Mobile learning: the next generation of learning

Conclusion 1. The importance of mobile learning

Distance education is intrinsically linked to technology in education. Mobile telephony is the most widespread technology ever. There are 1.5 billion of them for a world population of 6 billion. Their use for learning and training is essential.
Conclusion 2. The new missions and challenges facing the Open Universities today.
Open universities have dispersed student bodies with whom they have to communicate. Each of these students possesses a communication device that he or she carries constantly. A pressing new mission and challenge for the Open Universities is to harness these communication devices for administrative purposes, for short courses, course summaries and for full modules.
Conclusion 3. The two markets for mobile learning.
There are two markets for mobile learning: learners that are either without computing infrastructure and access, or learners that are continually on the move. In other words:

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  3^rd world rural or remote area learners who have mobile phones, and
  

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  1^st world learners who are the workforce on the move with state of the art mobile devices.
  

Conclusion 4. The omnipresence of mobile phones.
The much awaited introduction of 3G wireless technologies will occur in the near future and will make mobile telephony even more powerful and widely used than they are today. At the present one can plan that nearly every member of the student bodies of all universities has a mobile phone.
Conclusion 5. The success of PDAs
All the problems associated with presenting full mobile learning courses on PDAs have been solved. There should be no difficulties in developing learning materials for these devices and running full courses on them. The problem with PDAs is that there are only 7-8 million of them in the world today and sales are not increasing. Industry experts suggest that PDAs may eventually be merged into smartphones.
Conclusion 6. Mobile learning on smartphones and mobile phones
There are 1.5 billion of these devices in the world today and the Chinese market alone is growing at the rate of millions per month. The problems of presenting courseware on these devices have not yet been solved. This is the task for the present development of mobile learning.
Conclusion 7. The future is wireless.
The awkwardness of wiring and wired devices is giving way everywhere to wireless connections. This development is now impacting education and training. The development of mobile learning is the new cutting edge in development, the next generation after e-learning.

Reference

Brown, T. (2004) Exploring future learning paradigms. Will m-learning survive? MLEARN 2004 Conference, Bracciano, Italy.

CHAPTER 4 PLANNING FOR MOBILE LEARNING
Introduction
The choice of devices and technologies for mobile learning will depend on the definition of mobile learning adopted.
In this study mobile learning is defined as ‘the provision of education and training on mobile devices: Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs), palmtops and handhelds and on smartphones and mobile phones’.
This definition reflects the tension in the field of mobile learning between functionality and mobility. The devices available may be assembled on a continuum running from the most functional to the most mobile. Because the focus in mobile learning is on mobility this presentation limits the range of mobile learning limits the range of the field to the devices listed, to the exclusion of laptop computers.
There are five dimensions to this chapter:

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  Definition of devices to be used
  

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  Definition of technologies to be used
  

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  Development of tools and environments to be used
  

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  The search for a wireless Learning Management System (mLMS), that is the changes that are needed to an LMS to ‘mobilise’ it
  

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  Definition of courses to be developed.
  

1. Definition of devices to be used

What do we want?

When we look at how our students and teachers are working today, we find good readability to be of great importance. The materials that we offer online as well as answers to assignments and the assignments themselves, are quite extensive and demand a readable screen. The size is also an issue, but we must also take ease of mobility into consideration. If the screen is to be large, the device will inevitability have to be bigger.
The hypothetically perfect device would be small and fit easily into one’s pocket. The screen should fold out to A4 paper size and have paper readability. Wireless connectivity should be of high speed, the user should be always online with the possibility to switch seamlessly between wireless zones and phone networks. The device should have an integrated phone and support all the major office formats for reading and writing as well as pdf format. Security should be high, and if the device is lost the data should be made useless with no risk to the owner. The perfect device should render standard web pages perfectly and offer the ability to strip out advertisements etc. and display useful content only. The web pages should be readable offline as well as online. This should facilitate an understandable on-the-fly text-to-voice and voice-to-text feature.
It is believed the above would be a close to perfect device, but since a device satisfying these specifications is not presently on the market and will not be within the foreseeable future one needs to restrict what one wants and attend to what one needs.
The following list describes a close-to-perfect handheld device:

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  Always online connectivity
  
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  Bluetooth for connection with other devices
  
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  Built-in video cannon for displaying presentations etc.
  
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  Camera for documentation in the field
  
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  Flash support
  
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  Full size keyboard available
  
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  Full WI-FI connectivity
  
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  Large storage capacity (Large is a relative term changing with time)
  
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  Screen of acceptable size and readability
  
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  Large battery capacity
  
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  Messaging client for peer-to-peer communication
  
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  Non-volatile memory for backup
  
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  Phone ability
  
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  Read Adobe Acrobat documents
  
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  Read/write common office formats
  
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  Scanner and printer built in
  
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  Small compact device
  
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  Support multimedia content as well as flash, java and java script etc.
  
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  Synchronize and check e-mail with common mail clients.
  
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  Text-to-voice screen reader and Dictaphone