26 min read

(For more resources related to this topic, see here.)

What is mobile learning?

There have been many attempts at defining mobile learning. Is it learning done on the move, such as on a laptop while we sit in a train? Or is it learning done on a personal mobile device, such as a smartphone or a tablet?

The capabilities of mobile devices

Anyone can develop mobile learning. You don’t need to be a gadget geek or have the latest smartphone or tablet. You certainly don’t need to know anything about the make and models of devices on the market. The only thing the learning practitioner really needs is an understanding of the capabilities of the mobile devices that your learners have. This will inform the types of mobile learning interventions that will be best suited to your audience. The following table shows an overview of what a mobile learner might be able to do with each of the device types. The Device uses column on the left should already be setting off lots of great learning ideas in your head!

Device uses

Feature phone

Smartphone

Tablet

Gaming device

Media player

Send texts

Yes

Yes

 

 

 

Mark calls

Yes

Yes

 

 

 

Take photos

Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes

Listen to music

Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes

Social networking

Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes

Take high res photos

 

Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes

Web searches

 

Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes

Web browsing

 

Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes

Watch online videos

 

Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes

Video calls

 

Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes

Edit photos

 

Yes

Yes

Yes

Yes

Shoot videos

 

Yes

Yes

 

Yes

Take audio recordings

 

Yes

Yes

 

Yes

Install apps

 

Yes

Yes

 

Yes

Edit documents

 

Yes

Yes

 

Yes

Use maps

 

Yes

Yes

 

Yes

Send MMS

 

Yes

Yes

 

 

View catch up TV

 

 

Yes

Yes

 

Better quality web browsing

 

 

Yes

Yes

 

Shopping online

 

 

Yes

 

 

Trip planning

 

 

Yes

 

 

Bear in mind that screen size will also impact the type of learning activity that can be undertaken. For example:

  • Feature phone displays are very small, so learning activities for this device type should center on text messaging with a tutor or capturing photos for an assignment.
  • Smartphones are significantly larger so there is a much wider range of learning activities available, especially around the creation of material such as photo and video for assignment or portfolio purposes, and a certain amount of web searching and browsing.
  • Tablets are more akin to the desktop computing environment, although some tasks such as typing are harder and taking photos is bit clumsier due to the larger size of the device. They are great for short learning tasks, assessments, video watching, and much more.

Warning – it’s not about delivering courses

Mobile learning can be many things. What it is not is simply the delivery of e-learning courses, which is traditionally the domain of the desktop computer, on a smaller device. Of course it can be used to deliver educational materials, but what is more important is that it can also be used to foster collaboration, to facilitate communication, to access performance support, and to capture evidence. But if you try to deliver an entire course purely on a mobile, then the likelihood is that no one will use it.

Your mobile learning strategy

Finding a starting point for your mobile learning design is easier said than done. It is often useful when designing any type of online interaction to think through a few typical user types and build up a picture of who they are and what they want to use the system for. This helps you to visualize who you are designing for. In addition to this, in order to understand how best to utilize mobile devices for learning, you also need to understand how people actually use their mobile devices. For example, learners are highly unlikely to sit at a smartphone and complete a 60 minutes e-learning course or type out an essay. But they are very likely to read an article, do some last minute test preparation or communicate with other learners.

Who are your learners?

Understanding your users is an important part of designing online experiences. You should take time to understand the types of learners within your own organization and what their mobile usage looks like, as a first step in delivering mobile learning on Moodle. With this in mind, let’s look at a handful of typical mobile learners from around the world who could reasonably be expected to be using an educational or workplace learning platform such as Moodle:

