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Education IT

Learning beyond the classroom

By Kelly Ng | 21 June 2010

She has music blasting from her MP3 player almost every waking minute. She spends over seven hours a day on entertainment media. She checks her phone every ten minutes for updates from friends via messages and tweets. She is the average student.

Surrounded by portable devices which keep them in constant contact with their family, friends and the world, students today absorb, interact with and create content outside of the classroom more than they do inside it.

Lingnan University in Hong Kong recently surveyed 783 freshmen in their first week. 62 per cent had phones that could access the internet. 49 per cent of them use SMS several times a day. Nearly 70 per cent of them take photos with their mobile phones at least once a week. “Students carry mobile phones everywhere they go and use them all the time,” observes Dr David Kennedy, Director and Associate Professor, Teaching and Learning Centre of Lingnan University. “We should leverage the technologies and applications in these devices and take advantage of the skills students already possess by building activities and resources around the devices they have 24/7.”

Portable devices, like the mobile phone, can make learning more individualised, adds Dr Kennedy. In ongoing research funded by a Hong Kong General Research Fund grant, he is working with language instructors to develop a blended learning environment that incorporates the use of iPhones and more recently, the iPad. “In these new courses, students will be asked to use the technologies in mobile phones as an integral part of their language learning – taking photos, creating voice notes, recording interviews and presentations, and reflecting on the activities and what they have learned. Students will then present what they have done, uploading their content into an ePortfolio for sharing and feedback. Such activities will enable each student to contextualise their learning experiences, providing a unique highly personalised experience. Using these strategies, you get much better student engagement compared to what can happen in a conventional classroom, where students get uniform or similar tasks,” Kennedy says.

According to Tom Joseph, Director of Asia Pacific Education Programmes, Autodesk, mobile devices open new learning avenues. “Conventional learning opportunities are bound by the faculty and students in the classroom. If a group of students is struggling with a problem, the discussion is limited to the minds within the classroom. But when each student is connected to the web and a global community anytime and anywhere, they can get thousands of ideas on how to solve the problem. And this collaboration can take place in real-time across the globe,” he explains. Besides enhancing learning, mobile phones have become the best channel to reach students. The library at Hong Kong University implemented a system which sends a text message to the student when the book on loan is overdue. The system reduced the amount of money due to late returns by 90 per cent. Several platforms have now been developed by educational institutions, which allow faculty to send text messages from an interface similar to an email programme.

Learning on mobile devices has its challenges. One is the battery life of these portable devices. “Users will be running more processor- and energydemanding tasks such as listening to podcasts, watching a movie, recording media files and sharing large files. Looking at the current devices in the market, users still need to manage the battery life very carefully. Two of the most popular devices, the iPhone and the newly launched iPad, for instance, have expected battery lives of just 10 hours,” notes Kennedy, but experience has shown that students are very skilled at battery management.

If students are more engaged and learn better outside the classroom, will physical campuses be a curiosity of the past for the next generation? Steve Ryan, Director, Centre for Learning Technology, The London School of Economics and Political Science, United Kingdom, does not think so. “The death of the university campus is overstated. There are huge opportunities in online learning but there will always be a value in meeting face-to-face. The rich experience of gathering in campus and learning together is hard to quantify,” he believes. Dr Kennedy concurs, stating that “students value enormously the relationships that develop in a face-to-face class, but mobile learning offers opportunities to increased collaboration and communication outside their classes”.

“Integration will be the future of mobile learning where an integrated network of hardware and solutions will connect all parts of the organisation so that the user will be able to access information remotely and interactively. HP is transforming learning towards student-centered, personalised learning environments by leveraging technology in an affordable and sustainable way to create new possibilities for technology to have a meaningful impact on people,businesses, governments and society,” says Ng Tian Chong, Vice President & General Manager, Personal Systems Group, South East Asia, Taiwan & Korea, HP.

The generation has integrated these mobile technologies into their lives. The ball is in the educators’ court as to whether they can leverage these devices for learning purposes.

Case Studies

India
Satish Jha, President, One Laptop Per Child (OLPC)
Device: Laptop (OLPC XO)
Cost : INR15000 (US$300)
Student profile : 1900 students, five to 15 year-olds
Description of project: Each child is provided with a rugged, low-cost, low-power, connected laptop with content and software designed for collaborative, enjoyable, self-learning. They choose from 40 to 200 applications to draw, write, access eBooks, browse the web, record or create music and play games.
Challenges: As a non-profit organisation, OLPC lacks monetary and human resources. Pressing issues such as getting food and water to rural villages push getting laptops down the list of priorities for governments.
Next step: At the moment, there are 27 schools which have 15 to 50 laptops each. Jha is working with respective governments to roll out 75,000 laptops in Manipur, 2000 in Mawana, more than 100,000 in Uttar Pradesh and Himachal respectively.

USA
Janet Temos, Director of the Educational Technologies Centre, Princeton University
Device: E-Reader (Amazon Kindle EX)
Cost: US$489
Student profile: 51 Undergraduate and graduate students
Description of project: In the Autumn of 2009, a pilot programme using electronic readers (e-readers) was launched to determine if it will reduce the use of paper while not compromising the learning experience. Students in three pilot courses received their readings on the Kindle.
Challenges: The goal of printing less in the pilot courses was achieved: pilot participants printed just over half the amount of sheets than control groups who did not use e-readers. The classroom experience was somewhat worsened by using e-readers, as study and reference habits of a lifetime were challenged by device limitations. The “writing” tools fell short of expectations, and prevented them from doing things easily accomplished with paper.

Singapore
Lim Ee-Lon, Manager, iMedia Centre, Ngee Ann Polytechnic (NP)
Device: Portable media player (iPod Touch)
Cost: S$300 (US$200)
Student profile: 20-25 per cent of its 16,000 students, 17-19 year-olds
Description of project: NP has custom-developed applications for academic, administrative, and social networking purposes. Students can track how well they are performing in the National Physical Fitness Assessment (NAPFA) using the ‘NAPFA Test’ calculator application. Other applications help students manage their lectures and tutorials, track deadlines, arrange assignments with the pre-loaded academic year calendar. There is also a location-intelligent application to show the nearest canteen via the campus map, with corresponding food reviews.
Challenges: NP has to purchase an enterprise developer licence (US$299 annually) for the distribution of in-house custom developed applications through iTunes. Owing to cost considerations, iPod touch is more viable for students, but does not have GPS technology, camera capabilities and so on.
Next step: NP will increase engagement of students in application conceptualisation, design & development.

International
Benjamin Bederson, Co-founder, International Children’s Digital Library (ICDL)
Device: iPad
Cost: US$499
Student profile: 29,102 children and 49,420 adults from 228 countries
Description of project: ICDL for iPad gives users access to a collection of free online children’s books with over 4000 titles in more than 54 languages representing 64 countries. Its engaging interface lets children find books easily and takes advantage of iPad’s ‘auto-rotation feature’. ICDL’s PopoutText technology allows users to read story text clearly in the context of highly illustrated beautiful children’s picture books regardless of screen size.
Challenges: Instead of downloading the entire book in advance like you would for an e-reader, ICDL users read the free books via the live web. This means that the experience might be slower. It might also be too heavy – at 1.5lbs – to hold on one hand while reading.

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