Mobile learning has its features that, once known, they strengthen the overall learning experience of the student and can make it easier, enjoyable and flexible.
Designing for a course is like designing a car; it needs to be useful, desirable, practical, and flexible to your users' needs and wants. To find out what your student needs from your course, you already conducted your needs assessment, you have now to engineer (plan) your actions and look into the theory to know how to implement it into the field of your school. To do so, it is important to know what to look for, what to pay attention to, and then, what to integrate exactly to be able to redesign your course and instruction.
First, you need to know this...
Mobile learning is all about personal devices, light weighted and easy to carry like tablets, laptops and smart phones. Some of these tools can be wireless connected to the internet, others are cable connected or data limited with internet card.
To start redesigning your course with mobile considerations, you need to define what type of internet your users are going to have to know exactly the capacity of the internet you are getting to designing for. Designing for a MENA region course is different from designing for the Golf region. it depends on the rapidity of the internet. in some other regions, electricity itself is not stable. So, deciding on the tools, activities and the format of the delivery of your course (blending combination) should be known before any redesigning process.
But, if you have all these details set from the beginning, it is now time to balance your knowledge for the good, the interesting and the bad things about mobile learning.
The good thing in mobile learning is that it allows students and teachers gain freedom in learning through personal devices: laptops, tablets, and smart phones. It benefits the student in constructing a personalized platform for learning that is shaped according to his needs and wants. Teachers, as educators, can organize their work easily when they use their own devices rather than working on the school computer where their privacy may be breached. They have their calendars set automatically with reminders and their classes scheduled ahead. Students also, who are keen to use personal devices can collaborate and share educational games and contents from their devices, they can use them for augmented reality in educational applications and to apply their creative and beyond the reality thinking. Their social skills are much advanced than those of children in their age in older generations. They can get instant information, updated and new at a fingertip and they can receive feedback from their teachers instantly as well.
The interesting thing about mobile learning is that many applications are now designed in a way that suit all type of devices, which allows for a better learning as the display of the content is customized to multiple devices. The speed of processing the information is better too, and few years back, many applications were asking the user to use his laptop to have a better user experience. Now, the capacity to process heavy documents, long texts and visual contents in small devices is higher. What is interesting in mobile learning is that formal and informal learning are combined in one place. We do not learn only to get certification and gratifications, we learn because we want to know something, we search for it, we read more, we are open to better resources from other cultures and faraway places. That is why mLearning's slogan is about "whenever and wherever" you are, you can still learning.
The bad thing about mobile learning is that many students spend more time playing on their personal devices than getting educational benefits from it. The learning itself has changed when people started designing for personal devices as the learning time slot has reduced considerably taking into consideration the fact that sitting in front of the devices for a long time can be harmful for the body and the mind. the security of our children is also questioned with mobile learning, our privacy is not considered as such anymore; we share so many details that our children's life, interests and habits are social topics.
Then, you need to know this...
Designing for such generation is a tough work where details are very important. students now need their learning to be displayed in a specific way that makes UDL principles the key for designing, and knowledge of technological tool features is one way to produce tailored documents and school announcements. The goal of our design is to give the mobile the tasks that our brains do not do well like memorization and monitoring. let the device repeat, record information, recall it when it needs to, show notification when it is time for it, save passwords, pop-up informational messages, organize in patterns the platform for learning... etc.
What the designer should know before taking any action is that designing for mLearning does not mean transform all the learning material into digital version of the course. It is about performance and context. Two words that should stick to your head whenever you started to redesign your instruction.
At last, you need to read on this...
mLearning frameworks.
Learning theories for mLearning.
Design principles for mobile learning.
Each of these points will be detailed in separate posts in this blog. please read them before you approach your instructional design. An overview for each of these details is necessary to be able to plan for the new instruction with mobile considerations.
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