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LIVESMOBILE : extending the LIVES system to support SMS and MMS for mobile learning

University of British Columbia

The past decade has seen a proliferation of cellular devices actively being used in day to day lives by people in developing nations. Education however still remains a challenge as children are either deprived of basic education or are victims of favoritism due to deep-rooted inequalities linked to family wealth, gender, ethnicity, language and location. Less educated adults face problems due to lack of skills or qualifications required to get decent jobs. The proper use of educational material can tackle some of these problems and in general improve the general quality of life amongst this section of the population. Learning through Interactive Voice Education System (LIVES) is a system developed at the University of British Columbia (UBC) which aims at providing education to people in developing countries by using voice-based lessons delivered using a pre-existing mobile phone infrastructure. LIVES offers a two-way communication channel between the user and the system and thus has the ability to offer a customized learning experience based on the users’ preferences. In the LIVES system, this customization is offered by providing the user with a list of options through the use of voice dialogues within calls at which the user chooses a particular option. In this thesis, we propose a way to integrate Short Message Service (SMS) and Multimedia Message Service (MMS) into the LIVES system to enhance the learning experience of the end-user. By using SMS, we propose that the user can customize his learning experience in ways which are hard to achieve through voice. Moreover, the addition of MMS to the LIVES system provides an additional mechanism for content delivery to the student. We propose that the addition of MMS capability to the LIVES system can tackle some of the challenges faced during content delivery by using voice as a delivery mechanism.

Text

2011-01-21

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/30756

Computer Science

University of British Columbia

UBCV

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/