Vault: Exploring the effects of social and collaborative platforms in a mobile relational learning application

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Vault: Exploring the effects of social and

collaborative platforms in a mobile relational

learning application

Vault: Utforska effekterna av sociala och kollaborativa plattformar i en

mobil relational learning applikation

Niklas Johansson

Fredrik Åckerström

Main field of study:

_{Computer science}

Program:

_{Application development}

Level:

_{Bachelor Thesis}

Credits:

_{15 HP}

Supervisor:

_{José Font}

Examiner:

_{Nancy Russo}

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Sammanfattning

Mobila enheter är idag en stor del av våra liv och har förändrat hur vi gör många av våra vardagsaktiviteter, såsom att läsa en bok eller att se sitt favoritprogram. Detta har också lett till förändringar i våra utbildningar eller mer specifikt hur vi lär oss och lär ut till andra [1]. Den snabba tillväxten av teknologi har haft en stor påverkan på vår utbildning, vilket har lett till en anpassning av både strukturen av utbildningar och dess material [1, 2]. Teknologins utveckling har också möjliggjort den att kombineras med inlärningstekniker, som

kollaborativ inlärning. Kollaborativ inlärning är baserat på konceptet att det naturliga sättet att lära sig är genom att kommunicera med varandra [4]. Kollaborativ inlärning är

sammankopplat med de sociala aspekterna, där den stora uppgången av sociala plattformar har visat att de kan vara ett nytt och mer modernt utbildningsområde. Interaktionerna på dessa plattformarna har visat sig kunna skapa ett nytt digitalt område av kunskap [29].

I denna uppsats så fortsatte utvecklingen av en Android-applikation kallad Vault. Vault är byggd på filosofierna mobile learning, relational learning och parkour. Mobile learning tillåter människor att lära sig var de än befinner sig [3]. I relational learning så existerar inte den traditionella student-lärarrelationen, där alla istället lär sig av varandra genom att dela med sig av sina idéer och erfarenheter [6]. Parkour, vilket även är känt som konsten av rörelse, är en filosofi där människor delar med sig av upplevelser medans de lär sig och hittar nya vägar att visa sina färdigheter [28]. Parkour har även ett fokus på att upprepa vad andra har gjort. Funktionerna som implementerades i Vault var baserade på en applikationsanalys där sociala och kollaborativa plattformar blev analyserade. Det undersöktes sedan hur dessa funktionerna kunde integreras med filosofierna som Vault är byggd på.

Vault testades sedan av två idrottslärare under 10 dagar för att utvärdera applikationen med dess nya funktioner där de sedan intervjuades. Målet med intervjuerna var att få information om hur de nya funktionerna påverkade inlärningen samt användarupplevelsen jämfört med den gamla versionen som var producerad av Lindermans uppsats [5].

Keywords: Mobile learning, relational learning, collaborative learning, parkour, mobile development, collaborative and social platforms

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Abstract

Mobile devices is today a big part of our lives and it has changed how we do our everyday activities, such as reading a book or watching our favorite show. This has also caused changes in our education or more specifically how we learn and teach others [1]. The fast growth of technology has had a big effect on our education, which has led to the adaption of both the structure of education as well as the educational materials [1,2]. The development of technology has also allowed for it to combine with learning techniques, such as collaborative learning. Collaborative learning is based on the concept that the natural way to learn is by communicating with each other [4]. Collaborative learning is connected to the social aspects, where the big rise of social platforms have shown that they can be a new and more

present-day education area. The interactions on these platforms have proved to be able to help create a new digital area of knowledge [29].

In this thesis there was a continuation of development of the Android application Vault. Vault is built upon the philosophies of mobile learning, relational learning and parkour. Mobile learning allows for people to learn at any time wherever they are [3]. In relational learning the traditional student and teacher relationship doesn’t exist, where instead everyone learns from each other by sharing ideas and experiences [6]. Parkour, also known as the art of movement [27], is a philosophy where people share experiences as they learn and find different paths to display their skills [28]. Parkour also have a focus on repeating what other people have done. The features implemented in the further development of Vault was decided by an application analysis where social and collaborative platforms were

analysed. It was then examined how these features could be integrated with the philosophies that Vault was built upon.

Vault was later tested on two physical education teachers which both had ten days to test out the application with its new features after which a interview followed. The goal of the

interviews were to get information about how the new features affected the learning and user experience compared to the old version produced by Linderman’s thesis [5].

Keywords: Mobile learning, relational learning, collaborative learning, parkour, mobile development, collaborative and social platforms

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1 Introduction

1.1 Previous research and Background

In today's society mobile phones are a big part of our lives and are no longer only used for communication purposes. This shift in our society has led to many new possibilities when it comes to how we do many of our everyday tasks and hobbies. These are things like reading a book (E-book) and listening to your favorite music on the go. There is also beginning to be a major difference in how we learn and teach others [1]. In the last century the textbooks have dominated the school materials used in education but in the last decade we are seeing more innovative and new kinds of educational materials. This can be things like websites, mobile apps and podcasts [1]. The major strides made within technology in a short matter of time is also a big factor to why the education structure has adapted to the current technology used in society [2].

The rise of mobile learning has occurred along with the development of mobile technology. But how is mobile learning defined? The simple definition of mobile learning is according to Traxler “any educational provision where the sole or dominant technologies are handheld or palmtop devices” [3]. Traxler goes on to explain that such definitions are rather

technocentric and based around a set of hardware devices. This draws the attention to its technical limitations instead of promoting its pedagogic advantages and characteristics [3]. Instead of specifying a single sentence that defines mobile learning, Traxler defines some core characteristics that describe mobile learning in single words. These are things like spontaneous, portable, light-weight and context aware [3]. In this thesis the definition of mobile learning will be “Learning either theoretically or practically in different contexts with the use of smartphones or other portable devices such as tablets”.

