Friday, 11 September 2015 Dr James Kadirire1 Learning with mobile devices: a microportal design experience

Friday, 11 September 2015 Dr James Kadirire2 What is a microportal? Why do we need a microportal? Design criteria Design considerations Some current mobile devices A microportal snapshot Mobile devices used Performance evaluation criteria Discussion – lessons learned Summary Overview

Friday, 11 September 2015 Dr James Kadirire3 What is a microportal? A microportal is a small version of a portal designed to run on mobile devices A portal is a web site hosted with portal software that allows for: Aggregation of different back end systems, processes or websites brought together via a single portal page. It commonly provides personalisation of content And hosts the presentation layer of information systems e.g. portlets.

Friday, 11 September 2015 Dr James Kadirire4 Why do we need a microportal? Mobile devices have become truly ubiquitous with 1.52 billion users in September, 2004 A microportal can take advantage of this unprecedented opportunity to present learning material Learning content can be aggregated from different websites, back-end syastems, personalised, and a single sign-on used

Friday, 11 September 2015 Dr James Kadirire5 The design criteria? The software must be adaptable The software must be extensible The software must be ‘intelligent’ Must render well on disparate devices

Friday, 11 September 2015 Dr James Kadirire6 What are the design considerations? A resource allocation problem in which the utility value of the content must be maximised subject to some constraints Considerations for calculating the utility value are: Informational content Cost Design metrics Relevance

Friday, 11 September 2015 Dr James Kadirire7 Some current mobile devices

Friday, 11 September 2015 Dr James Kadirire8 A microportal snapshot

Friday, 11 September 2015 Dr James Kadirire9 Mobile devices used Nokia Communicator 9210 running EPOC32 Handspring TREO 270 running Palm OS 3.x SPV Orange Smart Phone running windows CE O2 XDA PDA running Micrsoft Pocket PC 2002 Palm Tungsten T, running Palm OS 5

Friday, 11 September 2015 Dr James Kadirire10 Performance evaluation criteria Image Rendering The the speed of loading a web page The ease of content navigation within the microportal The overall (albeit subjective) quality of the page.

Friday, 11 September 2015 Dr James Kadirire11 Discussion - Lessons Learned No empirical data was used to compare rendering times In terms of overall performance: –Ericsson P800 –O2 XDA –Nokia Communicator –the Palm Tungsten T and the –SPV Orange Smartphone –Handspring Treo 270 Phones with resolutions of 160x160 or less are no good for content adaptation and rendering

Friday, 11 September 2015 Dr James Kadirire12 Summary The unprecedented growth in mobile device usage has created an opportunity to use mobile devices for learning. Software adapted to different mobile devices needs to be developed, accessible via a microportal

Friday, 11 September 2015 Dr James Kadirire13 Summary Adaptable, extensible & intelligent sofware has been developed for a microportal The design considerations and constrainsts have been discussed. Mobile devices hold out a good prospect for learning via microportals. Dr James Kadirire Ultralab Anglia Polytechnic University