  • Maria is an office manager in Madrid, Spain. She doesn’t leave home without her smartphone and uses it wherever she is, whether for e-mail, web searching and browsing, reading the news, or social networking. She lives in a country where smartphone penetration has reached almost half of the population, of whom two-third access the internet every day on their mobile. The company she works for has a small learning platform for delivery of work-based learning activities and performance support resources.
  • Fourteen year old Jennifer attends school in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Like many of her peers, she carries a smartphone with her and it’s a key part of her life. The Brazilian population is one of the most connected in the developing world with nearly half of the population using the Internet, and its mobile phone subscriptions accounting for one-third of the entire subscriptions across Latin America and the Caribbean. Her elementary school uses a learning platform for the delivery of course resources, formative assessments, and submission of student assignments.
  • Nineteen year old Mike works as an apprentice at a large car maker in Sunderland, UK. He spends about one-third of his time in formal education, and his remaining days each week are spent on the production line, getting a thorough grounding in every element of the car manufacturing process. He owns a smartphone and uses it heavily, in a country where nearly half of the population accesses the Internet at least monthly on their smartphone. His employer has a learning platform for delivery of work-based learning and his college also has their own platform where he keeps a training diary and uploads evidence of skills acquisition for later submission and marking.
  • Josh is a twenty year old university student in the United States. In his country, nearly 90 percent of adults now own a mobile phone and half of all adults use their phone to access the Internet, although in his age group this increases to three quarters. Among his student peers across the U.S., 40 percent are already doing test preparation on their mobiles, whether their institution provides the means or not. His university uses a learning platform for delivery of course resources, submission of student assignments, and student collaborative activities.

These four particular learners were not chosen at random—there is one important thing that connects them all. The four countries they are from represent not just important mobile markets but, according to the statistics page on Moodle.org, also represent the four largest Moodle territories, together making up over a third of all registered Moodle sites in the world.

When you combine those Moodle market statistics with the level of mobile internet usage in each country, you can immediately see why support for mobile learning is so important for Moodle sites.

How do your learners use their devices?

In 2012, Google published the findings of a research survey which investigated how users behave across computer, tablet, smartphone, and TV screens. Their researchers found that users make decisions about what device to use for a given task depending on four elements that together make up the user’s context: location, goal, available time, and attitude. Each of these is important to take into account when thinking about what sort of learning interactions your users could engage in when using their mobile devices, and you should be aiming to offer a range of mobile learning interactions that can lend themselves to different contexts, for example, offering tasks ranging in length from 2 to 20 minutes, and tasks suited to different locations, such as home, work, college, or out in the field. The attitude element is an interesting one, and it’s important to allow learners to choose tasks that are appropriate to their mood at the time.

Google also found that users either move between screens to perform a single task ( sequential screening ) or use multiple screens at the same time ( simultaneous screening ). In the case of simultaneous screening, they are likely to be performing complementary tasks relating to the same activity on each screen. From a learning point of view, you can design for multi-screen tasks. For example, you may find learners use their computer to perform some complex research and then collect evidence in the field using their smartphone—these would be sequential screening tasks. A media studies student could be watching a rolling news channel on the television while taking photos, video, and notes for an assignment on his tablet or smartphone—these would be simultaneous screening tasks.

Understanding the different scenarios in which learners can use multiple screens will open up new opportunities for mobile learning.

A key statement from the Google research states that “Smartphones are the backbone of our daily media interactions”. However, despite occupying such a dominant position in our lives, the smartphone also accounts for the lowest time per user interaction at an average of 17 minutes, as opposed to 30 minutes for tablet, 39 minutes for computer, and 43 minutes for TV. This is an important point to bear in mind when designing mobile learning: as a rule of thumb you can expect a learner to engage with a tablet-based task for half an hour, and a smartphone-based task for just a quarter of an hour.

Google helpfully outlines some important multi-screen lessons. While these are aimed at identifying consumer behaviour and in particular online shopping habits, we can interpret them for use in mobile learning as follows:

  • Understand how people consume digital media and tailor your learning strategies to each channel
  • Learning goals should be adjusted to account for the inherent differences in each device
  • Learners must be able to save their progress between devices
  • Learners must be able to easily find the learning platform (Moodle) on each device
  • Once in the learning platform, it must be easy for learners to find what they are looking for quickly
  • Smartphones are the backbone of your learners’ daily media use, so design your learning to be started on smartphone and continued on a tablet or desktop computer

Having an understanding of how modern-day learners use their different screens and devices will have a real impact on your learning design.

