A flexible unified architecture to support heterogeneous multi-device learning environments

Since the personal ownership of mobile devices has increased steadily over the last decade, many students own personal mobile devices that can reasonably be integrated into mobile learning scenarios. Besides all the benefits this option brings, there are also drawbacks, such as the heterogeneity of the set of mobile devices that need to be managed and integrated into existing and emerging learning scenarios. In our approach, one key element to address this challenge is an architecture that allows an easy and flexible integration of mobile and non-mobile devices into the same (mobile) learning scenario. We used a well-known group discussion method and an existing tool and extended it based on our approach. A description of this extension is presented in this paper. Finally, the paper reports on a pilot study in which the extended system was evaluated.