R&D Projects - CoolLearning

These projects investigate the technology and/or educational issues involved in providing technology supported learning and teaching environments for Monash students and staff.

CoolCampus: Intelligent Mobile Agents for Pervasive Computing Environments: A Smart Lecture Theatre

This project involves developing a demonstration prototype for a Smart Lecture Theatre that uses intelligent mobile agents to enable flexible and ad-hoc querying of a lecture theatre from mobile devices. Typical scenarios that the prototype system will demonstrate are: ad-hoc queries from mobile devices, flexible queries in natural language such as: “Where can I get more information about the seminar speaker?”, “Will this theatre be available on Wednesdays from 2.00 to 4.00 pm?” Negotiation and swapping of bookings by intelligent mobile agents that represent users.

Investigators: Dr. Shonali Krishnaswamy W. Sutandiyo, T.T. Naing

CoolCampus: 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 sets out to design and implement a learning environment to suit the above scenario, and implemented using Internet technologies such as ASP.NET.

Investigators: Dr Des Casey, Janet Fraser, Christine Clemence, Chris Freeman