Cost Efficient Educational Multimedia Delivery

NATIONAL COLLEGE OF IRELAND Cost Efficient Educational Multimedia Delivery Andreea Maria Molnar A dissertation submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the award of Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.) Supervisor Dr. Cristina Hava Muntean Submitted to the Higher Education and Training awards Council, August 2011 DECLARATION I, Andreea Maria Molnar, declare that this thesis is submitted by me in partial fulfilment of the requirement for the degree of Doctor in Philosophy, is entirely my own work except where otherwise accredited. It has not at any time either whole or in part, been submitted for any other educational award. Name: Andreea Maria Molnar Signature: Date: ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to thank everyone who has supported me during these years, at National College of Ireland. The activities organised for PhD students inside the college, provided me with numerous insightful discussions, and clarified many of my doubts along the way. It was a pleasure being a student here and a great honour to have the opportunity to learn from the lecturers. I would like to thank my supervisor Dr. Cristina Hava Muntean. Without her invaluable advices, guidance, patience, and support on my research, I could not have achieved what I have done. I would also like to thank my two co-supervisors: Dr. Gabriel-Miro Muntean, and Dr. Pramod Pathak for their invaluable advices. I would also like to acknowledge my fellow graduate students and colleagues, both from National College of Ireland and Dublin City University: David, Diana, Alain, Ioana, Arghir, Ramona, A.J., Bogdan. Many thanks especially to Ramona for being always helpful and for explaining various engineering concepts. I was really lucky to have you as my colleague. I shared the same office with Aby and Kate and I want to thank them both for their invaluable advices regarding Irish life. I would also like to thank Dr. Alexandra Cristea, who is one of the most energetic and enthusiastic persons I met. Also many thanks her students from the University of Warwick that i helped me a lot during my visit at their university. I have spent some of the best days of my life at Telefonica Research, Madrid, working on a wonderful project, and I want to thank the people from there who were always more than helpful starting with my accommodation to the Spanish lifestyle. I would like to thank my family, and my friends for their unconditional support. They helped me get through many difficult times, and shared joy and bitterness with me during my three years here in Dublin. Thank you Jorge, for being such a supporting friend, and for the great time we spent in the conferences we attended. Your enthusiasm both regarding research as well as regarding travelling is amazing and contagious. Diana, Oana, and Mihaela were there always when I had some questions regarding graduate life, and have tried a lot to help me, even if that involved a lot of effort on their part. And not last to Ionut Trestian. There are no words to describe how much I appreciate all the help you gave me during these three years. I probably would have not enrolled in PhD if it wasn‘t for you. Your unconditional love and support definitely made my life far easier during these years! THANK YOU! ii LIST OF PUBLICATIONS 1. Molnar, A., & Muntean, C.H. (2011). Mobile Learning: An Economic Approach. Intelligent and Adaptive Learning Systems: Technology Enhanced Support for Learners and Teachers, S. Graf, F. Lin, Kinshuk, and R. McGreal (Eds.), IGI Global, pp. 311-326. 2. Moldovan, A.N., Molnar, A., & Muntean, C.H. (2011). EcoLearn: Battery Power Friendly e-Learning Environment for Mobile Device Users. Learning-Oriented Technologies, Devices and Networks, A. Lazakidou, and I. Omary (Eds.), Lambert Academic Publishing, pp. 273-296. 3. Molnar, A., & Frias-Martinez, V. (2011). EducaMovil: Mobile Educational Games Made Easy. AACE EDMEDIA 2011 World Conference on Educational Multimedia, Hypermedia & Telecommunications, pp. 3684-3689, Lisbon, Portugal, 27 June - 1 July. 4. Molnar, A., & Muntean, C. H. (2010). Educational Content Delivery: An Experimental Study Assessing Student Preference for Multimedia Content when Monetary Cost is Involved, 10th International Conference on Intelligent Systems Design and Applications, pp. 871-876, Cairo, Egypt, 29 November - 1 December. 5. Molnar, A., Muntean, C. H., & Cristea, A.I. (2009). Reusable Quality of Experience aware Adaptation Strategies for Authoring Adaptive e-Learning, AACE E-Learn- World Conference on E-Learning in Corporate, Government, Healthcare, & Higher Education, pp. 3801-3810, Vancouver, Canada, 26 - 30 October. iii 6. Molnar, A., and Muntean, C. H. (2009). QoE MOT A Learner Quality of Experience- Oriented Authoring Tool, EC-TEL: European Conference on Technology Enhanced Learning, A3H: Seventh International Workshop on Authoring of Adaptive and Adaptable Hypermedia, Nice, France, 29 September-2 October. 