Page - 281 - in Intelligent Environments 2019 - Workshop Proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Intelligent Environments

In this paper, we provide a questionnaire, in which we tried to understand which learning contexts are important to the learners in the learning process, and we aim to understand their needs and preferences, to use this information in our new Context aware Mobile Learning Approach. The remainder of this paper is organised as follows. First, we present an overview of context-awareness in mobile learning. Second, we will explain our methodology and our work. Third, we describe in detail our questionnaire. After that, we will discuss the results of this questionnaire. Finally, our conclusion and future work is given. 2. Context awareness in mobile learning The most used definition of context in literature is defined by Dey [3]: ‘‘any information that can be used to characterise the situation of an entity’’, where an entity is can be a person, place, or physical or computational object. However that definition is too technology centric and we favour instead the following user-centric revised definitions as we want to emphasise the importance of the stakeholders in technology: Contexts: “the information which is directly relevant to characterise a situation of interest to the stakeholders of a system”. Context-awareness: “the ability of a system to use contextual information in order to tailor its services so that they are more useful to the stakeholders because they directly relate to their preferences and needs”. Context-awareness is an essential component of systems developed in areas like Intelligent Environments, Pervasive & Ubiquitous Computing and Ambient Intelligence [4]. Thus, context is an important explanatory concept in mobile learning. If we see learning as a mobile activity that can occur anywhere, supported by a wide variety of physical, technical and social resources, with or without a teacher, then understanding the ever-changing context of learning becomes a central concern. [5] Therefore, the awareness of learning context is important. A learning system that examines the learning context shall adapt learning process with respect to context change. Although it is not a new idea, context awareness is increasingly vital in mobile learning because educational contexts are becoming more dynamic and complex. However, context awareness is not easy to achieve. Hence we are trying to facilitate understanding of the role of context in Mobile Learning, to identify which contexts are more relevant to the learners. 3. Methodology The aim of our work is to propose a context-aware architecture for mobile learning. Many efforts have been made in the area of Context-aware Mobile learning systems in order to propose a user model, most of them are focusing on the technological context such as the network performances, mobile devices capabilities .., others are focusing on the learners’ style and preferences, and no one tried to understand the learners’ needs and no one tried to study the Learning context in the point of view of the learners. K.Chouchaneetal. /Context inMobileLearning: ThePointofViewof theLearners 281