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Tag Archives: Mobile Technology
GSMA & MasterCard Foundation Release Report on M-Learning
The GSMA and The MasterCard Foundation today released a new report, ‘Shaping the Future – Realising the Potential of Informal Learning Through Mobile’. The report focuses on the needs and aspirations of underserved young people, the barriers they face to education and employment, and how the existence of mobile technology in their lives can enable them to achieve their ambitions. It also highlights opportunities that exist for the industry to develop mobile learning services that can directly benefit underserved young people in developing countries.
“Currently, 69 million young people globally have no access to basic education, while 759 million adults don’t have a formal education – there is clearly a huge opportunity for mobile in addressing this issue,” said Chris Locke, Executive Director, GSMA Development Fund. “Mobile is already playing a key role in development areas such as providing access to banking, health information, and to agricultural services reaching rural farmers. The scale and ubiquity of mobile networks means they are often the only infrastructure in remote and rural areas, and the mobile industry has shown incredible innovative and sustainable approaches to using their networks to aid disadvantaged groups.”
The study took place in 2011 and GSMA researchers interviewed 1,200 underserved young people in Ghana, Uganda, Morocco and Maharashtra in India, to explore the potential of mobile technology to support their education and employment goals. The findings indicate that mobile learning (mLearning) has a unique role to play in reaching those who are outside of the scope of traditional schooling, and who can benefit from access to simple educational programmes. It also points to challenges that limit the uptake of mLearning services, such as cost of services, lack of infrastructure, limitations of basic mobile phones in delivering visual content, and lack of long-term investments in mLearning.
Key findings across the youth from the four countries are as follows:
- Education is one of the three biggest priorities in life for the young people surveyed, with 39 percent naming it as their key priority to providing the financial stability and improved standard of living that they currently lack;
- Only one quarter of participants named the classroom as their primary source of information and education. Friends and family were seen as far more important information sources, named by 41 percent, while 43 percent relied on television;
- One in four said that the number one barrier to accessing educational resources was lack of funds, and in Ghana, this number reached almost half of those surveyed;
- Seventy-four percent of mobile owners surveyed said that it is the number one asset they own and 63 percent believed that they could learn through even a basic mobile device; and
- Eighty-five percent of young mobile users made voice calls every day and 67 percent of respondents believed that calls would be the most desirable method for receiving content such as educational information.
The report was released at the 2012 e-Learning Africa conference in Benin. To download this free report, visit www.mastercardfdn.org or www.gsma.com/development-fund/.
Mobile Learning – The Road Ahead
The 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.
Posted in Mobile Learning
Tagged mobile learning app, mobile learning program, Mobile Technology
6 Comments
Mobile Learning: Why waiting will get you left behind
It’s being widely acknowledged that mobile devices are poised to replace many traditional computing activities. All indications are that access to the Internet through mobile and wireless devices will soon outpace access through desktop devices by 2014 (Morgan Stanley).
Yet we are still seeing a lot of “watching and waiting” from educational institutions and enterprises when it comes to implementing mobile technologies for learning.
While there is an understandable reason in ensuring success of established technologies before adopting, it’s also true that complications arise when the audience begins to use this same technology to work, play, and learn without waiting for a top-down influence.
Mobile technology is a perfect example of this happening; the technology is growing in a rapid manner and we are seeing two main camps:
• Those looking for validity and the “perfect” opportunity
• The “adopters” who are diving in
Last year, there were several well-publicized examples of institutions implementing mobile learning, especially with the arrival of tablets. Along with these developments, the mobile learning marketplace has seen several commercial options which facilitate m-learning implementation with minimal risk of capital.
However when it comes to the majority, the attitude to devices in school and on campus is still largely one of waiting for acceptance.
Learners already on-the-go
On the flip side, students are already doing a lot to create their own personal learning experience either by sharing notes using online tools, collaborating through social media with like-minded learners or most recently, downloading educational apps.
App stores have become a fabulous conduit for non-traditional educational tools to reach learners, and lately, many traditional publishers have also started to participate.
While a lot of these applications and tools are of relevance, (e.g. learning material for test prep), one of the key missing pieces in mobile learning is the absence of validated educational resources that are a part of school or college curriculum. This is happening largely due to the hesitation on the part of institutions to disperse their educational content via mobile devices, forcing students to look to other sources. Besides illegal digitization, this could also result in unmonitored circulation of material which could be incorrect or outdated.
An exception to this rule is the availability of publisher notes for a specific book. Already student usage of these applications when available has been very pervasive and popular.
While many of these tools are being used in an ad hoc manner, the fact that students are driving their learning initiatives provides us with ample evidence of the tremendous opportunity to deliver validated and educator-driven content on to these platforms.
