Promoting a Ubiquitous E-learning Framework

Mobile learning development is, most of the time, the privilege of practitioners with support from a technical team. The deep learning curve involved understanding the native mobile operating systems and developing mobile applications keeps most of the non-technical teachers and researchers away. We explore what innovation mobile technologies and Web 2.0 can bring that allows teachers to author their own mobile learning environment and how best we can leverage the emerging technologies to better prepare students for the digital world. We hope our study will help build teachers' confidence and skills through learning the affordance of mobile Web 2.0 technologies in the process of developing mobile learning environments for their courses. In this paper we will describe our design-based research in our efforts to 1) develop a generic mobile learning based platform for all (MEPA) that allows easy access to device's core functions as well as web-based learning contents and social tools; 2) encourage instructors without a programming background to implement these functions for teaching and learning; 3) document lessons learned to inform future research.