Crawler Based Context Aware Model for Distributed e-Courses through Ubiquitous Computing at Higher Education Institutes

In the recent years, the ever tighter weave of learning technologies (e.g., m-learning) has assumed a crucial role in the education process, particularly in the higher education. On one hand, the increasing class size, the diverting mobility of students and the evolving use of technology in learning (e.g., using social media and using open educational resources), challenged the universities to review the educational courses offered and assess their quality. One the other hand, the increasing availability of computing resources and mobile devices (e.g. laptops, PDAs, Smart phone, even the PCs) at these institutes necessitated the use of what called the pervasive or ubiquitous learning environment where the students can get access to the offered courses at the right place and at the right time. In this paper, a distributed e-courses pervasive architectural model is presented. Moreover, a mechanism to better utilize the used resources (i.e., computing resources and network bandwidth) is proposed. The proposed system is expected to increase the availability, the scalability and the quality of the offered e-courses at universities. Furthermore, the e-courses´ materials are automatically updated using an autonomous focused web crawler. The periodic update is to enrich the repository with the evolving educational materials from specific educational servers (e.g. websites of open educational resources).