Unlocking Smartphone Data for Educational Use in Teaching and Learning Environment

Authors: Fuming Shih and Weihua Li
Abstract. We address the challenges of applying smartphone data to improve the
experiences of teaching and learning in the university environment. Specifically, we cre-
ated a framework to collect, monitor and analyze student behavioral data and increase
social interactions for educational uses. The framework has three essential components.
The first component is App Inventor, a web-based platform with drag-and-drop tools
for novices to create mobile apps that collect personal and environmental data. The sec-
ond component is Reactive Data Store, an intuitive mechanism that connects multiple
data sources and automates the tasks for analyzing personal data. The third compo-
nent is a push notification mechanism that delivers personalized or group messages as
the results of the real-time analysis and triggers more actions accordingly. Together,
these components will transform people's campus experiences by unleashing the values
of smartphone data. Lastly, we introduced the framework to a group of teachers in
higher education with a focus group discussion to identify the plausible use cases in
terms of performance assessments, pedagogy design and collaborative learning.
In Book Title: Smart University Workshop in Eighth International and Interdisciplinary Conference on Modeling and Using Context, November 2013