keskiviikko 28. toukokuuta 2014

Mobile learning – a bliss or a mess?


When an innovation turns into your regular cup of tea, wouldn't you want to know what you are actually committing to and how it affects your business?

Be it smartboards, flipped classroom, or gamification, learning styles or neurolinguistic programming, there is a variety of educational fads that we might put to use in the classroom – without having any clue whether they are a solution or just another mess in the learning process.

How is it with mobile learning?


We've drawn up a roadmap to facilitate the active application of mobile learning and particularly the BYOD model in our TVET powerhouse Omnia. (slideshow below, in Finnish).

In order to achieve major changes in the working and teaching culture, there is a need for the personnel to be instructed in taking advantage of educational technology and teaching practices that support learning in the digital world.

We've done a lot of piloting in mobile learning already, and the digital world learning culture is gaining foothold rapidly.

What do we know about the effects, and the benefit-cost ratio? How do we measure various direct and indirect consequences?

We've already taken various measures to gather information, like carried out surveys on campuses, given questionnaires to those who've borrowed iPads from the library etc. Our approach hasn't been very comprehensive or thorough, though.

Surely there are qualitative questions in our surveys meant to evaluate the advantages of mobile learning. And definitely we gather quantitative data as well. But now we want to move forward.

Trawling the net for research on the subject yielded only small fish. I started reading Salman Khan's The One World School House this morning, as I expected him to be the one who knows about analysizing educational data, but so far the first forty pages have been a disappointment. So, proper research papers might be a better option.


Have you found useful resources on evaluating and measuring the effects of mobile learning? Has your school come up with practices to share? Do me – and many of the blog readers, I guess – a favour and leave a comment!