Introduction
The approach of e-flashcards is mainly related to work on active learning and
feedback. Regarding the topic of active learning, such approaches are widely accepted that
are based on constructivism and emphasize that active learning deals with own
production and discussion of (learning) content [
1
]. The use of e-flashcards within large
university courses was evaluated in [
2, 3
]. A study of use and acceptance of
eflashcards showed a high positive level of user acceptance according to the user
feedback and active learning [
3
]. But this user acceptance was not reflected in the actual
use of e-flashcards during the examination preparation phase. In this phase, learners
meet other learners occasionally forming small ad hoc learning communities. Thus,
the research question arises how to provide mobile support for small ad hoc learning
communities during exam preparation. To gain additional benefit of the offline
interaction in the learning process, a mobile learning application should support mobile
collaborative learning, especially creation and ad hoc exchange of user-generated
content. Therefore, this paper presents an approach to support mobile collaborative
learning with e-flashcards within small ad hoc learning communities meeting these
requirements.
Copyright © 2013 for the individual papers by the papers' authors.
2
2.1
E-Flashcards in University Settings
Pedagogical Scenario
The e-flashcard approach is based on small content snippets in the sense of
Microlearning (see [
4
]) and is suitable for learning of facts. Each e-flashcard consists of a
question and the related answer page, which can be accessed by a web-based client or
a mobile application, so that learning becomes possible anytime and anyplace. The
mobile application for ad-hoc collaborative learning picks up the scenario of
questioning each other using paper-based flashcards within the co-located ad hoc learning
community. For this collaborative task, a Bluetooth-Connection between the mobile
devices of the learners is established. One learner, the questioner, requests the answer
to the question on his e-flashcard from the other learners. The questioner sees the
answer side of the e-flashcard on the mobile device, whereas the question side of the
same e-flashcard is presented to the other learners of the learning community (see
figure 1). The answers of the other learners are compared with the answer on the
flashcard and discussed between the learners. The questioner can send the solution or
parts of it, for example a correct match in a fill-in-the-gap question, to the mobile
devices of the other learners. If during this communication process new questions
arise, a new e-flashcard will be created and sorted into the flashcard-deck.
Furthermore, an ad-hoc exchange of e-flashcards between the mobile devices of the learners
is possible by using the Bluetooth-Connection or utilizing NFC-tags.
2.2
System Architecture
Figure 2 shows the rough architecture of the e-flashcard system. The web server
application supports the use and the creation of e-flashcards and maintains the
eflashcard pool. To enable a user-friendly, offline mobile learning with the
eflashcards, a native Android application was developed [
5
]. The learner subscribes
lessons to determine the e-flashcards to be used on the mobile device. These
subscribed e-flashcards are replicated in in a SQLite database [
6
] on the mobile device.
To support additional ad-hoc collaborative learning with e-flashcards, this
serverclient architecture was enhanced with a P2P-network between the mobile clients.
Because an internet access of the mobile phones of the learners in ad-hoc
collaboration settings could not be taken for granted, the Bluetooth protocol was used to
establish the ad-hoc P2P-network. Zhang et al. [
7
] showed for example, that various
mobile devices could be connected by Bluetooth to provide an ad-hoc 1:n
communication channel between teacher and course members for feedback and learning
progress monitoring.
To ease this connection process for the learners, NFC-capable devices are
connected by touching the devices utilizing the NFC protocol (named Android “Beam” [
5
]) to
transmit the Bluetooth-Connection data (port, MAC-address). This is applicable for
the Android operating system 4.0 and above, whereas all other mobile devices still
have to undergo the Bluetooth pairing process. On the mobile device ad-hoc created
e-flashcards are stored in the SQLite database and can be stored on NFC tags
additionally. When the connection to the e-flashcard server is (re)established, these ad-hoc
created e-flashcards can be uploaded to the e-flashcard-pool.
Fig 2. Architecture overview
2.3
First Experiences and future work
A case-study was carried out in a classroom setting at a vocational school for
commerce in February 2013. The test group consisted of 16 students (14 male, 2 female),
who were preparing for the A-level examination in the subject business economics. At
first the test group created 44 e-flashcards and worked with the mobile cooperative
application in small peer groups of 2 or 3 learners. In the follow-up interview the
learners indicated their acceptance to work together by means of the mobile
application.
In order to increase motivation and fun of the users future work addresses the idea to
add gamification-elements to e-flashcards platform (e.g. a competitive card game) to
investigate whether this is a means to enhance the tool’s use by the learners and to
study cooperation within ad hoc learning communities.
3
Relevance for cooperative work and workplace learning
The approach of e-flashcards and its cooperative usage have the potential to support
(collaborative) learning of facts even in companies. Therefore, various mobile
eflashcard applications are available, see for example [
8, 9
]. Due to the NFC and
Bluetooth connection between the mobile devices the collaboration within these ad hoc
learning communities collaboration is possible even if WiFi-connection is protected
due to security reasons. From our point of view learning or internalization of facts is
necessary even though knowledge platforms are widely used to store knowledge
about facts. Internalized facts are especially necessary at workplaces handling
timecritical situations, for example flight control, medical care or fire service. In these
situations searching of facts in knowledge management situations is too
timeintensive. As an example, Sonne et al. [10] reported on a question-based mobile
learning application focusing privacy protection and data security developed for an airline.
E-flashcards could be used to enhance the internalization of facts and should be
therefore integrated in work processes. Such opportunities occur whenever people
come together to spend some time, have fun or meet for learning, for example during
on-call duty or travel time. With this contribution we would like to brainstorm
possible further tool’s use cases and start a discussion about these and more potentials of
the e-flashcards-approach for CSCW.
Acknowledgement
Thanks to the students Stefan Hoppe for the implementation of the described
software and Robert Zimmer for user support.