Mobile learning, offers learners the potential to acquire knowledge and skills in a ubiquitous and personalized manner, facilitating a learner-centered learning experience in “anytime and anywhere” settings. Among the numerous elements that are associated with a successful mobile learning strategy, emotional, affective and motivational factors are considered especially important and need to be further investigated.
The special session “Motivating Students with Mobiles” (MsM’2015), within the “IMCL 2015 - International Conference of Interactive Mobile Communication Technologies and Learning”, in line with the objectives of the last year MsM’2014 Special Session, aims to continue and promote the discussion about the motivational aspects of mobile learning. It will provide an opportunity for researchers and practitioners to present their latest work on evaluating the impact of mobile learning on student motivation and propose pedagogies, instructional design methodologies and implementations to support and enhance learning motivation through the appropriate uses of mobile technology.
The special session “Motivating Students with Mobiles” (MsM’2015) invites original papers (full/short/poster submissions) focusing on mobile learner motivation and engagement, self-regulation, perceptions, attitudes and acceptance, emotion and affective issues along with mobile learning performance. Special focus will be given on motivation issues in game-based mobile learning and wearables-based learning.
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With the amazing development of mobile technology along with the rapid growth of their usage all over the world, a big area of investigating is emerging and a need for constructing and adapting existing contents to these new platforms has arisen.
Furthermore, mobile learning needs more and more investigations and research to go along with these developments. We need to explore and improve the learning process and enable the development of mobile learning tools. Another field linked with the process of learning is online labs, we need to explore and develop multiplatform capable of running on PCs and mobile devices which integrate contents that helps students to study while moving.
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Pocket Labs (or Lab in a bag/pocket, Lab at home, etc.) are a very promising opportunity especially for part-time students for managing their study efforts and time. Here, Pocket Labs are meant to be hardware units (e.g. National Instruments’ myDAQ or myRIO, but also open microcontroller platforms such as Arduino or Raspberry Pi), in combination with software management and programming tools, which enable students to do a reasonable part of their time-consuming work at home and – even more important – at a self-defined time.
Besides Online Labs, Pocket Labs are predestinated to be a promising platform for enforcing technology-enhanced as well as mobile learning. Especially at Universities of Applied Sciences, where practical work is a big issue, they help keeping the practical part of the entire study program high enough. Moreover, students get motivated by doing practical work at their own pace, thus providing a higher level of student satisfaction.
According to National Instruments’ Academic group, a quite large number of Universities and institutes already have experience in using their products. myDAQ and myRIO are offered at special discounts for students as well as teaching staff, and the software for controlling the systems is either free (NI ELVIS 4.00) or is available at – even for students – affordable price (e.g. LabVIEW student edition).
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Serious games have seen an exponential growth as means to help students enhance competences, skills and overall learning experience. In particular, the advent of serious games in Higher Education is perceived as a novel approach for promoting student-centred approaches to teaching and learning through the interactive, immersive and motivational game dynamics included in such games. With the parallel growth of mobile devices such as smart phones and tablets, the use of mobile serious games extends conventional platforms as means to encourage learning in out-of-class settings. This special session aims to explore the use of serious games with special focus on mobile serious games in formal and informal educational settings. Papers that explore the use of mobile serious games for formal and informal learning both for teacher's training and student's learning would be of special research interest. Authors are invited to submit their research contributions or practical experience reports. All papers will be peer reviewed by at least two referees. The track provides its attendees with an opportunity to experience state-of-the-art research and development in a variety of topics directly and indirectly related to their own work, as well as, an opportunity to come up-to-date on important issues involved in the enhancement of health care and training/education with mobile technologies.
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The Special Session IMMERSIVE TECHNOLOGIES FOR EFFECTIVE LEARNING (ITEL) is part of the 9th International Conference on Interactive Mobile Communication Technologies and Learning, IMCL2015 held on 19-20 November 2015, in Thessaloniki, Greece.
The goal of ITEL Special Session is to get together educators and technical specialists in order to discuss opportunities given to pedagogy by modern immersive technologies. Mulsemedia (MULtiple SEnsorial MEDIA) can give “new breath” to existing pedagogical approaches and methods. Immersive technologies enable to facilitate human communication and improve educational delivery and learning; they have the potential to make more efficient use of the human perceptual and cognitive capabilities, because the human brain has evolved in a multisensory environment. Therefore, the use of mulsemedia can make the interaction and learning more natural. Existing multimedia systems used in education address mostly only two senses by using two communication channels (visual and audio) of the five human senses (sight, hearing, taste, smell, and touch), limiting the potential efficiency. Thus, the mission of ITEL Special Session is to demonstrate to educators the technical opportunities given by modern immersive technologies. For this purpose the session will be also focused on technical components (3D displays, 3D sound systems, olfactory displays, haptic devices, interaction devices, head mounted devices, etc.) of modern immersive technologies in order to encourage new ideas of their use for new effective forms of learning, including adaptive learning, experiential learning, individualized learning, adventure learning, case studies, multimedia learning, simulation games and other.
ITEL Special Session will cover all aspects of the use of immersive technologies, in particular multisensory learning environments, virtual environments, augmented cognition technologies, and serious games for better learning and teaching.
