LEARNING FROM A DISTANCE - with your phone?

Just Friday one of my students showed me his recently purchased smart phone.  After saying how cool it was, the next thing I thought was “how can I use these things in my classroom to enhance learning…”  I thought to myself “the screen is big enough to easily watch a movie, so why not interactive educational material?”  If given the chance, my student could be anywhere in the world as long as there was an internet connection and have access to content if available. So, I set off on a search to learn more. Here is a report from my initial investigations. Could this be an example of  a “disruptive innovation”?

I came found a study by Minjuan Wang, Ruimin Shen, Daniel Novak, and Xiaoyan Pan entitled “The Impact of Mobile Learning On Students’ Learning Behaviours and Performance: Report From a Large Blended Classroom”.  In their study, they set out to determine if cell-phone technology could increase interactivity in a blended English as an additional language classroom in China.  The students had the option to take the class using a synchronous or asynchronous distance learning method.  They soon found that the students enrolled in the live broadcast weren’t provided with a way to interact with the instructor or with each other.  They feel that distance learning without interactivity reinforces students’ ability to be passive learners who don’t (or in this case can’t) participate.  Consequently, they developed a program where students could tune in anywhere and reply instantly with their devices.

Chinese university students are noted as being a bit reserved, listening quietly to what the instructor has to say.  In actuality, this is really no different than what North American students have been subjected to in lecture theatres until recent times.  The system was incorporated to engage the students to participate rather than be passive learners simply watching a lecture on a screen or classroom.  Initially, a reward system was used to further elicit responses.  They had four options for tuning into the class with the text/audio/video option being most popular (much like our “kitchen parties”).  The students would then text in answers to questions posed by the instructor allowing them to response immediately.  Students also had the opportunity to post messages to a forum and these postings were also analyzed in the study.

The project was deemed as a success on many levels. The researchers felt that it promoted interaction as well as engaging students cognitively, socially, and emotionally.  The students were found to have had a high level of satisfaction with the class, the method of delivery, and with the activities presented to them in class.  The authors present us with all kinds of statistical data to substantiate their findings.

I could see this being especially useful in the social sciences and languages.  As a mathematics teacher, I struggle to think of a practical use in my subject area other than for choosing an answer in a multiple choice format.  Perhaps I could be proven wrong.  If any teachers have used this technology, I would be interested to hear your thoughts.  With phones getting more and more technologically advanced, and with wifi or 4G available in more and more places, hopefully the excuse “I wasn’t the day we learned this” soon becomes obsolete.  My only fear is that this could be seen as a fad and the interest could soon wane.  I intend to research this topic further.

Check out the study – it’s an interesting read.

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1467-8535.2008.00846.x/abstract

Wang, R. S., Shen, R., Novak, D., & Pan, X. (2009). The impact of mobile learning on

students’ learning behaviours and performance: Report from a large blended

classroom. British Journal of Educational Technology, 40(4), 673-695.

doi:10.1111/j.1467-8535.2008.00846.x