In today’s traditional educational system there is a clear hierarchy in which the teacher is at the top and the students below, whereas this hierarchy doesn’t exist in relational

learning(RL). In RL there are no clear roles around who is the teacher and who is the student [6]. This opens up the opportunity for the students, teachers and mentors to alter the current learning/teaching world to what they desire and feel fits their needs [6]. Because of the lack of hierarchy within the RL model many possibilities open up when it comes to collaborative experiences. This can be the experience between student-student interaction as well as the student-teacher interaction, which gives the involved parties the opportunity to learn from each other by both sharing ideas and experiences [6].

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The appearance of mobile learning have also opened up the possibility to combine it with other learning techniques, such as collaborative learning (CL). CL itself is not new and starts being used in schools from early on with young students all the way through to university and has a focus on social aspects such as communication and collaboration. A clear

definition for CL has not yet been established, but some of the principles that experts in the field mention [4] are that it’s a way in which students can work together in groups of two or more to complete tasks or solve problems. However it’s also possible for the teacher and student to work together in order to get a deeper understanding. It’s based on the concept that the natural way to learn is by communicating with each other [4]. The progress made in mobile technologies makes an integration between CL and a mobile environment a

possibility.

CL has shown plenty of benefits when it comes to the learning experience. Social benefits [7] includes helping to expand a bigger and more comprehensive understanding between the ones teaching and the students. It also allows for learning communities to evolve, where it enables social support for the ones learning. Some of the psychological benefits [7] were an improvement on the students’ confidence, a decline in anxiety and an improvement of the students’ view of the teachers. CL has also proved to give an advantage when it comes to academic performances [7].This is done by including the students in an active way as they learn and has shown to advance students’ skills when it comes to critical thinking and school results have improved in general. With all the advantages CL brings makes it a desirable technique to make use of in pedagogical fields, including the mobile learning area.

CL is tightly connected to the social aspects in learning, where the big rise of social platforms have opened up the possibility to learn in new ways. Studies have shown that the interaction that this allows in the learning process can promote learning and act as a complement to the information gathered from traditional education [29]. Social platforms could help to

establish new and more present-day education areas which are less formal than the

traditional education. The interaction these platforms allow can also help create a new digital area of knowledge [29], where information is easily accessible digitally for everyone with an internet connection. The social interactions this allows for goes well together with learning philosophies such as CL which is based on that the best way to learn is by communicating and interacting with each other[4]. The less formal education areas these social platforms enable is also a good match for RL, where anyone can contribute in order to teach others. There is however some unclarity how effective tools from collaborative and social platforms

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could be implemented in combination with mobile learning, CL and RL. This thesis will therefore see how known tools in collaborative and social platforms can be combined and integrated with an Android application called Vault, which was a part of a thesis from 2018 carried out by Linderman [5]. Linderman’s thesis looked at how to combine mobile learning and RL in order to get use of the benefits from both techniques.

Furthermore the Android application was developed with the philosophy of parkour in mind. Parkour is a collaborative way of learning, and is also known as the art of movement [27]. In parkour, the area that the performers, known as traceurs, reside in become a place of

learning. It’s important in parkour to have a good perception of one's ambitions and abilities, while sharing the experience as they learn and find different paths to display their skills [28]. Just as in RL the traditional teacher and student relationship doesn’t exist in parkour, where instead everyone learns from each other and where a big focus is on repeating what others have done as you learn. In parkour the traceurs express themselves by finding their own paths, where they control their own expansion of knowledge. It’s also of high significance to record and share the process of learning in parkour, where being mindful of one’s own progress and goals in the learning is of high importance[28].

In order to discover what the state of the art tools in collaborative and social platforms are, to see what features on these platforms that can be integrated with Vault and its learning

philosophies, an application analysis will be performed on collaborative and social platforms to find out how they’ve been implemented.

Moreover, the Android application Vault will be further developed and re-evaluated to see the effect it had on the learning and user experience for the users. The thesis will also see how the theories of mobile learning, RL, parkour along with the features from collaborative and social platforms combine and affect the learning experience. Vault will then be tested at two different schools by teachers where the application will be tested for approximately ten days. The teachers will then be interviewed which gives us an overview of their experience and observations while using the Android application with its new features.

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1.2 Research questions

Research Question 1: Which tools found in current collaborative and social platforms could be added to Vault to create a better user experience and enhance learning opportunities? Research Question 2: How did the new features added to the Vault application affect the learning and user experience compared to the old version?

1.3 Purpose of research

The main concepts behind this thesis comes from Linderman’s research from 2018 where a study was carried out within the field of RL [5]. Linderman’s research was based on the philosophy and educational model found within parkour where there isn’t a set teacher or a ruleset about who is allowed to provide the information to others [5].

The goal of this research is to get deeper knowledge on how state of the art tools in collaborative and social platforms are implemented by exploring what features these platforms make use of. Furthermore the thesis is set to gain important feedback regarding the newly implemented features added to the Vault application from the end users’ point of view and compare these results with Linderman’s.

1.4 Previous work

The Android application Vault developed during Linderman’s research [5] is a social mobile platform which makes use of RL and the philosophy of parkour where anyone can contribute with content and share their knowledge in order to teach others. It’s open for users to view all the content and also interact with it by adding comments to the posts. Figures 1 to 3 below are taken from Linderman’s thesis [5].