Mobile usage in your organization

In 2011, the world reached a technology watershed when it was estimated that one third of the world’s seven billion people were online. The growth in online users is dominated by the developing world and is fuelled by mobile devices. There are now a staggering six billion mobile phone subscriptions globally. Mobile technology has quite simply become ubiquitous. And as Google showed us, people use mobile devices as the backbone of their daily media consumption, and most people already use them for school, college, or work regardless of whether they are allowed to.

In this section, we will look at how mobiles are used in some of the key sectors in which Moodle is used: in schools, further and higher education, and in the workplace.

Mobile usage in school

Moodle is widely used throughout primary and secondary education, and mobile usage among school pupils is widespread. The two are natural bedfellows in this sector. For example, in the UK half of all 12 to 15 year olds own a smartphone while 70 percent of 8 to 15 year olds have a games console such as a Nintendo DS or PlayStation in their bedroom.

Mobile device use is quite simply rampant among school children. Many primary schools now have policies which allow children to bring mobile phones into school, recognizing that such devices have a role to play in helping pupils feel safe and secure, particularly on the journey to and from school. However, it is a fairly normal practice among this age group for mobiles to be handed in at the start of the school day and collected at the end of the day. For primary pupils, therefore, the use of mobile devices for education will be largely for homework.

In secondary schools, the picture is very different. There is not likely to be a device hand-in policy during school hours and a variety of acceptable use policies will be in use. An acceptable use policy may include a provision for using mobiles in lesson time, with a teacher’s agreement, for the purposes of supporting learning. This, of course, opens up valuable learning opportunities.

Mobile learning in education has been the subject of a number of initiatives and research studies which are all excellent sources of information. These include:

  • Learning2Go, who were pioneers in mobile learning for schools in the UK, distributing hundreds of Windows Mobile devices to Wolverhampton schools between 2003 and 2007, introducing smartphones in 2008 under the Computers for Pupils initiative and the national MoLeNET scheme.
  • Learning Untethered, which was not a formal research project but an exploration that gave Android tablets to a class of fifth graders. It was noted that the overall ”feel” of the classroom shifted as students took a more active role in discovery, exploration and active learning.
  • The Dudley Handhelds initiative, which provided 300 devices to learners in grade five to ten across six primary schools, one secondary special school, and one mainstream secondary school.

These are just a few of the many research studies available, and they are well worth a read to understand how schools have been implementing mobile learning for different age groups.

Mobile usage in further and higher education

College students are heavy users of mobiles, and there is a roughly half and half split between smartphones and feature phones among the student community. Of the smartphone users, over 80 percent use them for college-related tasks. As we saw from Google’s research, smartphones are the backbone of your learners’ daily media use for those who have them. So if you don’t already provide mobile learning opportunities on your Moodle site, then it is likely that your users are already helping themselves to the vast array of mobile learning sites and apps that have sprung up in recent years to meet the high demand for such services.

If you don’t provide your students with mobile learning opportunities, you can bet your bottom dollar that someone else is, and it could be of dubious quality or out of date.

Despite the ubiquity of the mobile, many schools and colleges continue to ban them, viewing mobiles as a distraction or a means of bullying. They are fighting a rising tide, however.

Students are living their lives through their mobile devices, and these devices have become their primary means of communication. A study in late 2012 of nearly 295,000 students found that despite e-mail, IM, and text messaging being the dominant peer-communication tools for students, less than half of 14 to 18 year olds and only a quarter of 11 to 14 year olds used them to communicate with their teachers. Over half of high school students said they would use their smartphone to communicate with their teacher if it was allowed.

Unfortunately it rarely is, but this will change. Students want to be able to communicate electronically with their teachers; they want online text articles with classmate collaboration tools; they want to go online on their mobile to get information.

Go to where your students are and communicate with them in their native environment, which is via their mobile. Be there for them, engage them, and inspire them.

