An Approach for Supporting P2P Mobile Collaborative Communication to Suggest Learning Objects Based on Learning Profile

Abstract: The growth of small devices using as cell phones and smartphones has requested for the development of applications in different areas. The users may perform different tasks in these devices as read e-mails and magazines, make financial transactions, share physical resources, software and data, access multimedia content, and enjoy a variety of other applications. The diversity of mobile communication scenarios brings up the needs for applications to access not only Internet services but also local applications. This kind of application demands for a local communication, called collaborative communication, between the devices without the the usage of Internet infrastructure. This scenario represents a peer-to-peer (P2P) network, which allows the sharing and the exchanging of hardware, software and content. The content includes not only objects as musics, texts and videos, but also data about interests of the user. In the e-learning area this is not different and these applications potentially attract the students ’ attention. Considering the user preferences and interest, the application may suggest suitable content to the student, motivating him during the learning-teaching interaction. The goal of this work is to propose a mobile P2P collaborative communication approach to allow the sharing and the exchanging of learning objects comparing their metadata to the student learning profile. The learning profiles are split into dimensions based on Felder and Silverman model to attend different student preferences. A prototype based on the proposed approach was developed to validate our architecture. We performed the architecture evaluation with 20 students of an undergraduate course. An evaluation using different message protocols was conducted to verify the proposal and suggest the best communication technology. The communication technology has an impact on the time spent during the exchange of objects which may interfere in the student motivation