DEVELOPMENT AND USABILITY EVALUATION OF PLATFORM INDEPENDENT MOBILE LEARNING APPLICATION (M-LA)

In today’s digital age, wireless technology and widespread use of handheld devices are going under a continuous advancement to provide information anywhere and at anytime. Furthermore, these technologies are being utilized in the field of education and called mobile learning (M-Learning). Hence, M-learning means using of mobile devices and wireless computing as a learning instrument and communication technology respectively. The limitations of M-learning include either hardware or software of mobile devices, content creation, and no standards for mobile learning system (M-LS), wireless technology, and security. The main objectives of this research are to study and design model for M-learning approach; to develop platform independent M-learning application (M-LA) for Fundamentals of Programming course; to design M-LS platform classification, and to evaluate the effectiveness and usability of the application. In addition, under the development of this application the following aspects are considered: learning theories, M-learning development principles, and some of the aforementioned M-learning limitations. To achieve the above mentioned objectives, ADDIE (Analysis, Design, Development, Implementation, and Evaluation) life cycle is adapted which is one type of instructional design model (IDM). The application has been developed using Java 2 Micro Edition (J2ME), and Extensible Markup Language (XML). It contains several sections, but the main modules are Lecture Materials, and Quiz. Quasi Experiment Design and usability attributes was used to evaluate the effectiveness and usability of the application respectively using Universiti Teknologi PETRONAS foundation students. Finally, the data was analyzed using quantitative and qualitative method. The quantitative data was analyzed using coefficient variance and independent t-Test, and Cronbach alpha used to measure the internal reliability of the data. Overall results show that M-LA is efficient to improve learners’ performance, makes learning enjoyable, support continuous learning and learning time is reduced, and fulfilled the usability needs.