A study on UI design of smartphone app for continuous blended language learning

摘要

This study aims to develop a smartphone app which facilitates students to do their continuous language learning. It provides short but many different exercises as reviews for classroom lessons based on the microlearning. Currently, we have conducted a blended learning, which consists of both a face-to-face class and a home assignment in e-learning, for Chinese language courses. In this blended learning, we have provided a prototype of smartphone app "KoToToMo" with which students are able to practice by various exercises according to actual lessons in a class. However, we had found that the prototype app has some problems to be solved to perform effective practice based on the microlearning. This app just provides exercise, so students must remember chapters to be practiced and which exercises had been practiced. The students are also required many steps of operations to resume their exercisesfrom the point where they had halted their exercises. Therefore, in order to solve these problems of the existing app, we discuss effective user interface design of our app, which enables students to recognize the next exercises to be practiced by visualizing their progress of exercises and to select one from them in a few steps of operations.