3 Ways Mobile Is Transforming Education
mLearning is shaking the foundations of modern education systems
The world’s gone mobile… or haven’t you heard?
Mobile is the information and communication technology (ICT) with the fastest adoption rate in history. Smartphones, tablets, wearables… all total strangers 7 years ago. Today, almost half of the world population carries them on a daily basis.
But it’s not only about ownership, it’s about engagement. Survey says mobile is the most engaging and attention-catching technology humanity has ever possessed. Its ubiquitous nature is unleashing people’s individual access to information resources without time or location restrictions.
The infinitely-connected way of life will change everything. Education is one of the industry’s greatest challenges.
1. mEducation takes down infrastructure barriers
Access to education has always been dependent on infrastructures, both physical (schools, textbooks, teachers) and intangible (education laws). Lack of said infrastructures deprives some communities from accessing education, rendering it a privilege restricted to developed countries.
Mobile technology is wiping out those barriers.
Learning in a book-poor, mobile-rich world: For the first time in history, a vast majority of the population from emerging countries has individual access to ICT, narrowing the digital divide in one fell swoop.
“For every individual who goes online from a computer, two more do so from a mobile device. Even where schools and computers are scarce, people still have mobile phones”. ICT in Education, UNESCO.
People who never had access to a household landline or a desktop computer now own a connected mobile phone. It grants them access to basic online education programs and other learning resources.
This doesn’t render traditional infrastructures unneccessary for a comprehensive education. Nevertheless, mobile has made emerging countries less dependent on the private/public will — and capital — required to build them up.
In other words, mobile guarantees that people from emerging countries aren’t deprived of basic educational resources anymore.
Away-from-college barriers: Infrastructure barriers to access education aren’t only a Third-World issue. They also exist within developed countries, mainly in the form of tuition fees.
Even though developed countries contain the prerequisite infrastructures — excellent campuses, proficient teachers and curated education programs —access is still limited to those who can afford it.
Actually, even when money isn’t a problem —like for professionals and other adults — location and time barriers often are.
Current educational systems are time rigid and location-based. Long-distance learning hasn’t been entirely uncollared from a college-centered education system based on unilateral lectures.
mEducation is accelerating a shift the web started: online, open access to courses and other educational resources. Along with a blooming self-learning trend, these can break the monopoly of the colleges’ location-based, unilateral and expensive education.
2. mEducation is time-flexible.
Hands down, ubiquitous access is the feature that sets apart mobile from any other ICT. Mobile has provided the channels to communicate and access information from anywhere, anytime.
A 24/7 on-the-go connection flips people’s daily routine upside down.
It’s not that mobile frees us from our duties. Rather, the opposite is true: it occupies our downtime with new activities we would have dropped, since we couldn't take them outside of our home or workplace.
It’s like Dean Groom lays out in his Downtime Learner Theory: “We still go to and from work, but we’re now learning in the middle.”
Therein lies the great opportunity for mobile education.
This time-flexibility aims to change everything. One can now simply start a lesson while waiting the bus, pause it at the office elevator, and resume it at lunch. Learn vocabulary, coding, or pastry-making, and set your own learning pace.
“Engaging with subjects and then taking ownership of their learning. That’s the way humans naturally learn,” says Salman Khan , founder of Khan Academy.
Traditional education systems mean 9-to-5 in-college learning based on master lectures where “once pace fits all.” Khan points out this system is discouraging, since it doesn’t consider the different engagement levels and the uneven capabilities of the students.
Mobile education empowers students as the designers of their own program, letting them choose the time and pace of learning along with the content.
3. Mobile education is on-demand
These are transitional times. We are breaking into a new culture that uplifts individuals’ power to design and customize their own existence at whim. Do-it-yourself and on-demand are part of the ICT-powered cultural shift.
People don’t want to be mere observers anymore. They want to give their opinion, participate, make decisions and join the action, right here and right now. Ever since technology, social media and Web 2.0 have made it possible, users have designed their own content consumption patterns.
What works for music (Spotify), movies (Netflix) and books (Oyster) also works for education as a whole. Mobile solves the here and now complaint, giving ubiquitous access to educational resources.
However, time and pace aren’t the only things mobile learners can tweak. They can also decide what to learn and how to learn it by consuming small pills of educational content shaped as apps.
Our customized educational program, designed entirely by ourselves, echoes in our app drawer. Apps for learning languages, physics, web development, you name it. The more the app catalogue grows, the wider the range of choice for individuals.
Users can pick up and drop subjects as they please. They can give priority to one topic over the others, deepening it as much as they want to. Freedom of choice at its best.
Obviously, this can’t work entirely unsupported, especially when considering kids enrolled in formal education systems. Schools and colleges still need mentored programs. That said, educational apps can break free of some antiquated dynamics, like unilateral lecturers, boosting students participation and results.
In addition, the on-demand trend in education that mobile technology fosters makes students out of all of us. That’s the real cultural shift. From professionals to housekeepers to pensioners, different age groups and profiles that were traditionally kept out of the education system are now picking up their lessons right from their mobile devices.
Since mobile allows individuals to decide what to learn plus where and when to learn it, the potential student inside all of us has woken up.
Learning is, now more than ever, a lifetime activity.
