Evaluating Mobile-Centric Readiness of Higher Education Institutions: The Case of Institutional Policies and Information Systems Students

Many higher education students live and operate in mobile-centric environments. The question is whether the policies of higher education institutions (HEI) are aligned with students’ readiness for mobile technology information access and interaction. To investigate this question from a policy perspective, nine policies from the open and distance learning (ODL) university in South Africa were analysed for providing institutional mobile-centric support. Policy document analysis was used to evaluate five information and communication technology (ICT) polices and four teaching and learning policies. The analysis focused on how the policies support the provision of mobile infrastructure, technical support and learning resources. To investigate from the students’ perspective, quantitative data was captured on Information Systems students’ readiness through a survey of a total of 129 respondents from the same university. The mobile-centric readiness of students was evaluated based on factors that could affect the readiness of students in accessing and interacting with mobile-centric services. The factors investigated were infrastructure ownership, knowledge of mobile phone features and mobile phone Internet activities. The findings revealed that Information Systems students are ready to use mobile phones as tools for information access and interaction, but some inadequacies were observed in the way the policies support the students’ needs. This study proposes some recommendations on how the policies could better support students’ mobile phone information access and interaction

EXPLORING THE CHALLENGES AND OPPORTUNITIES OF M-LEARNING WITHIN AN INTERNATIONAL DISTANCE EDUCATION PROGRAMME

Imagine you are a student, studying as a postgraduate on a distance learning Masters course, offered by a UK institution. You are based in a developing country in Africa, employed full time, and due to the nature of your work in the development sector you often have to make trips to rural areas, and are sometimes away for more than a month at a time. You have a good job, but your disposable income is limited as you have a lot of financial commitments and a young family. You live in a society where livelihoods depend amongst other things on transport, livestock and communication, and where the price of a cell phone is equivalent to a cycle, a cow or three goats. What kind of learning resources and tutorial support would you consider suited your lifestyle and study preferences best ? For many years, answering this type of question has been constrained to consideration of options revolving around printed study resources, and written assignments submitted to tutors who provide feedback. Over the last decade email has transformed communication, and a lot of consideration has also been given to the use of the Internet and Online Learning Environments. However, access to the Internet as a platform for learning, has remained limited in Africa due to lack of infrastructure, together with reliability, affordability and performance issues. The big growth trend, over the last five years, has been the rapid and very widespread diffusion of mobile phones. Admittedly the functionality of the phones currently used revolves around text and voice. However, looking forward to three years time, and considering the powerful range of functions that newer phones with General Packet Radio Service (GPRS) and 3rd Generation (3G) functionality possess, we can explore the question raised at the start of this article afresh, as these devices increasingly support use of text, graphics, audio, video and interactive content. This paper provides a description of the experience of the first year of a two year project titled ‘Developing an educational model for delivery and support of postgraduate distance learning in Southern Africa that incorporates M-Learning’. The project is funded through a grant from University of London Centre for Distance Education (CDE), and is being implemented by Imperial College London Distance Learning Programme (DLP) with support from University of Pretoria’s Department of Educational Innovation (EI). The paper focuses on three main aspects of the work done so far: i) Results from a baseline survey carried out with the DLPs students in the Southern African Development Community (SADC) countries. ii) Lessons learned from the first year, relating to the project context and student profile. iii) Preliminary steps taken to design and test practical and educational activities, that aim to make use of mobile phones to add value to the educational experience of the students.Distance Learning Programme, Imperial College London E-Education Department of Education Innovation University of Pretori

Peran Orang Tua Dalam Proses Pembelajaran Jarak Jauh Anak Kelas Rendah SDN Bontorannu 1 Kecamatan Mariso

This study aims to determine the role of parents in distance learning in low-grade children at SDN Bontorannu 1, Mariso District, Makassar City by using a qualitative research type and using a case study approach. Data collection techniques used are observation, interviews, and documentation. The results showed that the role of parents in distance learning includes several aspects. Parents as facilitators prepare distance learning media that support children's needs, parents as companions and mentors guide in doing school assignments. The results of the study also show that there are obstacles that hinder distance learning, namely insufficient time to accompany children in the learning process because they have to work, lack of understanding of learning materials by parents, the ability to provide and operate mobile phones as learning media. Based on the results of the study, it was obtained that suggestions, especially for the government, were expected to be used as a benchmark in determining policies in the field of education, and suggestions for parents were expected to provide information to parents as educators in the family, especially in the process of distance learning assistance

Widening access to distance education using mobile technologies - A pilot project.