Other than the mandatory title and description as you create posts, you also have the possibility to add different post items to your post in form of pictures, videos, links or just plain text. With these post items it’s also possible to add GPS locations to pinpoint the location of the learning items, such as a building of interest.

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 Figure 1a View of creating a Post Figure 1b View of creating a Post item

Figure 1a shows a post about “Real life uses of arithmetics” being added along with a description. At the bottom of figure 1a it also shows that a link post item has been added to the post, which is shown in figure 1b. Each post item consist of a header in order to give information about what it contains. To give further in depth information about the post item it’s also possible to add additional text under “Add your Text”, which in this case is about a link.

When it comes to consuming content there’s a feed on the main screen, which is shown in figure 2a, that appears after logging in and where posts from all the users shows up. It’s also possible to save posts by adding them to your favorites which will make them appear under the favorites tab as well, where you can easily find posts of interest again at a later point in time. As you enter a post, seen in figure 2b, all the post items appears which can be scrolled through.

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Figure 2a Main feed of Vault Figure 2b View of Post

In order to enable communication on the platform it’s possible to add comments to every post, which is demonstrated in figure 3.

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2 Method

This section will go through the method used to gather the essential information to answer both of the research questions.

2.1 Method description

The main goal of this thesis is to evaluate how the further development of Vault will affect the learning and user experience. New features will be added based on the application analysis findings which will be done on state of the art collaborative and social platforms. The two research questions will be answered by the design and creation method.

2.1.1 Design and creation

Within the design and creation process there are five steps, which are awareness, suggestion, development, evaluation and conclusion. Oates describes the different steps as follows [8]: Awareness

❏ Is the recognition and articulation of a problem, which can come from studying the literature where authors identify areas for further research, or reading about new findings in another discipline, or from practitioners or clients expressing the need for something, or from field research or from new development in technology

Suggestion

❏ Involves a creative leap from curiosity about the problem to offering a very tentative idea of how the problem might be addressed.

Development

❏ Is where the tentative design idea is implemented. How this is done depends on the kind of IT artefact being proposed. For example, an algorithm might need the construction of a formal proof. A new user interface embodying novel theories about human cognition will require software development.

Evaluation

❏ Examines the developed artefact and looks for an assessment of it’s worth and deviations from expectations.

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Conclusion

❏ Is where the results from the design process are consolidated and written up, and the knowledge gained is identified, together with any loose ends - unexpected or

anomalous results that cannot yet be explained and could be the subject of further research.

2.1.1.1 Research question 1

Which tools found in current collaborative and social platforms could be added to Vault to create a better user experience and enhance learning opportunities?

The main goal of the thesis is to further develop the artefact created by Linderman [5] named Vault, which will be done using the design and creation method [8]. The future development of Vault will be decided by performing an application analysis which will be the awareness step in the design and creation process. This will be done on other collaborative and social platforms and seeing how state of the art tools can be implemented in Vault to improve the user as well as the learning experience. The collaborative and social platforms will be tested from a user’s perspective in order to find out which features are present within the different platforms. There will then be a comparison between the different platforms to look for common features among them.

2.1.1.2 Research question 2

How did the new features added to the Vault application affect the learning and user experience compared to the old version?

This thesis also aims at comparing how the newly implemented features affected the learning and user experience compared to the results achieved by Linderman [5]. The application will be tested on two different schools where physical exercise (PE) teachers will be given the opportunity to test the application with its new features. The test period will be

approximately ten days with semi-structured interviews to follow after the test phase. The interview aims at evaluating how the newly added features to Vault improved the usability and learning experience as a part of the evaluation step in the design and creation process. All the testers will be given the same questions but the interview might take different paths depending on the answers they provide.

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2.2 Method discussion

This section will discuss the method of choice, design and creation. It will also discuss the application analysis and interviews which are a part of the design and creation process.

2.2.1 Design and Creation

As this thesis aspire to find out how state of the art tools found in other collaborative and social platforms can be implemented in a mobile application which makes use of mobile learning, RL and parkour, there will be a continuation in the development of Vault. The features found on the other platforms will be adapted to suit Vault and its philosophies it’s built upon. The newly added features will then be evaluated by performing user tests to see what impact they have on the learning and user experience.

The current version of the application has some issues with the communication between the API and the database which leads to the API not being able to get access to the database. An API is an interface which the Android application in this case uses to communicate with the database instead of talking with it directly [19]. This might force a switch of infrastructure if the AWS [10] back-end structure can’t be fixed. Other alternatives worth considering is Microsoft Azure or Google Platform. The development plan for design and creation in this thesis is split into 3 different parts, these are as follows:

1. Reestablish the communication between the API and the database. 2. Get all the old features to work with the new infrastructure.

3. Implement new features based on the result of the application analysis to further develop and test Vault.

2.2.1.1 Application Analysis

The collaborative and social platforms that will be analysed will support the evaluation of how social and collaborative state of the art tools are implemented on a variety of platforms, which functions as the awareness step in the design and creation process. The intent of identifying how they implement social and collaborative tools is to explore how these

features can be implemented on a mobile platform and combine them with mobile learning, RL as well as parkour. This will be done by summarizing a platform’s core functionality in a couple of features by using the platforms from a user’s perspective.

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2.2.1.2 Interviews

This thesis will let PE teachers test the application Vault as a part of the evaluation step in the design and creation process in order to see what kind of impact the application with its new addition has on the learning and user experience. The reason it’s tested on teachers again, as in Linderman’s [5] thesis, is to have test subjects that are comparable so there can be an evaluation on what kind of influence the new features had. The reason PE teachers were chosen this time was that they have lectures that could suit Vault and its philosophies. Their lectures are occasionally outdoors which suits the mobile learning aspect where they should be able to learn wherever they are and also the workouts they do which can easily be replicated which is a big focus in parkour. By having two teachers from two different schools test the application increases the probability that the teachers are creating their own view of the application without anyone else’s opinion influencing them. This will lead to more truthful results and making it easier to compare the results with Linderman’s and drawing conclusions as to what future work needs to be done and how the user and learning

experience was improved.

