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Top1. Introduction
The past decades have witnessed a fast evolvement of utilizing the latest Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) in promoting the flexibility, adaptability, and mobility of Interactive Learning Systems (ILS) (Sabry & AlShawi, 2008). The wireless and mobile technologies are employed due to their spatial and temporal flexibility and their potential in increasing interest and encouraging engagement (Hwang et al., 2011; Álvaro et al., 2013). In the early years, the Infrared based devices and mobile phones or PDAs using Short Message System (SMS) and Wireless Application Protocol (WAP) were introduced in learning activities (Huang et al., 2008). The interface, speed and functionality of these systems are constrained by the device capability and communication bandwidth. Recently, the continuous progress in smartphone, wireless infrastructure, and mobile computing service converges to facilitate the interaction in learning activities (Sabry & Barker, 2009). The state of art smartphones such as iPhone and Android devices are introduced in learning systems in some research projects (Lu et al., 2010; Pein et al., 2010). Some proprietary and open mobile development platforms such as iPhone SDK, Android SDK, and Qt SDK can create high performance device specific applications. And some Web development technologies such as Ajax, jQuery, and jQTouch can provide the user with mobile oriented Web applications. Moreover, context-aware technology (Martin & Carro, 2009; Clough, 2010; Al-Homouz et al.,2012) and information adaptation technology (Zhang, 2007; Kao et al., 2009; Mahdavi et al., 2010) are used for mobile information retrieval and service provisioning in learning systems.
The remarkable technical advance creates chances to promote the information retrieval in the learning systems. In spite of the remarkable progress, the performance of mobile devices still falls behind desktops and laptops in computation capability, communication capability, and battery life, etc. In addition, heterogeneity in device capability, mobile platform, and runtime environment results in difficulties in creating cross-platform mobile applications for diverse mobile devices (Grace, 2004; Schmohl & Baumgarten, 2008). Therefore, it is a challenging and prospective topic to deploy the advanced technologies to overcome limitations of mobile devices while maximizing their strengths.
It is the gap between the functional constraints of the interaction systems and the remarkable advance in mobile technologies that has motivated this study. This investigation aims to integrate the emerging novel techniques in mobile devices and mobile computing paradigm to enhance the information retrieval towards efficient interaction in mobile learning systems. A lightweight Web-based system mobile-WRS is designed and implemented as a case study focusing on the techniques and methods in terms of interoperability, efficient computation resource usage, open media learning content distribution, and efficient user interaction.
The rest of this paper is structured as follows: Section 2 introduces the background and related work, and section 3 states the aim and objectives of this investigation. Section 4 presents teacher-learner response model and characterises the features of the system, followed with the system design and implementation described in section 5. Then, section 6 gives the results, evaluation, and further discussion of the system. Finally, conclusion is drawn and future work is suggested in section 7.