Learning About Mobile Learning

Ally and  Tsinakos (2014) provide 255 pages (4.2Mbytes of PDF) of free readings on Increasing access through mobile learning. This is divided into three parts:

1. Designing Mobile Learning
2. Implementing Mobile Learning
3. Using Mobile Learning in Education and Training

A few weeks ago I attended the Second International Conference on Open and Flexible Education (ICOFE 2015) at Hong Kong Open University. The theme of the conference was "Making Learning Mobile and Ubiquitous". While there were many papers and workshops presented on on e-leaning in general (you can read my notes on some), few were specifically on mobile leaning (m-learning). In e-learning courses I try to make the materials compatible with mobile devices, but this assumes that students will use these materials in the same way as on a desktop (or laptop) computer.

Clearly the experience of interacting with a mobile device on a bus is different to using a laptop in a private place. Does this change the nature of the learning and so should the content and activities be different.I assume a student may read notes and reply to a forum question (which requires a short answer) from a mobile device. But will the student try to prepare a 4,000 word essay on the bus? Should I break the assessment tasks into smaller components to suit this environment? Should I tell the student how many hours of "desktop" time they will need to complete the course (as opposed to palmtop time).

Ally and  Tsinakos (2014) goes some way to answering some of those questions.

Reference

Ally, M., & Tsinakos, A. (2014). Increasing access through mobile learning. Retrieved from http://dspace.col.org/bitstream/123456789/514/1/pub_Mobile%20Learning_web.pdf