In the years approaching 2010, some higher education institutions started engaging in headline-grabbing “iPad for every student” initiatives. Many institutions adopted a quick-win strategy of making mobile-friendly websites with access to campus information, directories, news and events. It is estimated that in the USA over 90 percent of higher education institutions have mobile-friendly websites. Some of the headline-grabbing initiatives include the following:

  • Seton Hill University was the first to roll out iPads to all full-time students in 2010 and have continued to do so every year since. They are at the forefront of mobile learning in the US University sector and use Moodle as their virtual learning environment (VLE).
  • Abilene Christian University was the first university in the U.S. to provide iPhones or iPod Touches to all new full-time students in 2008, and are regarded as one of the most mobile-friendly campuses in the U.S.
  • The University of Western Sydney in Australia will roll out 11,000 iPads to all faculty and newly-enrolled students in 2013, as well as creating their own mobile apps.
  • Coventry University in the UK is creating a smart campus in which the geographical location of students triggers access to content and experiences through their mobile devices.
  • MoLeNET in the UK was one of the world’s largest mobile learning implementations, comprising 115 colleges, 29 schools, 50,000 students, and 4,000 staff from 2007 to 2010. This was a research-led initiative although unfortunately the original website has now been taken down.

While some of these examples are about providing mobile devices to new students, the Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) trend is strong in further and higher education. We know that mobile devices form the backbone of students’ media consumption and in the U.S. alone, 75 percent of students use their phone to access the Internet. Additionally, 40 percent have signed up to online test preparation sites on their mobiles, heavily suggesting that if an institution doesn’t provide mobile learning services, students will go and get it elsewhere anyway.

Instead of the glamorous offer of iPads for all, some institutions have chosen to invest heavily in their wireless network infrastructure in support of a BYOD approach. This is a very heavy investment and can be far more expensive than a few thousand iPads. Some BYOD implementations include:

  • King’s College London in the UK, which supports 6,000 staff and 23,500 students
  • The University of Tennessee at Knoxville in the U.S., which hosts more than 26,000 students and 5,000 faculty and staff members, with nearly 75,000 smartphones, tablets, and laptops
  • The University of South Florida in the U.S., which supports 40,000 users
  • Sau Paolo State University in Brazil, which has 45,000 students and noted that despite providing desktop machines in the computer labs, half of all students opted to use their own devices instead

There are many challenges to BYOD which are not within the scope of this article, but there are also many resources on how to implement a BYOD policy that minimizes such risks. Use the Internet to seek these out.

Providing campus information websites on mobiles obviously was not the key rationale behind such technology investments. The real interest is in delivering mobile learning, and this remains an area full of experimentation and research. Google Scholar can be used to chart the rise of mobile learning research and it becomes evident how this really takes off in the second half of the decade, when the first major institutions started investing in mobile technology. It indexes scholarly literature, including journal and conference papers, theses and dissertations, academic articles, pre-prints, abstracts, and technical reports. A year-by-year search reveals the rise of mobile learning research from just over 100 articles in 2000 to over 6,000 in 2012.

The following chart depicts the rise of mobile learning in academic research:

Mobile usage in apprenticeships

A typical apprenticeship will include a significant amount of college-based learning towards a qualification, alongside a major component based in the workplace under the supervision of an employer while the apprentice learns a particular trade. Due to the movement of the student from college to workplace, and the fact that the apprentice usually has to keep a reflective log and capture evidence of their skills acquisition, mobile devices can play a really useful role in apprenticeships.

Traditionally, the age group for apprenticeships is 16 to 24 year olds. This is an age group that has never known a world without mobiles and their mobile devices are integrated into the fabric of their daily lives and media consumption. They use social networks, SMS, and instant messaging rather than e-mail, and are more likely to use the mobile internet than any other age group. Statistics from the U.S. reveal that 75 percent of students use their phone to access the Internet.

Reflective logs are an important part of any apprenticeship. There are a number of activities in Moodle that can be used for keeping reflective logs, and these are ideal for mobile learning. Reflective log entries tend to be shorter than traditional assignments and lend themselves well to production on a tablet or even a smartphone. Consumption of reflective logs is perfect for both smartphone and tablet devices, as posts tend to be readable in less than 5 minutes.