The interviews used on the PE teachers at the two schools will be semi-structured. By using semi-structured interviews the order of the questions can be changed depending on how the conversation goes. It’s also possible to ask supplementary questions if new issues are brought up during the interview which isn’t covered in the planned questions [8]. This will enable the interviewer to steer the conversation to get feedback about specific functionality that are newly implemented, but at the same time let the interviewee have some freedom to express themselves about their experience with Vault.

2.2.3 Alternate methods

In this thesis the design and creation method was chosen but an alternate method could have been experiments. In this case the testers would have first tested the old version and later the new version with an interview after each test to get their opinions of both versions. This was considered to be a worse choice compared to design and creation since the testers might prefer the version of the application they test last since they by then already have some base knowledge of the application and more easily understand it. Another issue with experiments is that the whole situation becomes more artificial compared to design and creation where they are able to test the application on their own for a longer time period in a less controlled environment.

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3 Implementation and evaluation set-up

As explained in the method chapter there was several steps that had to be completed to answer the two research questions presented in this thesis. These steps could be broken down into six different parts:

❏ Reestablish the communication between the API and database, which might lead to a change of infrastructure.

❏ Get all the functions in the old application to work with the updated infrastructure.

❏ Perform an application analysis on state of the art collaborative and social platforms.

❏ Implement new features based on the results of the application analysis ❏ Test the application with its new features on teachers from two different

schools where they will later be interviewed to gather information about their time with the application

❏ Compare the results gathered from the interviews with Linderman’s.

3.1 Troubleshooting the API and database

Before this thesis could focus on answering the research questions, the communication problem on the back-end [14] which is running on AWS [10] had to be resolved. The artefacts produced by Linderman’s thesis consisted of an Android application, a database running on Relational Database Service (RDS) and an API written in Golang [5]. The database was however lacking the necessary tables to store the data produced by the Android application.

3.1.1 How the backend is built

The database is a MySQL database which is located on RDS that stores all the data about users, posts and everything in between. RDS hosts the database in the cloud which gives it a public IP address which later can be called from the API [16]. For the Android application to be able to get and post information from or to the database it calls an API that is running on Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) that is written in Golang. Golang, also known as Go is a programming language that was created in 2009 by Google, which is a language loosely based on the syntax of C [18].

EC2 is a service where you can operate a windows or linux machine remotely that is running on Amazon's own servers [17]. The API which is running on EC2 can handle get, post, put

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and delete calls depending on what action the user wants to do. Images that are attached to posts and user profiles are stored in AWS Simple Storage Service (S3) where a link to the location it’s available online is stored within the database running on RDS. S3 is a service offered by Amazon where you are able to upload and store objects such as images or data [30].

3.1.2 Troubleshooting

The issues with the back-end of Vault were the communication between the API and database. This forced us to trial and error our way forward and try different weak points within the current implementation to see where the communication was failing. The test that was performed to figure out a solution to the problem was as follows:

❏ Trying if it is possible to connect and query the database without the API ❏ If step one worked, a restructure of the security groups that are protecting the

database will be done and a test with both the API and database together will be tried with the new security groups.

❏ If none of the above steps worked the last resort will be to redo the whole database instance as well as the EC2 machine that the API is running on. ❏ If step three also fails the database and API instance will be moved to either

Microsoft Azure or Google Platform depending on both the price and availability.

3.2 Collaborative features

To decide what features were to be implemented into Vault, an application analysis on state of the art collaborative and social platforms was carried out. The analysis checked what features that collaborative and social platforms utilized and in what way that could help further the development of Vault with the goal of increasing the learning and user experience.

The analysis examined six different collaborative and social platforms, these were Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Reddit, Instagram and Pinterest. These were chosen because of their high number of active users each month, all six of the selected sites are within the top 18

according to the list made by Alfred Lua [26]. The analysis was done by defining some core features that characterize the functionality of that specific platform. Since this thesis is a continuation of artefacts produced by Linderman some features were excluded from the

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analysis. The features that were excluded was commenting on and creating posts since both of these already existed to some extent within the previous version of Vault.

The new features added to Vault was based on the results of the data gathered in the analysis where the core features found by the analysis was customized in order to incorporate it with Vault’s current philosophies.

3.3 Implementation of new features

In order to answer both research questions, the features found from the analysed

collaborative and social platforms was implemented into Vault. These collaborative features was combined with the concepts Vault is built upon, mobile learning, RL and the mindset within parkour. Since collaborative learning has a big focus on the social elements in learning, where the theory is based on communication and interaction between each other [4], the new features added to Vault has a heavy focus on the social aspects.

3.3.1 Front-End

The application itself is written in Java or more specifically for Android [9]. The application works on 85% of Android based devices, which covers 74.15% of the market as of March 2019 [11]. There was a continuation in the development of the front-end [12] in Vault, that is on the mobile side which the user interacts directly with. On the front-end the changes required amendments of the graphical interface or removing/editing already implemented features to better work with the new additions to the application. This was all done while maintaining the same esthetics and following the guidance by Google and their Material Design [13].

