A Study of User Interaction with Context Aware Electronic Updates from a Moodle Learning Environment

This paper reports on a user study to gauge user interaction with RSS based mobile electronic updates from a Moodle based virtual learning environment. The electronic updates can be received in three dimensions of context: time, location and activity. The study aims to compare and evaluate the effectiveness of these context dimensions by comparing the level of user engagement. The mobile updates relate to teaching material, course work feedback, and general announcements from academic staff across a number of academic departments. As well as user profiling when interacting with the updates, early investigations show that there exists peak times when users interact with these applications. Results also show that time based electronic updates are the most popular, engagement wise, when compared to location and activity.