Many institutions use Moodle coupled with an ePortfolio tool such as Mahara or Onefile to manage apprenticeship programs. There are additional Packt Publishing articles on ePortfolio tools such as Mahara, should you wish to investigate a third-party, open source ePortfolio solution.

Mobile usage in the workplace

BYOD in the workplace is also becoming increasingly common, and, appears to be an unstoppable trend. It may also be discouraged or banned on security, data protection, or distraction grounds, but it is happening regardless. There is an increasing amount of research available on this topic, and some key findings from various studies reveal the scale of the trend:

  • A survey of 600 IT and business leaders revealed that 90 percent of survey respondents had employees using their own devices at work
  • 65 to 75 percent of companies allow some sort of BYOD usage
  • 80 to 90 percent of employees use a personal mobile device for business use

If you are a workplace learning practitioner then you need to sit up and take note of these numbers if you haven’t done so already. Even if your organization doesn’t officially have a BYOD policy, it is most likely that your employees are already using their own mobile devices for business purposes. It’s up to your IT department to manage this safely, and again there are many resources and case studies available online to help with this. But as a learning practitioner, whether it’s officially supported or not, it’s worth asking yourself whether you should embrace it anyway, and provide learning activities to these users and their devices.

Mobile usage in distance learning

Online distance learning is principally used in higher education (HE), and many institutions have taken to it either as a new stream of revenue or as a way of building their brand globally. Enrolments have rocketed over recent years; the number of U.S. students enrolled in an online course has increased from one to six million in a decade. Online enrolments have also been the greatest source of new enrolments in HE in that time, outperforming general student enrolment dramatically. Indeed, the year 2011 in the US saw a 10 percent growth rate in distance learning enrolment against 2 percent in the overall HE student population. In the 2010 to 2011 academic years, online enrolments accounted for 31 percent of all U.S. HE enrolments.

Against this backdrop of phenomenal growth in HE distance learning courses, we also have a new trend of Massive Online Open Courses (MOOCs) which aim to extend enrolment past traditional student populations to the vast numbers of potential students for whom a formal HE program of study may not be an option.

The convenience and flexibility of distance learning appeal to certain groups of the population. Distance learners are likely to be older students, with more than 30 years of age being the dominant age group. They are also more likely to be in full-time employment and taking the course to help advance their careers, and are highly likely to be married and juggling home and family commitments with their jobs and coursework.

We know that among the 30 to 40 age group mobile device use is very high, particularly among working professionals, who are a major proportion of HE distance learners. However, the MOOC audience is of real interest here as this audience is much more diverse. As many MOOC users find traditional HE programs out of their reach, many of these will be in developing countries, where we already know that users are leapfrogging desktop computing and going straight to mobile devices and wireless connectivity. For these types of courses, mobile support is absolutely crucial.

A wide variety of tools exist to support online distance learning, and these are split between synchronous and asynchronous tools, although typically a blend of the two is used. In synchronous learning, all participants are present at the same time. Courses will therefore be organized to a timetable, and will involve tools such as webinars, video conferences, and real-time chat. In asynchronous learning, courses are self-directed and students work to their own schedules, and tools include e-mail, discussion forums, audio recording, video recordings, and printed material.

Connecting distance learning from traditional institutions to MOOCs is a recognized need to improve course quality and design, faculty training, course assessment, and student retention. There are known barriers, including motivation, feedback, teacher contact, and student isolation. These are major challenges to the effectiveness of distance learning, and later in this article we will demonstrate how mobile devices can be used to address some of these areas.

Case studies

The following case studies illustrate two approaches to how an HE institution and a distance learning institution have adopted Moodle to deliver mobile learning. Both institutions were very early movers in making Moodle mobile-friendly, and can be seen as torch bearers for the rest of us. Fortunately, both institutions have also been influential in the approach that Moodle HQ have taken to mobile compatibility, so in using the new mobile features in recent versions of Moodle, we are all able to take advantage of the substantial amount of work that went into these two sites.