3.3.2 Back-End

The back-end part of Vault delivered was incomplete where there wasn’t a complete database structure and it severely lacked database tables. However, there was API calls left for the tables missing in the MySQL database which enabled us to recreate these tables. In order to accomplish this reverse engineering was used. With the technique reverse engineering you diagnose and understand software by analysing the parts of it. By doing this, it makes it possible to recreate a program and build something comparable [15]. We therefore looked at how the API communicated with the database and its tables and by doing so we recreated the missing database tables. New API calls were also created to add, get, remove or edit

information for the newly added features. New endpoints had to created in the API to handle these calls. An API endpoint is the touchpoint of which the API communicates with another

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system [25].These changes to the API led to new additions within the database structure to work with the new features.

3.4 Testing & interviews

The application was handed over to the two different PE teachers for ten days. Prior to their time to test the application a meeting was held in which the application was explained to them and how they can use it. They were able to ask questions and try out the application themselves during a short time at the meeting. This meeting was held to minimize the learning curve of using the application which gave the testers more time exploring the application’s possibilities instead of figuring out how the application worked. The test phase was held in a closed environment as Vault hadn’t implemented appropriate security

measures when it comes to data protection and privacy regarding GDPR and its regulations [31].

At the start of the test both testers was given a phone with the application pre-installed and ready for use. This was done to make us able to test the application on the phones before handover as well as giving the testers the ability to try the application even if they do not own an Android phone themselves. The mobile phones given to the testers during the ten days was not used as their personal phone which might have made the testers opt to only bring their primary phone when they weren’t at home. The testers could use the application during both work hours and during their private time at home with no time limitation. The testers also had the ability to use the application from a teacher's perspective as well as a normal person without any education within teaching to see if there is any benefits of using Vault outside of work hours or for other purposes.

After the ten days an interview was held with each of them. This interview was

semi-structured which gave the testers the ability to add or further develop the question initially asked, where the interviews aimed at evaluating the testers opinions of the application. These answers was later compared to the ones that Linderman’s research showed [5]. This gave a result to whether the new features and changes made to the

application helped to increase both the user and learning experience. It was however difficult to generalize the results collected since the test group only consisted of two people.

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3.4.1 Interview questions and motivation

The interview questions that was asked were very straight forward with the possibility for the testers to further elaborate on why they felt like they did. Most of the questions were taken from Linderman with some minor alterations to make it easier to compare the results gathered with the ones presented by Linderman. There was also new questions to evaluate how the new features improved the application.

To start off the interview the interviewee was asked about their current position and background to get an idea of who we’re interviewing. The testers was then asked if they usually use any social or collaborative platforms, and if so, which ones? This was asked to give an idea of if the interviewee was used to this kind of platforms and shows if they had something to compare Vault with. This is to get a better understanding if prior experiences with social and collaborative platforms changed the way they felt while using the application. This was followed by a simple question regarding how pleased they were while using the application, where the answers was on a scale of 1 to 5 with the possibility to elaborate on their chosen rating.

The following question was more directed towards the social part of the application. This was asked to get a better understanding if the testers felt like they were part of a community with the new features such as following people and being able to write your own description to introduce yourself to anyone visiting your profile. They were then also asked to elaborate on why or why not this made them feel like a part of a community. Furthermore they were asked if any of the new features such as seeing posts on the map, following people, being able to search for categories or users helped the learning and usability experience. This gave a clear image of if the new features improved both the learning and user experience compared to the previous version with less features.

The next questions were more focused on the application as a whole and was the same as Linderman asked in his thesis [5]. The questions focused on if the testers felt like they would be able to use the application to both learn and teach, where they then got to elaborate on whether they could or not. There was also two questions regarding how beneficial it would be for them to use the application at both work as well as at home, which was done based on a scale of 1 to 5. This was of high importance to see if the results showed any major difference after the implementation of the new features compared to the ones that Linderman got.

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The testers were also asked which of the new features were the most important to them while using the application. Moreover they were asked what features they recognized from other social and collaborative platforms and how useful they found them in Vault. Following that they were asked what features seen in other social and collaborative platforms they felt were missing. This was asked to give an idea of what kind of features they felt helped them or improved their experience the most, as well as seeing what features that could be implemented into Vault in the future to improve the learning and user experience.

Lastly during the interview the testers were asked to rank the following from a scale 1 to 5: ❏ How easy to use was the application?

❏ How do you rate the overall design of the application? ❏ How easy to understand was the application?

❏ How easy was it to find posts?

They were also asked to what extent they used the application during the test period which was 10 days and what would have made them use it even more.

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4 Results

This thesis answered two research questions with the use of the design and creation method. The result section will be split into four parts from the design and creation process, which are the application analysis, app development, API and database development as well as the interviews.

4.1 Application analysis

The application analysis looked at six different collaborative and social platforms and their features. All of the six applications were looked at and summarized by their core features that represent their characteristics, these were things like being able to follow/friend someone or check their profile. The table below shows what different features were found in all of the platforms and which features were most commonly found amongst them. The different colors mean the following:

❏ Green_{: The feature existed in its entirety.}

❏ Yellow_{: The feature existed to some extent with a few limitations}

❏ Red_{: The feature was not present at the point of when the analysis took place (April} 2019)

As Table 1 shows some of the features were more commonly found amongst the different platforms analysed than others. The most common features were follow/friending other users, handle your own posts and looking at other users profiles.

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4.1.1 Facebook

Facebook is a social or more specifically a social networking platform where users can post their current activity, pictures or videos and share them with their friends or relatives. The core features found while analysing Facebook was the ability to post to specific groups, add other users to friends, editing your posts, like different posts made by other users, sharing other people’s content and sending messages.

