Students at the University of Leicester’s new distance learning MSc in security, conflict and international development face more challenges than the typical distance learner. To illustrate, some students might spend weeks without access to an online connection, working in a refugee camp in post-conflict countries. How does the university make certain these remote students have everything they had to perform their studies
“When you are doing that kind of thing, you cannot be carrying huge folders of printed material,” says Prof Adrian Beck, head of the university’s department of criminology. “It struck us that we would have liked to seek out a technique for them to move our materials that may be highly flexible but low-weight, and offers them access to all of the material they are going to need while at the go.”
The solution was to provide every student at the course a free iPad, directly to which they may download a bespoke app and all of the course materials. Despite concerns from the university about security and technical support, the plan has gone smoothly. a couple of months into the MSc, no iPads were lost or stolen and scholars have responded with enthusiasm.
Distance-learning providers already use virtual learning environments (VLEs) to enable students to read documents online, contact tutors, submit coursework, or engage in discussions with other students. However the increasing approval for smartphones, iPads and Kindles implies that universities at the moment are responding to student demand to access those resources from their mobile devices.
The Open University (OU), for instance, is developing a brand new generation of interactive course materials for tablet computers and has just launched OU Anywhere, a tablet and smartphone app that allows students to download the entire course materials they wish directly to their mobile devices. The app also allows users to access the university’s VLE to have interaction with fellow students and tutors. For distance learners, who often struggle to mix studying with full-time work, this gives a brand new flexibility. Prof Mike Sharples, chair in educational technology on the OU, says mobile devices are perfect for students who wish to study during lunchbreaks or quiet moments at work, or at the train home.
As the price of technology falls, mobile devices become more powerful and cross-platform development becomes simpler, it kind of feels inevitable that universities will begin to take mobile devices under consideration after they design learning resources.
Stuart Sutherland, senior development and delivery manager on the University of Derby Online, which has recently introduced an app to permit mobile access to its VLE, thinks that the arrival of free Massive Online Open Courses (MOOCs) is forcing traditional universities to elevate their game, and to design content specifically for a mobile environment, akin to short videos or podcasts. “The small video explaining a troublesome mathematic or scientific phenomenon is often a greater way of explaining that than text,” says Sutherland. Terese Bird, a learning technologist on the University of Leicester who’s evaluating the impact of tablets in distance learning, argues that mobiles could be ideal for bite-sized learning: “One benefit identified by scholars is if you learn something briefly frequent bursts, you may actually have the ability to learn better than doing a five-hour study spree on the weekend.”
Opportunities for social learning open up when students use mobile devices: the OU, as an example, plans to permit students to share their e-reader annotations online, and to determine which other students are reading an identical text and chat online to them about it. The Leicester MSc students have an app that permits them to determine where other students on their course can be found and contact them. They are able to also make video calls to their tutors in given time slots or they could ask written questions, with the answers then made available to other students. Twitter functionality may be built into the following iteration of the app. As one student, RAF squadron leader Julian Turner, says: “i can often be using a note-taking app, ebook reader app and mind mapping app concurrently when studying.”
Mobile devices offer not only convenience and adaptability, but potentially a brand new way of studying. Equipped with cameras, video and sound recorders, and GPS, they allow students to become creators in addition users of info – by recording a brief video for a course assessment, as an example. John Traxler, professor of mobile learning on the University of Wolverhampton, says mobile technologies can be utilized to assist undergraduates “think like scientists, to have hypotheses and test them by gathering data within the wild as opposed to re-enacting what Michael Faraday did 200 years ago”.
It could be early days, however the potential for using mobile technologies to remodel the experience of distance learning is big. As Beck says: “Distance learning has gone from being something pretty static and lonely to something it’s a lot more dynamic and interactive, and you’ll find the right way to engage students in a community of learners that was quite difficult to do prior to now.”