University of Sussex

The University of Sussex is a research-led HE institution on the south coast of England. They use a customized Moodle 1.9 installation called Study Direct, which plays host to 1,500 editing tutors and 15,000 students across 2,100 courses per year, and receives 13,500 unique hits per day.

The e-learning team at the University of Sussex contains five staff (one manager, two developers, one user support, and one tutor support) whose remit covers a much wider range of learning technologies beyond the VLE. However, the team has achieved a great deal with limited resources. It has been working towards a responsive design for some years and has helped to influence the direction of Moodle with regards to designing for mobile devices and usability, through speaking at UK Moodle and HE conferences and providing passionate inputs into debates on the Moodle forums on the subject of interface design. Further to this, team member Stuart Lamour is one of the three original developers of the Bootstrap theme for Moodle, which is used throughout this article.

The Study Direct site shows what is possible in Moodle, given the time and resources for its development and a focus on user-centered design. The approach has been to avoid going down the native application route for mobile access like many institutions have done, and to instead focus on a responsive, browser-based user experience.

The login page is simple and clean. One of the nice things that the University of Sussex has done is to think through the user interactions on its site and clearly identify calls to action, typically with a green button, as shown by the sign in button on the login page in the following screenshot:

The team has built its own responsive theme for Moodle. While the team has taken a leading role on development of the Moodle 2 Bootstrap theme, the University of Sussex site is still on Moodle 1.9 so this implementation uses its own custom theme. This theme is fully responsive and looks good when viewed on a tablet or a smartphone, reordering screen elements as necessary for each screen resolution.

The course page, shown in the following screenshot, is similarly clear and uncluttered. The editing interface has been customized quite heavily to give tutors a clear and easy way to edit their courses without running the risk of messing up the user interface. The team maintains a useful and informative blog explaining what they have done to improve the user experience, and which is well worth a read.

Open University

The Open University (OU) in the UK runs one the largest Moodle sites in the world. It is currently using Moodle 2 for the OU’s main VLE as well as for its OpenLearn and Qualifications online platforms. Its Moodle implementation regularly sees days with well over one million transactions and over 60,000 unique users, and has seen peak times of 5,000 simultaneous online users.

The OU’s focus on mobile Moodle goes back to about 2010, so it was an early mover in this area. This means that the OU did not have the benefit of all the mobile-friendly features that now come with Moodle, but had to largely create its own mobile interface from scratch.

Anthony Forth gave a presentation at the UK Moodle Moot in 2011 on the OU’s approach to mobile interface design for Moodle. He identified that at the time the Open University migrated to Moodle 2 in 2011 it had over 13,000 mobile users per month.

The OU chose to survey a group of 558 of these users in detail to investigate their needs more closely. It transpired that the most popular uses of Moodle on mobile devices was for forums, news, resources and study planners, while areas such as wikis and blogs were very low down the list of users’ priorities. So the OU’s mobile design focused on these particular areas as well as looking at usability in general.

The preceding screenshot shows the OU course page with tabbed access to the popular areas such as Planner, News, Forums, and Resources, and then the main content area providing space for latest news, unread forum posts, and activities taking place this week.

The site uses a nice, clean, and easy to understand user interface in which a lot of thought has gone into the needs of the student.

Summary

In this article, we have provided you with a vision of how mobile learning could be put to use on your own organization’s Moodle platform. We gave you an understanding of some of the foundation concepts of mobile learning, some insights into how important mobile learning is becoming, and how it is gaining momentum in different sectors.

Your learners are already using mobile devices whether in educational institutions or in the workplace, and they use mobile devices as the backbone of their daily online interactions. They want to also use them for learning. Hopefully, we have started you off on a mobile learning path that will allow you to make this happen.

Mobile devices are where the future of Moodle is going to be played out, so it makes complete sense to be designing for mobile access right now. Fortunately, Moodle already provides the means for this to happen and provides tools that allow you to set it up for mobile delivery.

Resources for Article :

Further resources on this subject:

Packt

LEAVE A REPLY

Please enter your comment!
Please enter your name here