There is no right or wrong in choosing between immediate adoption of mobile learning or waiting for validation. But it is essential to be cognizant that even with the ground beneath our feet still shifting, users are incorporating mobile learning with success.
The call to action should therefore be to start implementing, using the slew of opportunities that have presented themselves over the past 12-18 months. In a future that is obviously more and more mobile device-driven, waiting for things to settle, may be akin to missing the train completely.
eLearning Predictions for 2011 and Beyond
Informative post by John Aleckson an eLearning Teacher & Entrepreneur, summarizing the different opportunities and challenges predicted to arise in the next ten years.
Excerpt: Many of these predictions are relative to one’s perspective, be it teacher, student, or management, but they all share one common idea: eLearning is going to play a major part in providing degree education and professional development in the future, especially with the advancements in mobile technology, the increasing ubiquitous nature of bandwidth, and the emerging acceptance of “anywhere, anytime” learning.
Technologies like the iPad, Android tablets and, of course smart phones, are creating what looks to be a bright future for eLearning, in general. Not only do these technologies allow for stronger opportunities for peer to peer learning (social learning) and better access to content, it also allows instructors to nudge learning along with calendar and assignment alerts. This increase in social networking will become a spearhead for increased collaboration and sharing, and also provide a way to bring together different sources of content and educational experiences in one single point of contact.
3-R’s of mobile learning, Review-Refresh-Reinforce
With mobile technology now entering classrooms, today’s students are experiencing a more dynamic, “unstructured” way of absorbing information. Minutes between classes, time alone waiting for friends, or commuting to and from school are all opportunities for enhanced learning.
Mobile learning is ushering in a new age of learning pedagogies, making us examine and question how knowledge is organized and interrelated.
Let’s take a look at some ways in which mobile learning can be used to reinforce existing teaching methods:
Review
By highlighting the key points of your lecture, or making a list of important, places and events, mobile learning can enable students to quickly run through a topic just before a test or exam. The review method works well on a mobile device as students can have quick and constant access to important points, helping them recollect and reiterate later.
Refresh
Flashcards, new definitions, vocabulary and equations, all critical content that need to stay top of mind. By accessing this information time and again, students can refresh their knowledge and keep the important bits, top of mind.
Reinforce
Did you learn your multiplications tables though repetition? So will this generation, but the tables will always be close at hand. Reinforcement is an age-old method of teaching and learning, and this holds true for today’s mobile learners too.
Mobile learning can be effective if used in a supportive manner, ie, by providing bite-sized learning assets to add greater recall value to current teaching methodologies.
Supporting quality learning anywhere, anytime.
Mobile learning and how it relates (or differentiates) from e-learning
While most of us have heard or come across the term e-learning in the past decade, the term mobile learning or m-learning is not as widely adapted into common usage. While both are intuitive in their meanings, how they vary and differentiate from each other is not that apparent.
What is mobile learning?
In an earlier post, we’ve defined mobile learning is the ability to obtain or provide educational content on personal pocket devices such as PDAs, smartphones and mobile phones. As we have established in our timeline, mobile learning using handheld computers is in its infancy in terms of both technologies and pedagogies. As a result there is still some dispute amongst industry advocates in how mobile learning should be defined: in terms of devices and technologies; in terms of the mobility of learners and the mobility of learning, and in terms of the learners’ experience of learning with mobile devices. (Traxler, 2007)
Clark Quinn, professor, author, and expert in computer-based education, defined mobile learning as the intersection of mobile computing (the application of small, portable, and wireless computing and communication devices) and e-learning (learning facilitated and supported through the use of information and communications technology).
What is e-learning?
E-learning has come to define any dissemination of educational knowledge over the Internet. This makes e-learning a subset of technology-based training. It also incorporates a number of learning activities conducted on the Internet, of which mobile learning is one part.
Differentiating e-learning from mobile learning
E-learning can be real-time or self-paced, also known as “synchronous” or “asynchronous” learning. Additionally, e-learning is considered to be “tethered” (connected to something) and presented in a formal and structured manner.
In contrast, mobile learning is often self-paced, un-tethered and informal in its presentation.
Because mobile devices have the power to make learning even more widely available and accessible, mobile devices are considered by many to be a natural extension of e-learning (Ellis, 2003).
References
1. C. Quinn (2000), “mLearning: Mobile, Wireless, In-Your-Pocket Learning”
2. Traxler, John (2007), Defining, Discussing and Evaluating Mobile Learning: the moving finger writes and having writ . . .
3. Ellis, K. (2003). Moving into M-Learning. Training
Posted in General
Tagged M-learning, mlearning, mobile education, Mobile Learning, Mobile Technology
6 Comments
