Teacher Decision Making in a Ubiquitous Learning Environment

Abstract

The ability for teachers to support students in ubiquitous learning environments has proven to be very challenging due to the limitations caused by physical distance and asynchronous communication methods. This been has been further complicated by the dynamic nature of the learning process and a dramatic rise in the number of digital resources combined with those found in the real world. This has generated a vast amount of information in terms of learning interactions, mobile anywhere, anytime access, peer associations, and demographic materials. This plethora of information has made it extremely difficult to isolate critical facts and refine meaningful patterns. While data mining, adaptive learning systems and other education support techniques have provided a number of tools they have yet to create a universal method of assisting students. These mechanisms have also focused on replicating the expertise provided by teachers rather than supporting them. These techniques also tend to be highly complex requiring specialized skills just to use them thereby limiting accessibility. Given the challenges of automating educational processes this paper proposes a mechanism for reconnecting teachers with their students. To accomplish this, an educational decision support system has been proposed in the form of an interactive dashboard to empower teachers with the ability to access student learning process information along with machine generated recommendations. The design has also focused on ways of expressing data mining outcomes using methods which have highly visual components in order to promote ease of access. This research has developed one potential teacher decision support system design for use in a ubiquitous learning environment. This has been augmented by also identifying the tools suitable for constructing such a dashboard. The prototype from this research has provided a proof of concept which can be used to guide future work and derive feedback from teachers and researchers alike.