Mobile MOOCs And Education
What Is Mobile Learning?
Sometimes referred to simply as ‘mlearning’, mobile learning can be described as ‘anywhere, anytime’ learning that is not fixed in time (by schedule) or space (by location) and that is supported by digital technologies. Put differently, it is learning that is relevant to the context and location of the student. Mobile learning has two main elements: (1) the learner, and (2) a portable digital device (or devices) through which he or she accesses content. Such devices include mobile phones (both ‘smart’ and ‘dumb’), digital cameras, voice recorders, tablet devices (such as iPads), laptops and netbooks, video cameras, and MP3 players.
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Below are several questions for you to consider based on the video:
1. Is it an easy adjustment for students to use their mobile devices in class? 2. How important are mobile apps to mobile learning? (i.e.: Flipbook) 3. What kind of versatility & immediacy does mobile learning provide for you? 4. What does mobile learning mean to you? 5. How can you facilitate mobile learning? "Mobile devices allow students the possibility of discovery that did not exist in the classroom before."
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True or false: 70% of children between 2-5 can use a mobile device, but only 11% can tie their own shoes.
TRUE. At the start of the 21st century only 13% of all school classrooms in Canada had Internet access with mobile devices, compared to 78% today. The proliferation and sheer breadth of accessibility that the Internet and mobile devices offer has redefined the process of “growing up”.
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Why Learn With Mobile Devices?
Mobile computing devices are expected to facilitate learning as they allow more flexible and wider access to content, can provide highly individualized and situated learning activities and feedback and connect with other technological innovations providing a profound impact on education. There are many affordances that mobile devices add to the learning environment. They include:
Flexibility For Learners:
Flexibility is not limited to any one place or time anymore. Flexibility in mLearning also involves learning using videos, podcasts and other popular multimedia assets on smartphones.
Improved Completion Rates & Higher Retention:
Content presented in the mobile platform is chunk-sized and concise inviting learners to complete courses leading to a seamless, successful mobile learning user experience.
Collaborative Learning:
Engaging learners towards the establishment of online learning communities is more effective using mobile devices as it tends to be one of the biggest mobile learning advantages. In many mlearning circumstances, quite often learning suffers from lack of collaboration among students.
Higher Engagement:
Research and statistics reveal a higher engagement rate when courses are delivered using the mobile format. One of many mobile learning advantages is that of personalization, which adds to the sense of engagement and motivation for the students. Moreover, the fact that mobile learning is accessible any time, any place by the users, helps students stay on track with their training, resulting in less dropouts.
Multi-Device Support:
Perhaps one of the most significant benefits of mobile learning in education is that of multi-device support. In a mobile learning environment, the same course is available on various devices ranging from PCs, laptops, tablets and smartphones.
Seamless Learning Paths:
Phone-based reminders and organizers can be integrated within the mLearning platforms. Learners get ongoing notifications and updates on their courses, which they check anywhere and anytime. The can also resume their course easily, without unlearning previous content. The learning path established in an mLearning platform provides more personalized and continuous learning environment. This feature in mLearning can be experienced when participating in our extra credit iTunes University activity that follows.
Does Mobile Fit With MOOC?
Many modern web-based systems provide a ‘responsive’ design that allows material and services to be accessed on mobile and desktop devices, with the aim of providing ubiquitous access. Besides offering access to learning materials such as podcasts and videos across multiple locations, mobile, wearable, and ubiquitous technologies add additional affordances that enable new forms of learning using MOOCs.
Ubiquitous access and contextuality are several advantages that can be combined into a powerful educational mobile MOOC mix whereby learners have the opportunity to access learning materials according to their needs and interests, continue their learning across locations while drawing upon context-specific resources while sharing their developing knowledge with many other people. Below are further elaborations on how mobile devices and MOOCs can mix to create a credible combination.
Ubiquitous access and contextuality are several advantages that can be combined into a powerful educational mobile MOOC mix whereby learners have the opportunity to access learning materials according to their needs and interests, continue their learning across locations while drawing upon context-specific resources while sharing their developing knowledge with many other people. Below are further elaborations on how mobile devices and MOOCs can mix to create a credible combination.
