The Design and Implementation of the Smartphone-based GroupNotes App for Ubiquitous and Collaborative Learning

The lecture accounts for about half of staff-student interaction yet many students fail to engage in them as they find the environment is not conducive to the social learning paradigm they are accustomed to. Smartphones are rapidly replacing mobile phones within the student population and the screen size, connectivity and text entry speed provide a readily accessible platform for students to conduct ubiquitous and collaborative learning activities. In this paper, we present the design and implementation of a Smartphone App - GroupNotes , which allows a small group of students to participate in a real-time collaborative note-taking session using their own Smartphones in the lecture. Key technical contributions include an innovative collaborative note-taking interface, synchronisation of multi-user editable notes, and compression of operation buffers to reduce the consumption of network resources and Smartphone battery.