Walkabout Learning

It is five years in the future. Monash's Peninsula campus has been selected as a pilot campus to introduce a less structured learning environment for some of its students. The campus has installed a radio network giving good coverage to all parts of the campus. Students use tablet computers as their principal learning aid. In those units where teacher/student and student/student interaction is of less importance to successful learning, the formal lecture and tutorial have been de-emphasised, and independent learning given more prominence.

For these units, a series of walk in sessions are held regularly. Students can drop in on any of these sessions, as needed, to get help from a staff member. There are no tutorial groups of students, students simply drop by on a need to get help basis.

Students use their tablet computers to access all learning materials, and also to undertake all the learning tasks associated with the learning materials. The tablet computer is also a communication vehicle from staff to students, students to staff and students to students.

The learning environment available on the tablet includes detailed expository material, skills building exercises, self testing instruments and annotation facilities for students to associate their own notes and other material with the unit's expository material.

The project set out to design and implement a learning environment to suit the above scenario, and implemented using Internet technologies such as ASP.NET, XML and other databases.

Five units have been added to the Walkabout environment, together with an administration system for managing students. In their full implementation, units have detailed expository materials including the use of streaming media for lecturettes, exercises and quizzes, a student note taking system, live audio help sessions.

Future directions include: more extensive field testing, and modifying the application with mobile ASP.Net controls to run on devices not supporting standard Windows or Windows CE.

More about the project: http://neptune.netcomp.monash.edu.au/walkaboutlearning/

Back to top