Challenges of establishing a collaborative learning environment using MANET

Abstract

The increased popularity of the smart devices among student community has increased the teacher learner communication and taken learning beyond classroom now. The Mobile based Learning (m-learning) gives learner the flexibility of learning and enables a collaborative learning environment. Involvement, cooperation, team work are the crucial benefits that a student can obtain from the collaborative learning environment. Because of the dynamic nature of m-learning environment, a dynamic self created network or Mobile Ad hoc Network (MANET) would be best suited to establish the collaborative learning environment. Use of MANET in itself raises various issues. For the educational collaboration mobile nodes may frequently exchange data, text, images, transmit audio, video streaming packets to one another or even exchange information from databases thereby causing heavy network traffic. Another important issue to be considered are the malicious attacks-the mobile learning collaborative environment may have to face in absence of centralized authorities and granting access to both legitimate users and attackers. This unconditional trust may not only cause attack on single node, but also on numerous others. Keeping the reputation of participating nodes and to mitigate the attacks against them in the collaborative learning environment has become a challenging issue. This paper will try to jot down these challenges of establishing a Collaborative Learning Environment using the MANET.