4.1.2 Twitter

Twitter is also a social networking platform just as Facebook is, but it’s also an online news site where people communicate with short posts called tweets [20]. The analysis of Twitter showed that it shared many features with Facebook which were following people, sharing other people’s content, liking other people’s posts, checking user profiles, separate flow for people you follow and searching for keywords.

4.1.3 Linkedin

LinkedIn is close to Facebook in its functionality but it’s for a different purpose. Instead of being used for your personal life like in Facebook, it’s used for your career [21]. The features found that best represent LinkedIn were the ability to create networks, like posts, check users profiles and follow different topics.

4.1.4 Instagram

Instagram is a bit different from all the previously explained platforms, it’s main purpose is to give the users the ability to share videos and pictures with their followers [22]. During the analysis the features that characterized Instagram were the ability to search for topics (hashtags), liking posts, follow users, check who others follow and who follows them.

4.1.5 Reddit

As of mid last year Reddit was the fifth most popular site in the USA. The best way to explain this site would be to say it’s a collection of different forums that represent different topics. The content posted could be everything from news to a simple picture where people then have the ability to comment and share their opinions [23]. The core features found to best describe Reddit would be the following: upvote/downvote ratio, save posts, posts are separated by different topics, follow people.

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4.1.6 Pinterest

Pinterest gives the users the possibility to post pictures or things like recipes that other users then can take inspiration from. Pinterest gives the users the ability to save a specific post or picture for later and access it in their own private collection which is a feature Instagram also has [24]. The features that best represented Pinterest’s characteristics is the ability to pick categories you have an interest in, show who you are following, search for categories or users, edit posts and deletion of posts.

4.1.7 Motivation of chosen features

To decide which of the features from the application analysis were to be implemented some different factors were taken into consideration. The first factor was how well the selected feature would work with Vault’s philosophies which are RL, mobile learning as well as parkour. This was of great importance since it was considered that a feature that wouldn’t improve the learning or user experience in regards to the philosophies mentioned above would not be well suited for Vault in its current state. Another factor was how prevalent a specific feature was in general across the different platforms. For example following a user and looking at other peoples’ profiles existed in all six platforms we looked at and they were considered to go well with Vault’s philosophies which made them appropriate to implement.

4.2 App development

The continuation of Vault’s development is based on the features found in the application analysis which had a focus on collaborative and social aspects.

The newly added features include the addition of user profiles which enables further social interactions such as following people in order to ease the interaction of people where users easily can keep track of the content a certain user of interest is providing. As seen in figure 4a the user profiles consists of three different feeds, where one shows people following the user, one that shows the people the user follow and one that has all of the user’s posts. Figure 4a also shows that the user profiles includes an optional description in which the user can write a short summary of themselves and their interests. This helps users to quickly see if a user’s posts might be of interest and get an idea of what they usually post about. The addition of user profiles and the ability to follow people allowed for a new section on the home screen to be added to let users see a feed of posts of users they’re following, which can be seen in figure 4b. This opens up the possibility for users to have one flow for all new posts and one flow for

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was there at handover but wasn’t working as intended, which was the possibility to favorite a single post which then showed up in your personal flow of favorited posts.

Figure 4a View of the user profile Figure 4b Feed from followed people

In order to improve the usability of handling the posts the possibility to both edit and delete posts have been implemented, shown in figure 5a, where it’s accessible under each post that the active user have created. These features showed to be standard on the analysed

applications aside from Twitter which doesn’t allow edits of posts. There’s also been an expansion on the post creation, where the ability to add a category to a post has been added, seen in figure 5b, which was added in order to improve and simplify the process of finding posts.

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Figure 5a View of post edit and delete Figure 5b View of Post creation

The functionality of adding GPS locations to post items have also been further developed. Even though it wasn’t deemed relevant to RL by Linderman or have any connection to the application analysis, it’s there as a functionality for users who regard it important for their posts. The continuation of development of this feature resulted in a section in Vault where users have access to all post items that include a GPS location on Google Maps. This in order to allow users to easily navigate around the globe and look for post items at places of interest or if people visit a new city and are curious to gather some new knowledge about the location they’re visiting. Figure 6a shows post items scattered around the city of Malmö where the different post items consisting of videos, pictures, links and text are separated by color and different icons.

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Figure 6a View of google maps Figure 6b View of search

To ease the process of finding posts of interest, the capability to search for posts have been added. As seen in figure 6b, it’s possible to search from the home screen where it’ll look for titles of posts, the category associated with them as well as different usernames.

4.3 API and database development

On the back-end many changes and implementations had to be made to cope with the new features on the Android side. Since the handover version of the back-end lacked database tables and the ability to communicate between the API and server most things had to be done from scratch. The RDS instance got accessible after all the security groups (SG) were wiped and altered to fit the new conditions. The solution to fix the broken communication between the API and database was fixed by recreating the EC2 instance as well as the alteration that was made to the SG for the RDS instance. This had to be done since the first two steps described in 3.1.2 didn’t fix the communication problem. The same goes for the S3 bucket, where the access was there but not through the Android application which resulted in no pictures were shown in the application and forced us to recreate the instance. After the

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recreation and fixes within the Java code the pictures were working again with the new instance.

After the communication was reestablished the work could continue to the database tables, which were recreated by reverse engineering with the help of the API and its calls to the database. This helped with deciding which columns and tables should exist, since we could see what the API was expecting as an answer from the database queries. As the tables were re-created with the use reverse engineered, new tables as well as columns was created to support the new features added to Vault. Since the tables didn’t exist at the hand over some changes were made mid-way through the project since we noticed that some of the old features didn’t work properly as the project proceeded.

