Spreading mobile learning in Asia (I)

MobiLearn Asia 2013
2nd-3rd October, 2013
Singapore

[See also Day 2 blog post]

Sin4B

Gardens by the Bay, Singapore. Photo by Mark Pegrum, 2013. May be reused under CC BY 3.0 licence.

The second MobiLearn Asia conference has built on the success of the first, increasing the number of speakers and attendees gathering to discuss the rapidly growing field of mobile learning.

In their Day 1 keynote, Future of Learning: Dreaming and Preparing for 2020, Geoff Stead and Tamar Elkeles from Qualcomm suggested that the time has come to use everyday devices to transform lives, creating a mobile life cycle. Phones are no longer as much for voice; they’re more for data. People communicate nowadays via data and social media. User-generated content has become critically important.

BYOD, they suggested, is already here. In 2012, 50% of workers brought their own personal devices to work. It is anticipated that by 2015, more than 300 million pre-K-12 students will be carrying mobile devices, opening up huge educational potential.

In the workplace, it may not be about learning in the sense of classes or courses. In its internal Employee Apps Store, Qualcomm works with the concept of an app store as a less structured way to provide necessary information and learning to employees. There’s a whole mixture of web, Android and iOS apps, constituting an open ecosystem.

The combination of mobile and web provides a truly global platform. Whether we’re taking about html or native apps may not really matter because they all interconnect. Unlike what happened with PCs, the hardware is if anything diversifying. There is a hugely vibrant ecosystem of technologies. Beyond mobile devices, we’re now seeing wearable and wave-able (gesture-based) devices emerging. These devices are all connected and all talk to each other. In the next few years, augmented reality technology will be an important way of linking together the real, the digital and the virtual.

In his keynote by web conference, The Online Revolution: Education for Everyone, Andrew Ng from Stanford University, a Coursera co-founder, spoke about the way that MOOC platforms like Coursera change the economics of higher education and make it possible to offer courses for free online. With 87 partners and 4.9 million students to date, Coursera is the largest MOOC platform in the world.

Coursera is currently putting a lot of work into captioning and subtitling, to make video lectures available to a wide range of people of different language backgrounds. Lecturers are encouraged to break lectures down into bite-sized chunks, with optional as well as core material. Interactive videos contain in-video quizzes on which every student gets immediate feedback on their responses; in this way, a website can be more interactive than a face-to-face class. There are also more demanding homework exercises attached to courses, which may take many hours to complete. Students may make multiple attempts at pieces of work, giving them multiple chances to succeed before moving on to the next set of material.

There is also peer grading of open-ended work. There is strong evidence that peer grading correlates well with teacher grading, and self-grading is even better. Peer grading allows marking at scale. Coursera students are given instructions on how to grade others’ work. Students have to demonstrate proficiency in grading by giving similar grades to those awarded by teachers on sample homework. Students might then be asked to grade five other students’ work. An instructor would not normally grade the work. Thus, auto-grading combined with peer grading allows large-scale courses to be offered.

It is also possible to have students answer each other’s questions in discussion forums. Often students can answer each other very quickly. This allows a community to build up around the material, with many students helping each other.

There is a programme called Signature Track which allows Coursera to verify students’ identities at scale. A combination of webcam photos and your typing rhythm allows verification of identity, meaning that certificates can be issued on completion of a course to a high level.

At the moment, about 15% of Coursera’s traffic comes from mobile devices, and Coursera is currently working on a mobile app, initially for iOS, to be followed by an Android app.

Having such large numbers of students allows lecturers to collect an enormous amount of data about courses, students and their learning. The volume and detail of student data is unprecedented in history. This gives a new window into human learning. For example, it is possible to see if large numbers of students are making the same kind of error, allowing the creation of customised feedback messages. Ironically, then, in order to achieve personalisation – e.g., a custom error message – what may be needed is to teach a class of 100,000.

Having content material available online also allows lecturers to work in a flipped mode in face-to-face contexts. Classroom time can be used for small-group problem solving, so it is much more lively and interactive. This gives a much better education to those students who do attend face-to-face. In other words, Coursera serves two different audiences: those who would never have access to a Stanford education; and those who attend Stanford and who can now benefit from a flipped approach. MOOCs can bring a great education to everyone.

In the plenary discussion, Emerging Technologies and New Paradigms and How They Will Shape Future Learning, Pascal van den Nieuwendijk (Microsoft), Geoff Stead (Qualcomm), Chris Ting (Singtel) and Andrew Ng (Coursera) discussed how new technologies might be better integrated into the education system. Andrew Ng suggested that MOOCs free teachers from the more routine aspects of their jobs and allow them to provide more personal attention to more students. Geoff Stead suggested that the app model, where users put together a personalised collection of apps from a huge selection, is in tension with the older publisher model based on the idea of one large system that incorporates multiple functions.

