Providing Flexibility in Learning Activities Systems by Exploiting the Multiple Roles of Mobile Devices

The wide adoption of mobile and wireless technologies allow for users to have access to learning resources and generate digital content at any location and time. An immediate implication of this latest trend is the need to create and deploy learning activity systems that offer a high level of flexibility. This flexibility can allow for the creation of adaptive activities, something highly required in dynamic learning environments such as those in the field of M-learning. Mobile devices can provide flexibility to activity systems by adapting their behavior on a context basis. To give an example of flexibility in the mobile device behavior, we present the FLexible Activity Client (FLAC). FLAC is a mobile application that allows the mobile device to switch from client-role to service-provider-role behavior. We describe our proposed architecture and its implementation and present the results of our initial tests.