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Education IT

Malaysia uni to use sms for m-learning

By Xinghui Guo | 31 March 2011

In the Universiti Sains Malaysia (USM), one of the biggest universities in terms of enrolment in the Southeast Asian country, a mobile learning research team has created Pocket Education. This initiative provides free mobile learning resources to anyone, targeting those within the “bottom billion” communities in developing countries.

Issham Ismail, Director of mobilelearning@usm, USM, said, “Mobile phones are a must-have technology since it has the highest number of subscribers. Hence with content rich SMSes, that only requires a basic accessibility of mobile technology, education opportunities are made available to almost everyone.”

With a RM330,000 (US$190,000) grant from the education ministry, the research team, mobilelearning@usm, focus on using cheap mobile technology to disseminate education materials whether informal and for the masses, or formal mobile learning content like secondary school science subjects. In the pilot programme, the research team found that one SMS can contain a complete definition of a certain physics phenomenon. Text messages were constructed according to the sequence of topics in the learning materials, thus delivering course content to the students.

To develop such content, the team has worked on identifying factors that influence learners’ acceptance or rejection of mobile content, said Ismail to FutureGov Asia Pacific. So far, 20 postgraduate students had begun learning and conducting research via SMS.

In the future, Ismail said the organisation is going to propose to the Ministry of Higher Education “to extend the M-learning methodology to all universities as the cost is much less compared to the conventional methods”.

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