Creating Coherency:
Mobile MOOCs can offer a connected learning experience (Sharples, 2014) in which learning can progress easily despite changes in time and location. Furthermore, MOOC learning media can then be continually available, easily paused and restarted, along with providing the option to download content for offline access. The challenge is to create a coherent learning experience from the fragments of learning content, providing guidance and orientation to ensure an overall understanding of the learning process and its different stages. In that sense, mobile devices mixed with MOOC technology can offer possibilities for being personal guides for distributed learning scenarios across contexts, connecting learning activities distributed over time, space and social settings. Interface devices, such as To Do lists and navigation panels can orient the learner and show where the current activity fits into the structure of the course. |
There is also opportunity to use the affordances of mobile devices to provide a more connected learning experience and open the assignments and learning activities to the groups and communities of learners. The MOOC platform can send messages to make the learner aware of the learning activities of others. Some classic pedagogies can be revisited in a mobile world. For example, spaced repetition is especially good for learning individual facts (Pimsleur, 1967). This is a learning method that presents and reviews items to be learned at increasing intervals of time. The Memrise software for mobile devices hosts courses created by its community that use spaced repetition to teach foreign language vocabulary. This example represents a linkage between ubiquitous seamless learning and the strengths of contextual learning support as described next. |
Context Is King:
Research into mobile MOOC learning has identified how this type of learning can highlight the importance of context in understanding learning situations (Sharples, Taylor & Vavoula, 2007; Specht, 2009). As learners, we are simultaneously embedded in a context as we move through locations across time, and we create context through our interactions with settings, artefacts and people. Below are various examples to prove how powerful the mobile MOOC mix can be:
A visitor to an art gallery may be in the context of a particular painting in the gallery, while creating context by bringing previous knowledge of art to that setting, looking closely at the texture of the brush strokes, and discussing the artist’s style with friends. This contextuality of learning can be advantageous when combined with a MOOC. While discussion forums and live meetups can provide opportunities to share experience, they are de-contexualised spaces, separate from the immediate content of the course and not exploiting the situational context of the learners. Studies have shown that collecting data in context can enable more authentic and personally relevant learning (Kravcik, et. al, 2004) as well as offering possibilities of live connections between remote learning contexts and classrooms (Bergin et al., 2007).
The iSpot platform, developed at The Open University is an example of a mobile MOOC learning technology that exploits situational context. This site enables people to make observations of nature (such as birds, animals, plants and fungi) by taking a photograph of an interesting natural item using the iSpot mobile application (app) and adding a proposed identification. Other people in the iSpot community, among them wildlife experts, offer additional information and a more accurate identification. The system adds further information and links, e.g. to Wikipedia pages, based on the species identification and other meta-data such as the location. A sophisticated reputation management system (Clow & Makriyannis, 2011) awards credit and online badges to people who make many observations, offer identifications that are confirmed by others, and gain confirmed identifications from experts.
Applying contextual learning to arts and humanities, mobile devices offer possibilities to connect learners using a MOOC with people embedded in a location using it's GPS technology. Consider, for example, a MOOC course on the Renaissance in Florence. It might be designed so that participants on the course are in contact with residents in the City of Florence, either directly or through a shared forum, to ask questions of the local residents or commission localised investigations such as photographing buildings or interviewing museum curators. MOOCs based around interactive maps as learning resources could enable people in differing locations (educators, professional guides, or learners) to create learning resources based on photographs, personal histories of locations, and tours. The community map site OpenStreetMap is already being used as a resource for humanitarian relief workers, with local people and volunteer workers contributing data to create detailed maps of earthquake zones or remote areas of Africa. OpenStreetMap and other community mapping sites such as Crowdmap could support MOOC courses on, for example, geology, demographics, or community history.
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True or false: MOOC courses can allow you to receive credit toward university degree requirements.
TRUE. Arizona State University announced plans to make a handful of undergraduate massive open online courses, or MOOCs, available for credit to anyone who was interested. The initiative, which officials say is the first of its kind, would make it possible for students to take general education courses that they could then count toward an ASU degree or transfer to their institution of choice, effectively giving them a leg up on their freshman year.
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Keywords & Trending Topics
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Before proceeding, think about the following questions:
1. As an educator, what advantages do you see using mobile and MOOC technology?
2. Can you see any disadvantages or limitations?
3. In what ways can you apply contextual learning to mobile education?
3. What types of ubiquitous learning activities can you envision using in your mobile classroom?
2. Can you see any disadvantages or limitations?
3. In what ways can you apply contextual learning to mobile education?
3. What types of ubiquitous learning activities can you envision using in your mobile classroom?
Activity #4 - Change The Way You Think (Password Protected)
Now its your turn:
RETRIEVE THE PASSWORD TO UNLOCK THE ACTIVITY PAGE TO CHANGE THE WAY YOU THINK ABOUT mobile EDUCATION! Highlighted on this page is a 6-letter passcode that you can use to unlock an ACTIVITY PAGE so you can learn more, participate and share your knowledge on mobile education and MOOC technology: |