Enhancing Mobile Learning
Mobile learning is a concept that depends heavily upon context. It is a flexible term used to cover a spectrum of approaches that help learners in a variety of ways. They focus on getting key pieces of information to staff and students in timely and contextually-useful ways.
Examples of these include informing learners that a lecture has been postponed or cancelled, or that library books are due back soon. They can also prepare the students to appear in a webinar.
There are five immediate improvements for mobile learning which are listed out as follows.
- Including a mobile stylesheet on the website
- Add a mobile-friendly front end to an existing RSS feed
- Setting up social media accounts to keep updated on news −
- Turning the mobile version of your learning platform on
- Opting for secure SMS/text services
Let us now discuss each of these improvements in detail.
Including a mobile stylesheet on the website
Using a mobile-friendly stylesheet, an existing website can offer its services more effectively to users who are increasingly searching for products and services online and through mobile devices.
Designing interactive mobile interfaces has now become a full-blown industry with companies dedicated to changing existing websites to be mobiledevice copacetic. In addition to that, social learning, or collaborative learning can be kick started on a mass scale through M-learning, as sharing of information is also instantaneous.
Add a mobile-friendly front end to an existing RSS feed
RSS feeds are key features to be used by most content management systems (CMS), to keep the readers updated on new information. Nowadays, RSS feeds can be used to syndicate information to more than one device other than a desktop.
This keeps the learners always informed on the latest changes and buzz in their areas of interest and provides them updates on daily, sometimes, hourly basis by collating information from all sources and presenting them in inbox or daily feeds.
Setting up social media accounts to keep updated on news
Facebook, Twitter and Google+ have already implemented some very mobile-friendly websites and apps. Sending an RSS feed to social networking sites where all your friends already are, provides them quick information and faster response time, as normally all the friends spend time on those platforms itself.
This not only gives a quick response to the information that you post, but also generates instant feedback process.
This acts as a time-efficient method to get any information proof checked for facts.
Turning the mobile version of your learning platform on
Most of the virtual online learning platforms of today have developed a mobile-phone version for their learners. Some of such e-learning platforms such as Moodle, Blackboard and Microsoft SharePoint have extremely mobile-friendly apps or versions of their online solutions.
Such tools help in getting fast responses, corrections and feedbacks. In many countries, introducing Meducation has brought about a very significant change in the scoring levels of students, and a marked decrease in the drop-out rates from technical academic education.
Opting for secure SMS/text services
For additional security of data while sending texts, or receiving messages from others during M-learning, many services have started coming up with flexible options to integrate security features with the learners’ existing SMS provisions.
These services provide a secure environment to share information without fear of data leakage and privacy violations. Mass texting through SMS has been a standard way of advertising information.
Nowadays, live links can now be embedded in these SMSes which will elaborate on the information given in the text messages.
