A contribution to the quality evaluation of mobile learning environments

Abstract

In recent years, issues related to teaching and learning have been more and more discussed and investigated by the scientific community. Mobile learning (m-learning) environments, despite the benefits provided, are still considered as new and incipient products. Among the limitations observed in the construction and adoption of such environments, we highlight the lack of specific quality guidelines to allow an adequate evaluation of them. In short, the planning and execution of a systematic evaluation among m-learning environments can ease their selection and adoption by apprentices, tutors and educational organizations. Motivated by this scenario, in this paper we propose a process for the quality evaluation of mobile learning environments. To validate our ideas, we have applied the proposed process in the quality evaluation of a set of m-learning environments. The promising results achieved suggest the feasibility of adopting the process for quality evaluation purposes in the m-learning domain.