Enabling Innovations in Mobile-Learning: A Context-aware and Service-based Middleware

Development of mobile learning projects involves addressing many challenges, from pedagogies (e.g., what must students learn? and how?) to technical issues (e.g., use of context-awareness, use of communication or collaboration methods, mash-up of information). This paper introduces a framework intended to provide different educational tools and information to mobile learning programmers and designers in order to simplify and reduce the project development. The paper offers an overview of the state of the art of mobile learning applications, focusing on some of its problems: lack of interoperability and difficulty of using advanced technologies, such as location-based systems. It also addresses why most of the m-Learning applications do not make use of the existing services and knowledge of the Learning Management Systems, which are in fact the real pillars of the e-learning methodology. The framework design is guided by a new paradigm for development of e-learning tools and platforms: Learning as a Service (LaaS). The main contribution of this framework is to provide contextual information from different sources and sensors (e.g., geographical, motion); and integration of many existing services from e-learning platforms.