology? 7) How much pressure do you feel to use it? 8) How much time do you need to take full advantage of it?

Users had to answer with a number that ranged between 1 (a little) and 5 (a lot) for each question. In Table I, we present the mean value of the ratings on each question. One row of the Table has the results from 18 students involved in the evaluation process, while the second row refers to the answers given by 4 teachers responsible for lecturing the course.

TABLE I. USERS’ OPINIONS QUESTIONNAIRE

Users Questions

Q1 Q2 Q3 Q4 Q5 Q6 Q7 Q8

Students 4,0 3,5 4,1 4,5 3,3 4,0 2,0 2,0

Teachers 4,5 4,5 4,0 4,75 4,0 4,5 1,0 3,0

978-1-61284-641-5/11/$26.00 ©2011 IEEE 2011 IEEE Global Engineering Education Conference (EDUCON) – "Learning Environments and Ecosystems in Engineering Education"

April 4 - 6, 2010, Amman, Jordan

Page 988

We think that these results are explicit about the use of the PortableLab system. In the testing laboratories, teachers felt that students were positive about the introduction of this m-learning tool and the questionnaire results confirm that informal and empirical conclusion.

We are in the process of carrying out another questionnaire survey designed to gather information on students’ attitudes towards aspects of the collaborative learning they experienced as well as some more specific aspects of testing.

VI. CONCLUSIONS The use of m-learning tools, if correctly conceptualized and

built, constitutes an efficient complementary tool to the traditional teaching methods. Distance education, particularly e-learning and m-learning, has been receiving increased attention from diverse institutions, conferences and publications. Additionally, sophisticated smart phones are increasing their sales in comparison to the basic cell phones and engineering students are massively using them. Regarding the target platform, the increasingly sales numbers of Android-based mobile devices and the fact that Google software is booming show that the decision made is good. All these points, among others presented throughout the paper, mean that this project is interesting, innovative, beneficial, and has potential to be profitable.

As future work, it is intended to study how to overcome some disadvantages found in m-learning, such as its high costs, the possibility for mobile devices to be misplaced or stolen and the difficulty to use mobile devices in noisy environments. Another point for future work is to study the best solution to apply mobile courses like this one to classes where the majority of their students do not have the chosen platform-based devices. In addition to that, we are beginning the development of a version for Apple’s iPhone.

Nonetheless, we will continue with the strengthening of the application, focusing on new features, such as competitive quizzes, mobile mini-forums and self-assessment tests.

ACKNOWLEDGMENT We would like to thank Prof. João Martins for proposing

the initial project, which led to the development of the PortableLab system, and for clarifying all our doubts about poor quality power supply occurrences.

REFERENCES [1] C. Romero, S. Ventura, and P. Bra, Using Mobile and Web-based

Computerized Tests to Evaluate University Students, Computer

Applications in Engineering Education Journal, vol. 9999, Published online in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com), 2009, DOI 10.1002/cae.20242.

[2] R.N. Madeira, V.F. Pires, O.P. Dias, and J.F. Martins, Development of a Mobile Learning Framework for an Analog Electronics Course, Proc. Int. Conf. IEEE Education Engineering (EDUCON), Madrid, Spain, 2010, pp. 561 – 567.

[3] D. Frohberg, C. Göth, and G. Schwabe, Mobile Learning projects – a critical analysis of the state of the art. Journal of Computer Assisted Learning, vol. 25, no. 2009, pp. 307–331.

[4] Mobile Learning Network (MoLeNET), What is Mobile Learning?, http://www.molenet.org.uk/, 2009.

[5] http://www.slideshare.net/linade/mobile-learning-aprendizagem-mvel, pp. 7, 2010 (last access: Aug. 2010).

[6] G. Avellis, A. Scaramuzzi, and A. Finkelstein, Evaluating Non functional Requirements in Mobile learning Contents and multimedia educational software, Proc. of Int. Conf. MLEARN 2003 – learning with mobile devices, London, May 2003.

[7] E. D. Wagner, Enabling Mobile Learning, EDUCAUSE Review, 40(3), 2005, 40-53, Available at: http://www.educause.edu/apps/er/erm05/erm0532.asp.

[8] J. Machado, E-Learning em Portugal. Published by FCA – Editora de Informática Lda., Lisboa, Portugal, 2001.

[9] F. L. Reis, Do ensino presencial ao ensino à distância no contexto universitário. http://www.fai-mg.br/portal/download/revista_cientifica_2009/pub_dw_artigo_ensino.pdf, FAI, Brasil, 2009 (last access: Apr. 2010).

[10] Casanova, I., R. M. Gonçalves, L. Rocha, R. Marquilhas, J. C. Reis, H. d’Ávila, M. L. Marcelo, J. Vidigal, R. Queirós, C. Fernandes, F. Fernandes, F. Marques, I. Guerreiro, L. Anjos, R. Pimenta, R. Pacheco, SABATINA - Guia de formação escolar. Published by Marina Editores, Lda - Editores e Distribuidores de livros, Setúbal, Portugal, 1998.

[11] A.M. Duarte, E-learning e abordagens à aprendizagem no ensino superior. Sísifo/revista de ciências da educação, 7, 2008, pp. 39-50.

[12] http://techcrunch.com/2010/02/23/smartphone-iphone-sales-2009-gartner/, 2010 (last access: Nov. 2010).

[13] C. H. Muntean, and G. Muntean, Open Corpus Architecture for Personalised Ubiquitous E-learning. Personal Ubiquitous Computing journal, vol. 13, no. 3, 2009, pp. 197-205.

[14] M. Sharples, The Design of Personal Mobile Technologies for Lifelong Learning, Computers and Education, vol. 34, no. 3, 2000, pp. 177-193.

[15] A. Hamid, and S. Hafizah, WE-learning – Electronic and Mobile Learning Environment, The Public Institutions of Higher Learning R&D Exposition, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, 2003.

[16] MOBIlearn project website, MOBIlearn – the wings of learning, http://www.mobilearn.org/.

[17] G. Licea, L. Aguilar, J. R. Juárez, and L. G. Martínez, Teaching Mobile and Wireless Information Systems Development in Engineering Courses, Computer Applications in Engineering Education Journal, vol. 9999, Published online in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com), 2009, DOI 10.1002/cae.20251.

[18] National Instruments, NI LabVIEW Mobile Module for Handheld Devices, http://sine.ni.com/nips/cds/view/p/lang/en/nid/12222, 2010 (last access: Oct. 2010).

978-1-61284-641-5/11/$26.00 ©2011 IEEE 2011 IEEE Global Engineering Education Conference (EDUCON) – "Learning Environments and Ecosystems in Engineering Education"

April 4 - 6, 2010, Amman, Jordan

Page 989