What is Consistent Mobile Access

Although mobile interactivity is becoming quite common, for content-rich applications, such as educational hypermedia systems, user-centered design is still a development challenge. Content has to be accessible for different users in various settings, thus, to be presented in a situation-dependent way to learners and coaches. For browser- or GUI-like access facilities the drivers of design are rarely learning tasks or transfer activities coupling content to communication, but rather standard access facilities of hypermedia systems, eventually driven by domain-independent user profiles. Taking into account learning tasks and transfer activities requires adaptation of navigation and content elements of hypermedia to various front ends. In this chapter conceptual mappings of stationary to mobile access facilities ensuring coherence and consistency are presented. Context-sensitive coupling communication facilities to didactically relevant content elements enables focused work. Navigation is either based on (filtered) domain structures or on user views generated through annotations. For mobile access, additional visual encodings are used to facilitate the navigation procedure given the limited space of non-stationary devices. In this way ubiquitous access facilitates self-directed learning.