Going mobile

When Going Mobile was released by The Who 40 years ago this year, telephones were - if I remember correctly - hardwired into the wall, with no functionality beyond dialing and speaking. Although the party line allowed you to meet online with at least one other person . . . .

I want to talk about the use of mobile technology in education, or mLearning. Our students have embraced mobile technology. The Chronicle of Higher Education states that over half of all college students accessed the internet using a smartphone or a tablet like the iPad in 2010. Only 2 years before, this number was only 10% of students. They are using mobile devices not just to telephone, but to connect with others via text and on social media websites, to access materials on the web, and to interact with a huge variety of apps.


Institutions will be forced to respond to the growing demand for easy mobile access to their offerings. This means not just reading the university's website on a smartphone, but finding and registering in courses, and interacting with course components that are web-based. Students in distance education taking hybrid or fully online courses will become increasingly likely to use mobile devices to post comments to online discussions, access course materials, etc. Indeed, students may well use mobile technology exclusively. It's hard to envision students continuing to lug laptop computers around unless they need them specifically - so much of what they use laptops for has now become available on smartphones and tablets.


Online instructors and those with web-based course components are under pressure to understand how mobile technology can be used in order to make informed decisions about how that might affect they way they present material to students and interact with them.  Not only the format of course material may change. The way educators do their jobs will also likely change as more of them adopt mobile technology. Even adding a few simple apps can change the way educators manage their professional lives.


Instructors in the classroom can also incorporate mobile technology. For example, if your institution does not supply clickers, you can use mobile (and web) technology to create an audience response system. Use something like Poll Everywhere to display a question from your classroom computer to your overhead screen and give students the option to respond using text messaging, email, the web or Twitter. Poll response are displayed in real time.


Students from less advantaged places on earth will also find increased access to educational opportunities through digital media accessed by mobile devices that are cheaper and more portable than desktop computers.


So, the growing use of mobile technology poses several challenges for educators:

• get familiar with it and understand how students are using it - our students may be literally anywhere
• consider how mLearning might be incorporated into our courses
• contribute to the scholarly debate concerning mLearning other educational technologies
• conduct empirical research on the use and efficacy of mobile technology in education and use evidence-based practices wherever possible

For a recent review of many of these issues see Mobile Learning: Transforming the Delivery of Education and Training (2009) edited by Mohamed Ally.


Currently we are in a transitional state - mLearning is here and burgeoning, and scholarly research on how to best use it is a field that will grow with it. How are using mobile technology in education?