7. Molnar, A., & Muntean, C. H. (2009). Billing Issues when Accessing Personalised Educational Content, China-Ireland International Conference on Information and Communications Technologies, pp. 188-195, Maynooth, Ireland, 19-21 August. 8. Molnar, A., & Muntean, C. H. (2009). Performance Aware and Cost Oriented Adaptive e-Learning Framework, IADIS International Conference e-Learning, pp. 255-262, Algarve, Portugal, 17-20 June. 9. Molnar, A., & Muntean, C. H. (2009). Enhancing Domain Model with Performance Oriented Metadata for Adaptive E-learning Systems, EdTech, Dublin, Ireland, 20-22 May. iv ABSTRACT Mobile device usage has increased both in developed and developing countries. The pervasiveness of cell phones has made them an ideal platform to cater educational content informally (anywhere, anytime). Although mobile devices offer different advantages compared with desktop PCs, several challenges need to be tackled such that students can effectively use them for learning. One of these is the cost of content delivery which is considered to be one of the most important issues that hinders the adoption of mobile devices. The cost of content delivery is particularly high when information is delivered over wireless networks. This is accentuated when heavy content, such as multimedia (understood in the context of this thesis as video in combination with audio and possible text), is delivered. With the further increase in heavy content, network providers have concerns that the infrastructure will not manage to cope with it and some of the network providers, that initially had flat rate plans, are considering charging extra fees for heavy data users. Under these conditions reducing the cost of content delivery to suit the learners‘ budget, is necessary. Consequently, this research thesis proposes an adaptive mechanism that considers: learner willingness to pay for the multimedia content (and how it changes considering learner location, consumption history, billing plan, age and gender), learner device characteristics (resolution), and the wireless network type over which the multimedia content will be delivered, in order to personalise the cost of delivery for learners. The mechanism suggest to the learner unwilling to pay a high price, a lower quality (cheaper) version of the multimedia v clip, and higher quality version to the rest of the users, based on a new model of assessing the learner willingness to pay. As a part of this research significant other contributions were made: an analysis of the characteristics of feature of the feature phones and smartphones, an analysis of the mobile data billing plans that exists on the European market, a resolution based division of the mobile phones in four resolutions classes and proposing of suitable bitrate values for multimedia clips based on the resolution classes the device belongs to and wireless network over which the multimedia will be delivered. The evaluation of the proposed mechanism has assessed the learner perceived multimedia quality, learning achievements, and the various savings obtained when the adaptive mechanism is used. The results have showed that the perceived quality and learning achievements have not been negatively affected for the learners who received the lower quality content. Moreover, savings are obtained in terms of amount of remaining data when a bundle based billing plan is used, and/or monetary cost. vi Table of Contents Acknowledgements ............................................................................................................................ i List of Publications ............................................................................................................................ ii Abstract .............................................................................................................................................. v Table of Contents ............................................................................................................................ vii List of Figures ................................................................................................................................. xiii List of Tables ................................................................................................................................... xx 1 Introduction .......................................................................................................................... 1 1.1 Research Motivation and Problem ...................................................................................... 4 1.2 Contributions.......................................................................................................................

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