To support the new features some new API endpoints had to be implemented. The main new endpoints are to support the features of following people, see who you follow/is followed by, editing a post as well as being able to change your profile description. There are also some endpoints that have been improved or finished that Linderman initially started working on last year (2018). The improvements are mostly adding new or removing variables to the structs that are used within the API as well as returned to the Android application. The removal of struct variables was most often due to that the specific data wasn’t needed within the Android application. While the new additions to the structs are there to support the new features on the Android side. The new endpoints are as shown in table 2.

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Table 2 Showing the different endpoints, type and a short description

4.4 Testing and Interviews

The last part of the results this thesis produced was the interviews that were held with two teachers that used the application for 10 days. The interviews were held in Swedish since it was both of the teachers native language. The interviewees will be named interviewee 1 and 2 in the following sections.

The first question that regarded if they usually use social and collaborative platforms they both answered yes, but they used it in different ways. Interviewee 1 used the application to post things on his work’s Instagram meanwhile Interviewee 2 used it to follow his children on Instagram. On the following question regarding how pleased they were while using the application interviewee 1 gave it a 3 out of 5 while interviewee 2 gave it a 4.

They were also asked if the new features made them feel like they were part of a community. Interviewee 1 said that the application would have needed more users to get that sense of community but also stated that if there were more users he saw its potential. Interviewee 2

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that the new features implemented to find posts helped the learning and usability of the application. Interviewee 1 stated that the map was a big part of this but he would have liked to limit the area and category of posts shown. Interviewee 2 on the other hand mostly appreciated the categories but he stated that he would have wanted fixed categories instead of free text, which would eliminate the risk of people describing the same subject in different ways.

They gave very different results regarding if they could use the application to learn and teach, interviewee 1 said that he would not be able to use it for either of them because of time limitations. Interviewee 2 on the other hand stated that he definitely could use it for learning and getting tips from others about work. On the question regarding how beneficial it would be for them to use the application at work both interviewees rated it a 4 out of 5. On the same question but instead of work it was during their spare time the results were very different, interviewee 1 still scored in a 4 but interviewee 2 scored it a 1 because he mainly saw it fit for his work hours.

On the question “Which features did you find the most important?” they both considered the ability to edit your posts to be of high importance. Interviewee 1 also believed that the map showing the posts as pins were important, meanwhile interviewee 2 liked the ability to add a category to your posts more. Furthermore the interviewees were asked which of the new features they recognized from other platforms and how useful they were in Vault. These results can be seen in Figure 7.

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Figure 7 Shows the interviewees answers to which features they recognized and how useful they were in Vault. Missing column means that the interviewee did not recognize that feature from other platforms. 1 is the lowest

and 5 is the highest.

The interviewees were also asked what features they thought were missing from the

application where interviewee 1 felt like he would have liked the feature to send messages to other users and record videos directly in the app instead of first uploading it to Youtube. They were also asked to what extent they used the application during the 10 days, where they were asked to give an approximate average time per day. Interviewee 1 stated that he used it for 20 minutes per day and that he would have used it more if he could have had it on his personal phone. Interviewee 2 said he used it for 10 minutes per day, he also stated that it took him a long time to get into it and if he had a longer test period he would have spent more time on it. This was followed by questions to get more general feedback about the application where they got to rate different usability questions on a scale of 1-5, these results can be found in Figure 8.

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Figure 8 Shows interviewees answers to their rating 1-5 of the specified features. 1 is the lowest and 5 is the highest.

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5 Analysis and discussion

This section consists of an analysis and discussion of the discoveries from the result section and will be split up by each research question.

5.2 _{Which tools found in current collaborative and social}

platforms could be added to Vault to create a better user

experience and enhance learning opportunities?

In order to get a better idea of what the state-of-the-art features found on social and

collaborative platforms were and how they’ve been implemented, an application analysis was performed. The platforms were selected based on their popularity, but there was some avoidance of platforms that were primarily made for collaborative learning because features found on these platforms tended to be more suited for traditional learning. Some of the features found on these platforms didn’t match with the philosophies of which Vault is built upon, where there’s no defined teacher where everyone instead learns from each other. The selected applications are often called social or social media platforms but they enable collaborative features due to their social nature.

The majority of platforms shared most of the typical features such as looking at people’s profiles or following/adding someone as friend. There were however some differences between some of the platforms. Not a single one of the platforms analysed had all of the core features we found in the analysis. Applications like Twitter didn’t have the feature to edit posts and Reddit didn’t give its users the possibility to have a seperate flow for people that the users follow or are subscribed to. Since most of the new features are commonly found in state of the art platforms, the users of Vault will know how to use them from the start instead of learning how things work. There really isn’t any generalisation that can be made with the analysis results since there was only six platforms and one would have to look at many more of the most popular social and collaborative platforms to draw a conclusion around what the top features found amongst them are.

Only 66,7% of the users felt like they were a part of the community while using the

application prior to the implementation of the new features according to Linderman’s results [5]. Because of this the majority of the new features implemented were chosen with the goal of boosting the learning and user experience by making the users feel like they were a part of a community. This was very important since some of the core philosophies behind Vault such

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as parkour and RL is based on people learning together by sharing experiences, ideas and knowledge.

In addition to the application analysis, there was a continuation of the development of Vault. The Android application Vault handed over by Linderman was built with the theories mobile learning, RL and parkour in mind, whereas the continued development of Vault looked to integrate features from collaborative and social platforms with the application.

Among the features found to be common on the analysed platforms, the feature of having user profiles was a component that enabled a lot of functionality. Being able to have an introduction or a summary of interest on user profiles allowed for people looking for new interesting people to learn from to easily find teachers with the same interests and passions. The user profiles also made it possible to follow people, which allowed the functionality of adding posts as favourites to be removed as the function didn’t work properly in the version of Vault handed over by Linderman. Being able to follow people and get access to their posts either through their profiles or in the post feed of people followed was seen as an appropriate replacement.

