mLearning - in 2020 by Kalai Selvi Arivalagan (elon musk reading list TXT) 📕

According to Dr. Conrad Gottfredson ‘Learning’ happens in five situations in our life.

When we learn for the first time
When we want to learn more
When we try to remember
When things change
When something goes wrong

How can mLearning help the teachers in the above mentioned scenarios?  Is it not interesting to know how technology has started to rule our life and how it has penetrated into the roots of our day to day life?

Let us now explore all possibilities of incorporating mLearning into real teaching hours.

mLearning can help not only the teachers but also the students to update knowledge before a real classroom or a virtual classroom or even during an e-Learning session or even before their crucial exams.  mLearning can help the teachers to recall or reactivate knowledge on a specific subject. mLearning is handy to reach subject related quizzes and games on a mobile. 

When I started to use the Tab to have my online tutoring sessions,  it was challenging.  After initial days of struggles, my daughter taught me how to use it efficiently without much confusion.

Now-a-days I find handling online tutoring sessions using Tab saves a lot of time.  I can simply log in without much fuss and carry it along with me to the kitchen if I want to check the rice in the rice cooker. 

During a training session, it irritated me as a trainer for some boys were busy texting messages or replying for the messages they received.   From that day onward, I always insist every one in the group to switch off their mobiles once the training session started. 

 The extent of advancement in the mobile technology has been opening new doors now and then exploring possibilities of improving the technology. 

Mobile services providers come with innovative ideas to capture the younger generation of the world in one go.  First the basic mobile phones with minimum features replaced the traditional telephones.  The traditional telephone instruments were fixed to one place and they could not be moved as the users wished.  The cordless phones fulfilled the wishes of telephone users who wanted to answer their calls from the place they preferred. 

The crude sized mobile phones with the basic utility of attending and answering calls opened the new doors for communicators. A small pocket sized texting machine was used to send text messages.  The upgraded mobile phones incorporated both the facilities – making and attending calls along with exchange of text messages. Now the tablets available can open doors of golden opportunities to mLearning content. 

The real challenge is the ability to chunk the information and provide it in a way that can be gulped or utilized with minimum strain from the learner.  The mLearning content will be helpful especially to young learners who are studying in the colleges.  Even useful lectures can be converted to podcasts and the learners can listen to them whenever they have the time. 

The mLearning content must not strain the nerves of the learner and must be able to achieve the results within seconds.  Instead of flipping through the books at the last moment, the learner can just rewind the content and go through at random. 

If listening to more number of podcasts on a particular day can stress the auditory nerves, the learner can go through the catch animations that explore the difficult concepts with ease. 

Designing content with flash based story boards may take much time and much space.  These lesson modules need to run using a computer on a screen. The infrastructure need is more and more funds need to be allocated for its efficient functioning.

But mLearning can do wonders. The chunked information will occupy less space.  Animations can be effective even without voice over. 

The brilliantly built animated concepts can help the learner to remember the concepts forever.

Specific publishing guidelines need to be developed for creating mLearning content.

What are the important things we need to look into?

Everything need to be compressed in a small space, but at the same time the navigation and running through the content must be easy and flexible.

Mobile applications is the trend of the hour.  Whatever content you want to share with your target audience can be shared through mobile applications.  Mobile applications help to share any significant information with the wider audience within seconds.

Assessment plays an important role in mLearning content.  Apart from goint through the lessons in the form of e-content,  assessment work sheets help students of revise and remember what they have learned in the traditional classroom.   An online class room cannot be a substitute to real-time class room where students interact with their teachers in person and clarify their doubts immediately.  Teachers can also understand if their students could grasp whatever that is being taught and their knowledge have been enriched.

Publication Date: 06-28-2016

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Dedication:
m-learning that can penetrate invisible depth of learning and help our children in a broader way.