When it comes to online education, developers are constantly looking for ways to engage students and provide for an easier, more seamless learning experience. Online learning can be isolating, and research shows that students learn more effectively and perform better when they do so in a social and interesting manner.

In 2017, educators and startups have tried a variety of new ways to educate their learners. Med schools, K-12 classes, and Kentucky Fried Chicken have implemented virtual reality (VR), others have sought to gamify their learning modules, and MSU has mounted live streaming computers on self-balancing robots to bring remote students into some graduate education classes.

But there’s one strategy that has been a constant source of debate: the use of mobile phones and social media in the learning process.

A Large Body of Research Supports Mobile Learning

In 2012, the learning management system (LMS) giant, Blackboard, released a report detailing how the use of mobile learning and social media can create a personalized learning experience. BYOD (bring your own device) education was becoming viable, and parent/teacher support is changing in its favor, the report stated. “The prospect of a wireless device in every student’s hand with real-time assessment and feedback presents the potential for a sweeping paradigm shift to learner-centered education,” it said.

A study conducted by a team of Taiwanese researchers published this year titled “Exploring the Effects of Online Academic Help-Seeking and Flipped Learning on Improving Students’ Learning,” came to similar conclusions.

“The researchers in this study measured the effects of innovative adoption of mobile technology and help-seeking on improving students’ learning psychology, such as their involvement, self-efficacy, and self-directed learning, in this online computing course. Therefore, the integration and implementation of [online academic help-seeking] and [flipped learning] could provide comprehensive implications for educators to design their future online or blended courses and help their students to involve themselves in the course,” the report found.

These are just two examples of a vast body of research that finds, primarily one of two main conclusions:

1) The use of mobile devices will play an instrumental role in education in the future, if not today.

2) Both the use and the model of social media creates an engaging setting in which students tend to perform better.

By and large, most arguments that support mobile learning and social media are still controversial. As a result, many who voice these arguments heavily ground their views in research.

Dissenting Voices

But despite this body of academic and professional research, many teachers, parents, administrators, and learners themselves seek to avoid or forbid both these tools in the educational process.

This month, the French government declared that teens addicted to mobile devices had become a public health concern and that, in 2018, mobile phones will be outright banned on primary, junior, and middle school grounds. “I think it’s a sensible proposal to completely ban mobile phones in schools,” said Pia d’Iribarne of Accel Partners, a venture capital firm according to the Financial Times. “Time that children spend playing on their phones is time not spent learning or interacting with their peers.”

An editorial published this fall in the Guardian begins, “One of the best actions to protect young people’s mental health is to ban mobile phones in school. Progressive schools have already done so, recognizing the relentless impact that social media and screen time have on the emotional and mental health of their students.”

And then, of course, Facebook’s former VP recently argued that the social media platform is “ripping apart the social fabric of how society works.”

Socioeconomic and Geographic Realities

A certain trend has emerged with these diverging opinions: they generally follow geographic, and more importantly, socioeconomic lines.

Both educators and students in developing countries and less-affluent communities generally support mobile learning, whereas affluent members of the developed world deride it.

The influence of mobile devices in all aspects of life in developing countries cannot be denied. And it is no less true in the field of education.

In the words of Chris Haroun, CEO of Haroun Education Services, in conversation with Forbes, “A single smartphone has more processing power today than every computer in the world that was used to put the first person on the moon.”

“All problems in the world can be solved by education—every single one without exception. I firmly applaud and support edtech startups, governments, and organizations that help to make affordable and accessible technology-enabled education, which is just as much of a right for humankind as water, air, freedom of expression and freedom to co-exist.”

An Australian language learning test-prep app, By Degrees, has created a mobile-only software that replicates a social media environment to prepare Indian students for the Pearson Test of English.

In India, “almost no-one has a desktop/laptop and everything is being done by mobile,” said CEO Danny Bielik. Providing educational resources via other media isn’t just the best option to reach as many learners as possible, it’s the only one.

India’s government, led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, is currently in the middle of the “Digital India” initiative. This year alone, the government has unrolled four eLearning initiatives, of which, three are heavily based in mobile use.

The government of Rwanda is currently seeking to drive education via internet access and hopes to digitize all educational content by 2020.

The list of countries and companies seeking to enhance and increase education in developing communities could go on and on.

Students in developed countries, however, do not need much help to access some of the best educational resources currently available. They can do so in many different ways. They probably have a broadband internet connection and a personal computer along with a mobile device. They have well-funded libraries. They live in countries that can generate a substantial amount of tax revenue to divert to education.

Learners elsewhere do not have this option. Schools in many developing countries and less-affluent communities cannot afford to ban mobile devices; it might be a student’s only means of access to necessary educational material.

The post Attitudes Toward Mobile Learning Split Down Socioeconomic Lines appeared first on eLearningInside News.

Since online learning was first pioneered decades ago, educators have raised concerns about the student’s experience.

“In the 1990s,” writes Professor Wen-Li Chyr and a team of researchers, “it was found that students felt physically isolated when they participated in online courses, especially when the instructor could not immediately provide feedback to learners.”