Distance learners are typically adults who struggle to find sufficient time for their studies amongst diverse domestic and work commitments. Any technology that allows them to make more effective use of available time would be welcome. Mobile devices – such as mobile phones, digital personal audio devices (mp3 players) and Personal Digital Assistants – hold the promise of extending the time available for study, by allowing learners to access programme materials during miscellaneous commuting time and waiting time. This project represents an initial attempt to explore these possibilities in Oscail. The project consists of two-phases. In the first phase, participants on selected online distance postgraduate programmes offered by Oscail were surveyed to assess their current usage of mobile devices and also to gauge interest in using mobile devices to support learning on these programmes. For the second phase sample educational resources were developed and deployed, which students were invited to access and evaluate

Does Mobile Learning Foster Self-Directed Learning?

With the ever-evolving educational technology trends, distance learning is now able to provide tremendous opportunities of learning that were barely possible before. Despite that, distance education institutions are still continuing the battle with one of their most challenging issue, which is high learner dropout. There is a notion that learners will be more successful and less prone to dropout when their learning is self-directed (Uba, 1997). Recently, research showed that mobile learning encouraged learners to be self-directed and there was a substantial decline in dropouts (Attewell, Savill-Smith, Douch, 2009). This paper is a further effort to investigate the potential of mobile learning to support self-directed learning and aims to highlight the effect of mobile learning using short messaging services (SMS) on learners’ self-direction for learning. In the study, SMS text messages were sent to mobile phones of science teachers who were undertaking the Bachelor of Teaching Program at Open University Malaysia. Data was collected using survey questionnaire as well as interview method whereby 35 participants responded to the questionnaire and two were interviewed. The assessment of self-directed learning was based on the theories of self-directed learning suggested by Brockett and Hiemstra (1991) and Candy (1991). The findings show how learners exhibited ownership of learning due to mobile learning through their goals and plans for learning, strategies and processes of learning and self-evaluation of their learning. The study also discusses issues that these teachers faced when using mobile technologies for self-directed learning. (Abstract by authors

The potential of mobile phones to transform teacher professional development

Futures thinking is used by governments to consider long-term strategic approaches and develop policies and practices that are potentially resilient to future uncertainty. English in Action (EIA), arguably the world’s largest English language teacher professional development (TPD) project, used futures thinking to author possible, probable and preferable future scenarios to solve the project’s greatest technological challenge: how to deliver audio-visual TPD materials and hundreds of classroom audio resources to 75,000 teachers by 2017. Authoring future scenarios and engaging in possibility thinking (PT) provided us with a taxonomy of question-posing and question-responding that assisted the project team in being creative. This process informed the successful pilot testing of a mobile phone-based technology kit to deliver TPD resources within an open distance learning (ODL) platform. Taking the risk and having the foresight to trial mobile phones in remote rural areas with teachers and students led to unforeseen innovation. As a result EIA is currently using a mobile phone-based technology kit with 12,500 teachers to improve the English language proficiency of 700,000 students. As the project scales up in its third and final phase, we are using the new technology kit—known as the ‘trainer in your pocket’—to foster a ‘quiet revolution’ in the provision of teacher professional development at scale to an additional 67,500 teachers and 10 million students