By expanding the GPS functionality of the application where a Google Maps section was added filled with markers of post items allowed for further integration with one of the applications core philosophies, parkour. In parkour there’s a big focus on repeating what others have done, and by allowing users to pinpoint post items consisting of text, links, pictures or videos allows for other people to easily find them. This allows for instance posts about exercise to be placed on the map so it’s easily found along with the necessary

information that belongs to the post so the exercise can be replicated.

It was acknowledged by Linderman [5] that Vault had a lot of similarities with social and collaborative platforms, where it was clarified what the difference was, such as that Vault was made with the intention of creating content for educational purposes. As the development of Vault continued the intent was the same, to not just imitate common social and collaborative platforms, but instead see what features that could benefit Vault. The application analysis looked at the features found on these platforms and how they could be integrated in to Vault in order to simplify the ideas that Vault was built upon, where users learn and create

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5.2 _{How did the new features added to the Vault! app affect the}

learning and user experience compared to the old version?

The second research question looked to compare the result from the test period with last year’s thesis test results, and see if there was any noticeable difference when it comes to the learning and user experience. The overall satisfaction with the application, shown in figure 9 with the rest of the comparison to Linderman’s results from last year, didn’t show any major difference compared to last year, where it had gone from 3.67 out of 5 to 3.5.

Figure 9 Shows a comparison from the questions with last year’s result

As the development of Vault continued there was a focus on improving the sense of

community by enabling more social features such as following people with similar interest and get a post flow from people you follow. This was partly because the sense of a community is an important aspect in the philosophy of parkour and RL, but also because it was deemed important in order to improve the learning experience as it would allow users to more easily find posts of interest. The result of this was positive as both of the interviewees saw the possibilities the application have of creating learning communities but felt that the low amount of testers was a problem and it would require more users to get a true sense of how it would work. It was however rated high, where both gave it a 5 compared to last year’s results which showed that only two thirds felt like they were part of a community.

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Last year’s tests showed that the process of creating content was easy, where it was seen as very beneficial to be able to share ideas and tips to other teachers. The PE teachers opinions on this matter were similar, but one of the testers felt the process of creating posts was a bit complex, as there was a lot of titles that had to be filled in. As we looked to improve and ease the learning process we added categories to posts to allow people to easy find content of interest, which was seen as an important feature. One of the testers would’ve preferred pre-defined categories however in order to avoid people using different names for similar categories, instead of the implemented way which worked much like a hashtag. Furthermore the addition of editing a post was marked as one of the most important new features by both the participants, which would allow people to keep on adding content to their posts in the future.

The PE teachers who tested the application gave it a 4 when it comes to the benefits of Vault in their professional life, compared to last year’s results on kindergarten teachers where it only got a 3. This indicates that Vault could be more appropriate for use by PE teachers, but the low amount of testers makes it hard to draw any conclusions.

Much like the testers from last year, both of the interviewees felt there was a lack of time for them to be using the application. To give the testers more time to get familiar with the

application the duration of the tests should have been prolonged, but it also shows that it can be hard to integrate an application like Vault in to today’s educational system without it getting an overhaul.

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6 Conclusion and further research

To establish what the state of the art features are on social and collaborative platforms an application analysis was performed. This then allowed for Vault to be further developed with these new features combined with the learning philosophies Vault’s built upon, such as mobile learning, parkour and RL. This analysis revealed that the most popular social and collaborative platforms do indeed have a lot of features in common. It was shown that the most common features were looking at peoples profiles, following users and being able to handle user created content, such as editing or deleting a post.

The updated version of Vault ended up with new features such as user profiles in order to allow people to follow others with common interests, categories to distinguish posts, a search function to find posts or users and a map with posts laid out to allow users to explore the world for posts of interest. The handling of posts was also improved, with the

implementation of editing and deleting posts.

The new version of Vault was then tested over 10 days by two PE teachers. After the test period the two teachers were part of semi-structured interviews to reevaluate Vault, where the results were then compared to the outcome of the old version of Vault and its test results. The improvements were most evident when it came to the sense of community, where both of the testers saw the potential of creating learning communities within Vault, which was enabled by the social nature of some of the new features. This was due to features such as being able to follow people with similar interests or search for categories in order to find people who post content of interest. Vault did also show other signs of benefit from having new features from social and collaborative platforms, as new features such as being able to have bigger control over user created content by being able to edit and delete posts was marked as some of the most important features of Vault. Furthermore the possibility to add categories in order to more easily find posts of interest was marked as a valuable feature. The two participants saw benefits of using it at work, but difficulties integrating it with their current structure of lessons and the lack of time was an issue. Both of the testers did also indicate that in order to give Vault a proper evaluation a longer test period would have been necessary.

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6.1 Further research

The test period of Vault with its new additions shows that features from social and

collaborative platforms have the potential to integrate with Vault’s learning philosophies and help create a sense of a community.

Further research will as the interviewees stated need more time and testers, which will make it easier to draw some real conclusions. Mainly because the application is based on

interactions between users which is hard to accomplish with two testers. Further research will also have to look at the security of the application and GDPR, which are of high importance to deploy the application in a larger scale. The issues surrounding GDPR was something that the testers both mentioned outside of the interviews since the schools have very strict policies surrounding taking images on the school property. There is also a possibility to further test the current version of Vault in a bigger scale to get more generalizable results which can easier decide the path Vault should take.

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Vault: Exploring the effects of social and collaborative platforms in a mobile relational learning application