A Comprehensive View of Ubiquitous Learning Context Usage in Context-Aware Learning System

Research related to context-aware u-learning system has proliferated during last decades. Systems identified in literature are developed in ad-hoc manner to resolve a specific problem in a given context; however, u-learning systems developers need to have a clear and a general view of how their intended systems make use of the ubiquitous context. The paper details a general descriptive view of context usage within learning systems through three different view-points inspired from Dowson’s work [1]. Each view is capturing a particular aspect of context handling. Then a set of facets is associated to each given aspect in order to study, understand and appropriately describe it. This work would be useful for context-aware u-learning system developers in order to have a clear understanding of the context usage in such systems and to underline the requirements of the u-learning environment to respond. This research is also aimed to establish a structured baseline to help in comparing and evaluating context-aware u-learning systems according to the descriptive system views.