Abstract:

Mobile wearable technology gets increasingly common, especially in fields like fitness, health, and sports. Wearables support and motivate their users, keep track of their performance, and provide individual feedback.

Therefore, there are many new possibilities to support teachers in outdoor education due to the increasing availability of mobile and wearable technology. However, there is very little use of innovative technologies such as mobile and wearable devices in teaching in higher education, despite of its rising availability. In order to change that situation, we need to understand how to support teachers with technology appropriately, which implies understanding teachers’ needs and requirements.

We found that there is a high potential for mobile learning and teaching technology and to be useful and meaningful for sports education as well, in particular supporting task design and distribution. This is because, during the analysis of the context of use, we found task design and distribution to be an area that teachers expressed a huge need of support for, but which is rarely supported through technology. The main problems in this area are task feedback and communication of results, which are closely connected to the problem of task design and distribution. In the special case of outdoor education, teachers have to deal with a changing and flexible environment, which needs similarly flexible and highly adaptive technology solutions. In addition, there are face-to-face teaching situations as well as self-practice phases for the students, where the teacher is not in a close range to the students. The technological solution should contribute to a user experience of support, rather than taking away the teacher’s freedom of decision making. Therefore, we want to provide a system to support task handling in teaching situations. Sensors can provide additional feedback information about the students’ performance and therefore support teachers’ decisions.

In this paper we present user and usability testing of a task-support system under extreme circumstances (cold weather and real teaching situation) and its results and effect on technological and pedagogical implementation of the mobile teaching support system. One of the results showed that teachers are motivated to use this system because it supports their current teaching approach and gives them new opportunities for task design rather than taking away responsibility or closeness to the students. Our system not only provides a meaningful context for sensor usage in higher education; it also gives the teachers new design opportunities for their teaching tasks.

Keywords:

Mobile learning, usability, user testing, human-centred design, teaching support.