Tag Archives: mobile learning program

5 Steps to Ensure Success of your M-Learning Initiative

Aim at short-term, problem solving goals.
First identify what immediate learning issues, mobile learning could help solve. For example, could m-learning help biology students learn and memorize their taxonomy? Could it get algebra students to recollect and apply formulae correctly?

Utilize the content you have.
Take a look at what content you have easy access to, and use that first for your mobile learning program. Understand the issues involved in getting your existing content ready for a mobile device environment.

Work with existing devices.
Devices are a big expenditure. Rather than investing upfront, encourage students to bring in whatever mobile device they have and get an idea of what features are common and available to all. See if students can share between them.

Gain student usage and acceptance.
It’s easier to solve problems and identify potential hiccups while working on a small scale. Your mobile learning pilot will therefore enable you to understand the problems student face, and whether they are getting any learning value out of using the mobile devices.

Identify long-term strategies.
Once you’ve worked on small scale, it’s easier to expand by adding more lessons, chapters or even subjects. Now look at long-term strategies with what you’ve learned about the potential of mobile learning. Will implementing m-learning help an entire grade with test prep, or as remedial learning for students who need more exercises and revisions?

Getting into m-learning can be easy, if you start small and learn before scaling for entire grades and subjects. The important thing is to get started.

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Mobile Learning – The Road Ahead

M-learning and the road aheadThe future of mobile learning lies beyond delivery of learning material on to your phone in a form that can be easily consumed. The future lies in its ability to influence the rate of learning, and improve educational levels.

Global Presence

Mobile learning experiments are now being conducted in classrooms and institutions across the world with varying levels of success. The sophistication of devices themselves, in addition to the growing reliance and spread of internet connectivity has given tremendous impetuous to mobile learning everywhere.

Today’s challenges largely deal with the deliverability of content, access to technology, and integration with current educational or training systems. The future of mobile learning will deal with overcoming challenges in education itself.

Personalization of Learning

With diversity of student needs and varying levels of comprehension, mobile learning will be seen as the solution to enable personalized one-to-one education that will allow each student to make best use of their potential, and deliver content in the form that is most suited to the student. By understanding the capability of every student in a more personalized environment, educators will be able to move students through advanced levels of learning or suggest remedial courses, without the student ever failing or being exposed to debilitating peer and social pressures.

Overcoming Learning Disabilities

Mobile learning has the potential to liberate a great number of students who lag behind their peers due to various disabilities. In addition to enabling independence, mobile learning apps can be uniquely tailored to support students with learning issues such as dyslexia and ADHD, as well as to physically challenged students. Using technology, students will soon be able to compete on an even platform as mobile technology serves to overcome their impediment, and provide for their specific learning needs.

Mobile Learning and Measurability

In the future the successful mobile learning program will be able to incorporate ‘learning measurement’ or tools that can grade levels of education. To foster self-learning, it will need to provide the learner with objective measurement for learning improvement. To work in association with an educational environment, it has to provide educators with the ability to monitor and measure whether learning is taking place and how effective it is for students at different levels.

The way forward

The road ahead for mobile learning will see educational capability overtake the discussions on devices, connectivity and content delivery. We will no longer be talking about the capabilities of the mobile device or the features of the app, but of the value of the mobile learning program in terms of the education it delivers.

A mobile learning app that makes you learn French three times faster than a regular classroom; a course on your iPad that will enable your child to read and write before he joins Kindergarten; mobile learning will be measured and judged for its learning offerings in the future.

Mobile learning has the potential to disrupt the current route of education by delivering valuable and timely material on any subject, in a customizable form that is engaging and interactive. By bringing in the best pedagogies and providing the flexibility to cater to personal learning needs, mobile learning can fulfill the educational requirements of this century in a way that no generation before has experienced.

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