Many things have changed since the ‘90s, especially regarding online education and education technology. Some professors have made incredible commitments to online presence, such as Al Filreis who maintains a massive online open course (MOOC) version of his poetry class at the University of Pennsylvania. He and his team respond to students usually within the hour. Professor Ashok Goel at Georgia Tech created a teaching assistant chatbot for his computer science courses.

But by and large, these efforts are fantastic anomalies. The issues of isolation for online learners remain today. “[S]tudents suffer isolation when they study in an online environment and this situation is often considered to be unavoidable,” Chyr writes.

Chyr and his team published a study earlier this year titled “Exploring the Effects of Online Academic Help-Seeking and Flipped Learning on Improving Students’ Learning.” The study posed an interesting question. Instead of seeking to solve student isolation in an online setting, maybe changing teaching methods can help foster a more connected, collaborative online experience.

Flipped Learning and Online Academic Help-Seeking

The study specifically focused on online academic help-seeking (OAHS) and flipped learning in a college course in Taiwan. OAHS is fairly self-explanatory. It describes actions that students take—or don’t take—to better understand the material with which they are presented. In a traditional setting, a student might involve a TA or the professor. Online, a student might Google a question, refer to the class’s website, check independent forums, or post their question somewhere.

Flipped learning is less straightforward. In a “traditional” course, students will read course material, then go and sit for a lecture in which the professor elucidates that material, and then maybe participate in a discussion toward the end of class. Flipped learning asks students to research and discover the course material on their own. Class time then is spent primarily in discussion, where each student presents what they have learned. Flipped learning has been shown to be a very effective alternative to traditional teaching, especially in an online or blended setting where face-to-face interactions are limited.

According to the authors, most Taiwanese students are not encouraged to pursue either of these self-directed learning strategies. Those enrolled in compulsory education “are taught by didactic, spoon-fed, education. Upon entering college and participating in an online course without teacher’s on-the-spot support, students may not concentrate on learning materials, especially when seduced by potential distractions such as playing online games, surfing shopping websites, … and being addicted to social networks.” In other words, all students struggle with self-directed learning, but Taiwanese students come from a learning environment that does not encourage it in the first place.

When Life Gives You Smart Phones

The authors learned that every student involved in their experiment owned a smartphone and used it as their primary way to go online. What’s more, while not every student checks in on the course’s website every day, they do go on social media on a daily basis.

The researchers split their students into three groups of study. For the first, they heavily incorporated flipped learning and OAHS by requiring students to self-organize using the popular LINE mobile communications app. For the second, they adopted only flipped learning. The third served as a control.

To summarize, the implementation of OAHS and flipped learning did wonders regarding student engagement and self-efficacy. Furthermore, “the advantages of mobile learning and applications not only facilitate users to study anytime, anywhere, but also to get feedback immediately.”

“Moreover, the researchers in this study measured the effects of innovative adoption of mobile technology and help-seeking on improving students’ learning psychology, such as their involvement, self-efficacy, and self-directed learning, in this online computing course. Therefore, the integration and implementation of OAHS and FL could provide comprehensive implications for educators to design their future online or blended courses and help their students to involve themselves in the course.”

The post Study Explores Social Media and Mobile Use in Flipped Learning And Help-Seeking appeared first on eLearningInside News.

We recently reported on the coming trend of mobile only learning, where institutions design eLearning modules exclusively for use via smartphone.

One example of this is the Australian startup By Degrees, which recently announced their ELL test prep app. The company intends to use it to help English learners in India prepare for the Pearson Test in English. Unlike a more conventional eLearning program, By Degrees aims to teach via “Burst Learning.” This method developed by the startup involves recreating a social media environment.

Many English learners typically take to social media to practice their new language in the first place. By Degrees hopes to replicate this setting to create an engaging, natural setting in which to prepare for the language test.

I got in touch with CEO Danny Bielik via email to find out more about how By Degrees’ ELL test prep app works.

Henry Kronk: So — By Degrees is going to be available only on mobile devices. Why did you decide on this strategy? Why not make it available on PCs and desktops as well?

Danny Bielik: A number of reasons. Really, we’re trying to play to where the puck is going to be and not where it’s been (Gretsky). We see a decline in desktops and laptops and a dramatic increase in mobile usage—and the capabilities of these devices.

To understand By Degrees and Burst Learning you need to understand our philosophy. We are about student behavior – we’re not a technology company.  How do people learn and how do they use their devices?

Young people, in particular are now doing things in short bursts. If you couple that with the addictive behavior of social media, you’re basically looking at what makes people tick in the digital age. So we FOLLOW behavior, we don’t try to force people to learn our system.  This underscores our social-media-like approach, which effectively means mobile-native too.

Second, we’re looking at penetration in our core markets.  For Australians and Americans, we all have laptops or desktops and probably a few old ones gathering dust in the cupboard.

But in emerging markets, particularly our initial market, India you see huge mobile penetration and growth.  Check out these two slides:

So you have enormous growth exclusively being driven by mobile [devices].  In relative terms almost no-one has a desktop/laptop and everything is being done by mobile.