CERDASBELAJAR : MEDIA PEMBELAJARAN SEKOLAH DASAR BERBASIS ANDROID UNTUK MENDUKUNG PEMBELAJARAN DARING

Covid19 pandemic is forcing the world to adapt to a new life. One of the impacts is the educational world. Distance learning from home or online learning is indeed one of the learning solutions with this Covid-19 condition. Problems arise when not all students and teachers can carry out learning at home optimally. Various obstacles faced such as mobile phones, internet access, learning media, interesting learning material content, and others. Teachers realize that audio-visual content is indeed more attached and easier for students to digest when delivering a material. So what is happening at this time both from the side of students and teachers becomes a dilemma. Therefore, we need a way so that what students and teachers complain about having internet access and learning media problems can be resolved, one of which is by developing learning applications along with educational content for elementary school students based on audio-visuals to support learning both outside the network (offline). as well as in the network (online). We call the application the CerdasBelajar application. As a result, the CerdasBelajar application has been published on Google Playstore and stored as many as 34 learning videos, material discussion, practice questions, and arithmetic gamers and can be installed for free

Fast parallel volume visualization on cuda technology

In the medical diagnosis and treatment planning, radiologists and surgeons rely heavily on the slices produced by medical imaging scanners. Unfortunately, most of these scanners can only produce two dimensional images because the machines that can produce three dimensional are very expensive. The two dimensional images from these devices are difficult to interpret because they only show cross-sectional views of the human structure. Consequently, such circumstances require highly qualified doctors to use their expertise in the interpretation of the possible location, size or shape of the abnormalities especially for large datasets of enormous amount of slices. Previously, the concept of reconstructing two dimensional images to three dimensional was introduced. However, such reconstruction model requires high performance computation, may either be time-consuming or costly. Furthermore, detecting the internal features of human anatomical structure, such as the imaging of the blood vessels, is still an open topic in the computer-aided diagnosis of disorders and pathologies. This study proposed, designed and implemented a visualization framework named SurLens with high performance computing using Compute Unified Device Architecture (CUDA), augmenting the widely proven ray casting technique in terms of superior qualities of images but with slow speed. Considering the rapid development of technology in the medical community, our framework is implemented on Microsoft .NET environment for easy interoperability with other emerging revolutionary tools. The Visualization System was evaluated with brain datasets from the department of Surgery, University of North Carolina, United States, containing 109 datasets of MRA, T1-FLASH, T2-Weighted, DTI and T1-MPRAGE. Significantly, at a reasonably cheaper cost, SurLens Visualization System achieves immediate reconstruction and obvious mappings of the internal features of the human brain, reliable enough for instantaneously locate possible blockages in the brain blood vessels without any prior segmentation of the datasets

Beyond “appropriate” technology. Mobilizing education for development

Having established that technology mediated instruction of some kind\ud has potential and a valuable role to play in education for on the move and remote\ud area learners the paper looks at practice as documented and suggests that social\ud and cultural barriers are a greater challenge than technological ones. It concludes\ud by suggesting that successful implementation may depend both on use of familiar\ud technology i.e. phones rather than internet, and establishing for users a social and\ud cultural validity for using that technology for the delivery of education

Mobile technologies for (English) language learning: An exploration in the context of Bangladesh

Milton’s (2002) literature review of languages, technology and learning found that language laboratories “…proved to be a useful tool, but only one tool, in the hands of a good teacher, and a huge waste of time and money in the hands of a bad teacher” (p16) with computer language labs being “..something of an oddity… [with] no clear method or best practice for using them’ (p17). Instead, Milton identified numerous examples of effective language learning supported by broadcast (radio) or recorded (tape, CD) audio. Recently, research has begun to focus upon mobile learning (e.g. Naismith et al, 2004), but the potential of mobile media players (for example, the iPod) is only recently being explored. It has been suggested that language learning is one of the disciplines particularly likely to benefit from widespread ownership of mobile devices such as phones and media players (Kukulska-Hulme, 2006). For example, Rosell-Aguilar (2007) has begun to develop a theoretically informed pedagogy of podcasting, as a means of providing language-learning resources on mobile devices, suggesting podcasts offer a number of advantages for language learning (p. 479). This paper examines the opportunities for mobile language learning in the context of Bangladesh, where mobile devices are becoming increasingly affordable and ubiquitous. It is hoped that this paper also provides some insights into mobile learning for language education policy makers, distance education institutions and language teachers