In his talk, Jailbreaking Education with Mobile Learning (slides available here), Ashley Tan spoke about 21st century learners being taught by 20th century teachers in 19th century classrooms. Jailbreaking education, he suggested, is the answer. Mobility challenges authority, he went on to say. Teachers need to be designers of unGoogleable questions. Teachers need to jailbreak their own teacher OS and become facilitators. Moreover, the classroom is not the only learning environment. In a traditional classroom, students typically have an audience of one – if they use social media, they have an audience of many. What schools call cheating, he added, the rest of the world calls collaborating. Today’s assessments are inadequate and do not measure the things that employers are looking for. In conclusion, he suggested that it is time for us to jailbreak education, especially schooling, and to bring it back to where it belongs – to the learners. Eventually the efforts of jailbreakers and troublemakers can make their way into mainstream education. Some institutions value their troublemakers, while others do not – you have to know how best to operate in your own context.

Social media and social learning formed a key theme of several presentations. In her presentation, Mobile and Social Media: The Power of the Learning Network and Digital Literacy, Terese Bird suggested that keeping social media out of learning would be like speaking only in Latin. Social media skills are an important part of academic digital literacy,  and are necessary to communicate widely, to establish a reputation online, and to recognise and use the benefits of social media for one’s own development.

In his talk, Exploring the World of Social Learning: A Practical Guide, Julian Stodd argued that in the social age, traditional models of power and authority are subverted by reputation and agility. In particular, reputation-based authority is starting to subvert authority based on positionality or longevity. A formal hierarchy is no longer enough to give a business an edge. There is a need for creativity and innovation, facilitated by agile and collaborative social technology. It used to be the case that companies could define their own story and their own brand, but now the story and brand are shared by individuals, and meaning is co-created by individuals and communities. He proposed a model of social leadership training known as the NET Model (see below).

NET (Stodd)

The NET Model of Social Leadership (Stodd, 2013).

Gaming and augmented reality were major themes at the conference. In her presentation, Getting Innovative with M-learning, Brenda Enders illustrated a range of games, from low-end text- and email-based games to high-end virtual world games, employed by companies around the world. Gaming can motivate learning, automate learning of basic content, and refresh learning, freeing up face-to-face training time for more complex training. Augmented reality apps have particular promise when it comes to applying learning in the real world.

In his talk, Making Sense of Virtual Worlds and Augmented Reality, Mark Childs argued that key aspects of the technology include immediacy and immersion (which depends amongst other things on suspension of disbelief, motivation to engage, experience, personalisation, design of content, and ability to feel embodied). In many ways the distinction between perceptual immersion (which is more about immediacy) and psychological immersion is very important. Adding labels and tags in augmented reality can sometimes decrease perceptual immersion (if there is too much content or information) but can increase the sense of psychological immersion. It is the psychological immersion which is more important and can underpin improved learning experiences.

In her presentation, Implementation of a Mobile Heritage Trail for Clementi Town Sec School, Phyllis Pham described GPS-/IR-enabled mobile learning trails created with the LOTM tool developed by LDR. In addition to receiving information preloaded by teachers as they visit different locations, students are required to answer quiz or test questions on which they receive immediate feedback, and to create their own multimedia materials. The pedagogical aim is to create authentic learning experiences where students collect data, interpret it, and make meaning and connections.

On the Bukit Timah Nature Reserve trail, students have to collect enough data to support their conclusion to maintain or level the reserve, presented in a small skit. On the Clementi Neighbourhood Mobile Trail students visit key places (e.g., food centre, fire station, Buddhist temple) which play a role in ‘social defence’, answering key questions about them. These questions cannot be answered by searching online; they involve the students in interacting with and interviewing people in the various locations. The overall aim is to get students thinking and questioning.

2 Thoughts.

  1. Hello there Mark.

    This is a wonderful read. Enjoyed it. But I do have a point to add to what Mark Childs has stated in “Making Sense of Virtual Worlds and Augmented Reality”

    With Augmented Reality, the psychological immersion and immediacy does take place due to the labeling and 3D layering. But it does not necessarily imply that it replaces perceptual immersion. Augmented Reality has the potential to enhance perceptual immersion at a different level due to the 3D layer of information that adds a different dimension to the existing reality.

  2. Thanks for the elaboration on this! It’s always difficult to get down all the points, so I appreciate you adding this.

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