Third, you can do stuff on mobiles that you can’t do on desktops. Think about being in the workplace and videoing a demonstration of performing a task competently.  How do you do that on a desktop?

Students can contribute, critique, comment and rate posts all day, just like they do on social media.  Again, this doesn’t map well to the desktop/laptop environment.

Fourth, we can securely determine WHO is doing our courses.  Convincing employers and licensing bodies of the veracity of eLearning qualifications is still a challenge for providers. The desktop/laptop environment has to use eProctoring—we consider this a clumsy kluge that students find creepy.  We can do so much better and students won’t even realize we’re doing it.  Employers demand it and security and veracity is essential for the truly global scale to billions of eLearning students.

HK: We think your pedagogical approach is pretty cool, using a simulated social media platform instead of a more traditional learning module system. But how do you tailor this for the Pearson Test in English? Isn’t it awkward to use a colloquial approach to teach a more professional and precise standardized test?

DB: In fact, it’s easier. We want people to demonstrate their usage and comprehension of English—we still take a modular approach and students are guided by their facilitators.  We have summative assessments we call ‘Shots’ that can simulate actual questions in test as well as the formative stuff we do in the ‘Jams.’

The structure is really driven by our facilitation model.  Our facilitators can pose activities that drive the students to post their own responses and questions—plus other students can critique/comment, just like on Facebook.  If we really do this right it looks like a facilitated conversation in a classroom environment, however part of the facilitator’s job is to keep the class on track too.

We think that much eLearning today is driven by an imperative to reduce the cost of delivery—that means removing people and automating the approach to learning. We’re taking a very different approach, reinserting humans into the equation.

The post By Degrees’ English Test Prep App and How Danny Bielik Hopes to Use Mobile Devices to Teach English Learners appeared first on eLearningInside News.

Today, education technology and learning management system (LMS) vendors love to emphasize their products’ ability to run on multiple platforms.

Learners, they reason, want to be able to access educational material and resources whenever they can grab a few minutes of free time. They want to be able to study on the train, during their lunch break, in bed, in the elevator.

But some adventurous eLearning innovators have gone a step sideways. Instead of designing their material for any device, they’re choosing just one.

Mobile only education technology is springing up as the latest attempt to bring eLearning to everyone.

Bursts of mobile only learning

The Australian company By Degrees has just announced their launch. Their app will help English language learners in India (for now) get ready for the Pearson Test of English, one of the most widely accepted English proficiency test.

Here’s By Degrees’ philosophy: many successful English language learners practice and test their knowledge by getting active on social media in their new tongue. They form message groups, share content, and casually interact to boost their skills.

Burst Learning seeks to replicate this experience with a specific test in mind. “It looks like a Whatsapp conversation,” said By Degrees CEO Danny Bielik, according to The Pie. “And over the years people have established ad hoc learning groups this way anyways.”

Just as most people participate on social media platforms primarily through their phones, By Degrees will be available only on mobile devices.

Especially in communities where Wifi and internet access are not easily available, mobile only learning allows for online to offline transfer of content so that learners can extend their potential learning time. What’s more, with advancing mobile data infrastructure, going online is getting cheaper and cheaper.

Today a child in the middle of Africa has faster and greater access to information on their smart phones than Bill Clinton did in the 1990s,” Chris Haroun, CEO of Haroun Education Services, according to Forbes. “A single smartphone has more processing power today than every computer in the world that was used to put the first person on the moon.”

For the general public, this means that they’ll be able to more easily Tweet and post, but Haroun has grander visions. “All problems in the world can be solved by education—every single one, without exception,” he said. “I firmly applaud and support edtech startups, governments, and organizations that help to make affordable and accessible technology-enabled education, which is just as much of a right for humankind as water, air, freedom of expression and freedom to coexist.”

Growing trends

By Degrees is just the tip of the iceberg for eLearning, but in other industries, it’s already a growing trend.

In October, AdWeek cryptically reported that one of the BAT (Baidu, Alibaba and Tencent) Chinese giants will shut down desktop development altogether and go all mobile all the way. There are 1.1 billion mobile subscribers in China alone.

A recent study by the eLearning Guild found that 80% of respondents use smartphones and 27% only use them. When it comes to desktop use, only 14% of people use a computer. What’s more, a solid majority prefer a vertical alignment when consuming any kind of content.

Beyond user preference, there’s reason to believe that developing mobile only learning can improve the way we learn. Ambient Insight found that learners who completed modules on their mobile devices were more engaged, more motivated, and actually completed their programs 45% faster on average.

Today, mobile only learning sounds both like a risky business strategy and a potential turn off. But mobile only learning allows for designers to make their educational content for a mobile setting in the first place. By making software available on multiple devices, engineers typically design for personal computer use first and then adapt for mobile. Most often, these designers do a great job, and the experience between devices is more or less comparable. But it’s not necessarily the best it can be. Mobile only design let’s designers focus more on user-friendly, intuitive, or downright effective features.

The post Forget Compatibility, Mobile Only Learning Is Coming appeared first on eLearningInside News.