Towards a Notification System for Mobile Devices to Support Collaborative Learning

Presently, the combination of wireless technology and the advances of mobile devices are transforming the form in which people, companies and organisations communicate. In particular, virtual organizations in the education sector have shown the possibilities of remote training, which provides similar pedagogical benefits to face-to-face training. However, this group of technologies and initiatives have not been yet fully exploited to extract all their potential for remote education. In other words, no sufficient research has been conducted to conjugate these technologies so as to improve the teaching-learning process, informal and social communication in a virtual campus. This paper presents an attempt towards this direction by reporting the experience of developing and prototyping a notification system for mobile devices to support collaborative work in on-line learning. In particular, the main research objectives are: (i) definition of an event model to manage notifications of group work; (ii) adaptation and integration of the notification system based on the event model into mobile devices; (iii) development and prototyping of the system to support collaborative learning.