ALPS: MyKnowledgeMap, e-Commnet and T-Mobile

Spent Thursday at MyKnowledgeMap in York, doing some user acceptance testing for the ALPS project.

There's a lot of development to be done on the 'Compendle' software we're intending to use, in order to customise it for the ALPS project and make it more mobile friendly. The intention is that academic staff will be able to use 'Compendle' to create mobile learning/assessment materials, which they will then be able to publish to a group of students' mobile devices.

From the student's perspective, their phone will just notify them that they have a new assessment to take. Once the students has taken the assessment, they will then be able to synchronise the results back to a central place, perhaps the VLE, where tutors can then see the results. This same method is going to be used to deliver learning materials to students, such as video and audio material and to allow the students to send video and audio reflections back to a central location.

Partners involved in this project are

• T-Mobile: mobile device network services provider. They will supply the devices (880 MDA Varios & 20 MDA Vario II) and allow the students to connect to the Internet in order to send and receive data.
• MyKnowledgeMap: will provide the authoring tools to allow the academic staff to author and deploy mobile assessments/materials.
• e-Commnet: technical engineers who will be using Nokia Intellisync to act as a middleware mobile services platform so facilitate the data synchronisation and the remote device management. They will also work closely with MKM to ensure effective integration of their services with the authoring tool.

John Fairhall from Bradford is proposing to host the mobile services platform and to centrally support the project. This is an idea to which other partners have responded very positively.