Mobile Learning

I participated in the ConnectEd Summit hosted by Abilene Christian University today.  The conference was organized to explore the impact of mobile devices (cell phones and laptops, but particularly smart phones like the iPhone) in higher education.  I presented in the “pedagogy and praxis” track organized by Bill Rankin, director of educational innovation and associate professor of English at ACU.  My goal in attending the conference was to explore ways in which instructors might make good use of mobile devices in the classroom, leveraging my experience thinking about effective uses of clickers.

In preparing for my presentation, I listed several ways in which clicker technology often enhances teaching practices.  Then I tried to imagine how using mobile devices as part of classroom response systems might support or undercut these ways.  I thought I would share some of my thoughts here on the blog.  Keep in mind I’m just brainstorming here–I haven’t used mobile devices in these ways in my own teaching, nor have I talked with many other instructors who have done so.

Independent Answers – One great thing about clickers is that you can use them to have students answer questions independently of their peers.  Instead of waiting to see what their fellow students think about a question, students can be asked to think about the question and commit to an answer on their own, helping them get ready for subsequent discussion of the question.

Having mobile devices in the classroom might undercut this if students start a “backchannel” discussion of the question via text chat on their devices.  On the other hand, mobile devices make it much easier for students to respond to free-response questions than clickers do.  Free-response questions can require students to think more independently since students aren’t given the option of selecting a response from a list generated by the instructor.

Frequent Deliverables – Another nice thing about teaching with clickers is that it makes it fairly easy to ask students to complete a task (answering a clicker question) frequently during a class session.  This helps keep students engaged with the topics at hand.

Free-response questions answered via mobile devices can be used to request “deliverables” from students that are more complex than answers to multiple-choice questions.  Students might be asked to respond with a phrase or a sentence or two or even some non-text response–a photo, drawing, or diagram.  This raises the bar for student participation during class.

Accountability – Since clickers can be used to track individual student responses, they can be used fairly easily to objectively measure class participation.  This creates some accountability for students to participate in class by answering clicker questions.

Classroom response systems that include mobile devices should be designed so that individual student responses can be tracked, of course.  However, there’s a possibility that free-response questions can create a greater sense of accountability than multiple-choice questions.  A student who knows that her instructor will read her free-text response and perhaps use it as part of a class discussion might be encouraged to take that free-response question seriously, even if a participation grade isn’t on the line.

That’s enough for now.  Stay tuned next week for a few more posts sharing ideas generated at the ACU conference.