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Mobile learning is gaining more and more penetration not only in education, but also in traditionally more normatively legitimate fields, as is medicine, libraries and documentation centers, national and supranational venture archives…
Mobile devices increasingly penetrate inner core instruments and competencies in an ever growing frenzy for direct manipulation and immersion. Whether for social, medical, or operational policies and instruction, the principal for privacy overwhelms any learning charades that may indulge identity related crimes or control cooperation for bio politics.
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During the last years Social Networking Technologies and Applications have a tremendous growth of users with services such as Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Google+ and LinkedIn, enabling them to complement or replace their face–to–face meetings. The introduction of online social networking sites (SNS) and Mobile Social Software (MoSoSo) turned them into public, offering access to functionalities built around the interconnection of user profiles.
Within the same context the emergence of advanced mobile communication technologies, infrastructures and services, made Social Networking Services practically ubiquitous and accessible, through a variety of handheld devices offering users the mobility they really need.
Technically uniting computer and mobile networks opens opportunities for collaboration among Social Networking Sites (SNS) and Mobile Social Software (MoSoSo), supporting ubiquitous social networking activities. The mass adoption of MoSoSo applications is not only a generation of revenue for the mobile market, but more as an exit from interpersonal to network interactions and an opportunity for social change. Yet, for a social change, a lot must be done until SNS and MoSoSo transform from gadgets into tools. In order to avoid the insufficient use of these new services, it is essential to acknowledge the user dimensions of social network technologies and the significance of mobile contexts by conducting multidisciplinary research.
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Recent advances in mobile technologies have acted as catalysts for significant developments in the sector of health care, affecting strongly health practice and services, patient and healthcare management and, of course, health training and education. There is nowadays an international trend to involve mobile devices and ubiquitous access to Internet in medical curricula and in continuing life-long medical learning, in health monitoring, in active and healthy aging, lifestyle and well being management. In tandem to the above a plethora of technological (mobile based) interventions emerge for various health cases like those of chronic diseases, developmental, affective and socio-behavioural disorders bringing about radical changes to health care services and routine treatment and follow-up practice.
This special track aims to bring together researchers in the multi-disciplinary areas of Mobile Health and Health Training and Education as well as health care and clinical practice and to provide a forum for the presentation and discussion of their research activities. Academics, scientists, psychologists, clinicians, engineers, computer scientists and managers involved in all the above fields, as well as, managers of funded relevant research projects are encouraged to submit papers to this special track. We therefore welcome paper/poster submissions and delegates from the worldwide Health and Computing community, particularly those involved in funded research projects as well as those with training/teaching responsibilities. Authors are invited to submit their research contributions or practical experience reports. All papers will be peer reviewed by at least two referees. The track provides its attendees with an opportunity to experience state-of-the-art research and development in a variety of topics directly and indirectly related to their own work, as well as, an opportunity to come up-to-date on important issues involved in the enhancement of health care and training/education with mobile technologies.
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Effective teaching and learning is an area of teaching and learning that aspires to harnesses the technologies of affective computing and sentiment analysis in order to improve teaching and learning. The main rationale is to empower learners to express their sentiments on learning materials that are interacting with and through their sentiment to deduce if the material is effective. Through the answer to the classic question "what other people think?" we are able to assess the effectiviness as well as the sentiments that are generated. Having access to sentiments, following a decision, can be of extreme value as a feedback mechanism n various settings such as classrooms, social networks, Learning Management Systems.
Sentiment analysis has been widely used in areas such opinion mining in social networks, trying to identify/predict trends, resolve phemes either as true or lie and predict trends. Hower the use of such mechanisms in educational settings is rather novel but promising. For example, using Facebook, as a means to support the delivery of a module, has provided a plethora of comments/sentiments by the learners regerding the various tasks set by the lectuerer. Likewise, enabling, through a mobile application, learners to comment live on lecture slides, through an Android application, has also revealed an enormous amount of information and emotions about the learning process.
Effective teaching aims to capture all these sentiments and harness them to affect the learning and teaching process. This special session solicits novel work in the areas of sentiments anaysis, effective computing and learning analytics.
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Current learning theories emphasize that learning is not a reclusive process. Students learn nowadays, within a supportive learning environment, using networks, online material and tools according to their needs and their potentials.
In higher education, students’ autonomy level grows, as they learn how to collaborate and how to use all available online learning resources. However, not all students are ready to use the online learning material properly.
Additionally some Universities create either complementary online learning material, named “bridge courses” or webinars to provide online help to undergraduate and postgraduate students.
This special session is aiming to present applications, case studies and good practices of online material offered to students and lifelong learners using mobile devices.
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| 11 May 2015 | 1. Submission of structured abstracts for the main conference 2. Special Session proposals |
| 18 May 2015 | Notification of acceptance for Special Sessions proposals |
| 03 Jun 2015 | Notification of acceptance for abstracts for the main conference |
| 07 Sep 2015 | Submission of complete papers for Special Sessions and the Main Conference: Full Papers (5 pages), Short Papers (3 pages), Posters (2 pages) |
| 17 Sep 2015 | Submission of complete papers for the Doctoral Consortium |
| 21 Sep 2015 | Notification of acceptance |
| 09 Oct 2015 | Author registration deadline |
| 16 Oct 2015 | Camera-ready due |
| 19 Nov 2015 | Conference Opening |
