What You Need To Know All About Mobile Learning

Ever completed a course session during your morning walk? Just plug in those ear-phones and match your pace with that of the lesson. Let us tell you why this is such a great idea. Exercise releases endorphins that stimulate “feel good” emotions and triggers creativity in the brain. What does peaks in creativity during (and post) exercise have anything to do with effective mobile learning? Just one: advance constructive interchange.

You have this neat stack of knowledge in the deeper recesses of your mind. Lines of text or notes of audio entice those neat stacks to reshuffle and make room for more. How? You may wonder. Simple. Constructivism is at its best during your exercise. But how would you carry your learning while you walk/run/jog, in your latest smartphone or the coveted hand-held you purchased at a Black Friday? Is it really possible? A chunk of your time spared for your daily grind at the running belt multi-tasked with your daily mind exercise?

M-Learning and mobile learning management is all about learning on the run (running on the learning curve?) in this and many other mundane situations that make life so beautiful. So what has mobile learning solutions actually achieved for the digitally advanced consumer? Hiked up the time slot for learning activities from the usual post-dinner to during-my-early-in-the-day-activity. This preferred activity could be catching the train to work (or back), browsing the internet on the phone during the lunch break, waiting for the dentist after work or standing at a long line at the DMV. Now that’s an achievement.

How Online Study Materials Preparing for the Board Exams

Online learning or e-learning can contribute in a timely bound manner for school students mainly for those who are preparing for the board exams, whether it is CBSE, ICSE or even state. E-learning has many advantages over regular classroom learning.  At present, most of the people use the term’ google it’ for  all their queries expecting a perfect solution for their doubt. So are students, they too need to get access to the safe internet for knowing more on topics that they learn from textbooks. But the result is that they end up in a complicated manner with a wide variety of content  from which picking the right material is a difficult task and time consuming.Here we are about to give you some advantages of online learning and let you know how a student can get benefitted with online resources for his/her study purposes.

Textbooks VS Online study materials

Textbooks are static entities that their contents once printed cannot be changed, but in the case of online study materials, the students can get the latest or the updated study materials of their school lessons from the internet. Textbooks can only show the viewpoint of the author, but the student is enabled to explore the topic beyond the textbooks surfing the internet. If the student feels that the author tends to be biased on a particular topic, the student can easily identify the right facts from the internet probably with more explanations and clarifications.

Vast collection of study materials

The internet contains a huge amount of study materials including NCERT Solutions, CBSE guide, CBSE Question Papers, Model question Paper, question bank and much more. Websites like schoolessons.com are providing  ample study materials including animated lessons, MCQ's, fill in the blanks, practice tests and other features that can be easily learned by students through 24x7 and can be accessed any time of the day. Each day millions of contents are added to the internet that the volume of study materials are increasing daily. Online study materials can be in the form of notes, videos, animations, graphics etc. Videos can be accessed from youtube where children can find video lessons or video lectures related to their school lessons.

Is online learning the future of education?

    In the past, if you wanted to get a qualification, or even simply learn something new, you would sign up for a course at a bricks-and-mortar institution, pay any relevant fees, and then physically attend class. That was until the online learning revolution started.
    Last year, the e-learning market was worth an enormous $166.5 billion. It’s been estimated that this will grow to $255 billion by 2017. Its growing financial value is matched only by the swelling numbers of students choosing to follow an online course.
    In the latest Global Shapers Survey of 25,000 young people from across the world, 77.84% of respondents reported having taken online courses in the past. So is online learning the future of education?

 What is online education?

    Let’s start first by looking at what exactly it is. Online education takes two major forms. The first: for-credit courses where students enrolled in tertiary education take online classes offered by home or other higher education learning institutions for credit. Some well-known cases include the MIT OpenCourseWare and the Harvard Online learning.
    The second form of online education consists of professional training and certification preparation. Such online learning is usually targeted at professionals or students seeking training or preparing for certification exams. Popular courses include training in foreign languages, accounting and nursing.
In the Global Shapers Survey, close to half (47.79%) of respondents said they would be willing to pursue certification for certain skills, including online certification, once they have started their working careers. This again speaks to the large potential and market for online education.

Overcoming the challenges in online learning

    Regardless of these concerns, online education has made great strides in recent years. For starters, more and more institutions of higher learning have introduced or reinforced their online education platforms, the main considerations being cost reduction for students and recruitment expansion in face of rising competition. As a result, online education has become an increasingly important part of tertiary education, with colleges and universities using world-famous faculty members and professional support teams to promote online courses.
    To tackle the question of teaching quality, a number of providers have turned to user rating and internal evaluation. Star teacher, for instance, has become a popular teacher evaluation mechanism in China and South Korea, two of the largest e-learning markets.
    Overall, such progress seems to have eased the doubt about the quality of teaching, and 40.56% of respondents in the Global Shapers Survey said online education is as strong as traditional learning in a classroom, with another 11.76% saying they didn’t know.

Education for all

    Undoubtedly, with the even wider spread of technology and deepening of the global mandate of education for all, online education’s potential to become complementary – or in some cases alternatives – to traditional education cannot be overlooked.
    Instead of worrying whether or not online education can ever be as good as more traditional formats, perhaps we should instead focus on how we can use it to deliver quality education for people all over the world, particularly the poor and underserved.
    This won’t be an easy task – online education is in dire need of regulation. Outstanding issues include the question of accreditation and quality control. This gets even more complicated when you consider the international dimensions. For years, cross-border credit or degree accreditation has been a major issue for various education systems. The flexibility of online learning will only make that harder.
    The obstacles are real but not insurmountable. And the opportunity to make good on the promise of education for all is too big to miss.

Why Did That Student Fail? A Diagnostic Approach To Teaching

When students struggle in school, it can be for a variety of reasons.

From their grasp of content and literacy skills, to their engagement level, to behavior and organizational issues, to teacher actions, to the proverbial “stuff going on at home,” the possibilities are maddeningly endless. The following 8-step process is a valuable tool for me as a teacher, so I thought I’d share a version of it here in hopes that it might help you. It was useful not only for me to see what strategic responses I had available to me as a teacher, but it was also useful for students to come to know what to expect.

It also was valuable in teacher conferences, and in discussions with district folks during walk-throughs when they wanted to know how I “responded to non-mastery” (beyond reteach the same busted content in the same broken form with the same ineffective strategies that failed the first time.)

As you can see in the image below, this functions as a kind of hierarchy. The first step is the most broad and most powerful, and worked for the largest number of students. The second step is a bit more narrow, and wasn’t necessary nearly as often as step 1, and so on until step 8 which was necessary for very few students. This model worked effectively in grades 8-12, though I have never used it in elementary.

The Goal Of Diagnostic Teaching

It is important to keep in mind the goal of this process–diagnosis. What’s wrong? What’s the hang-up? What’s getting in the way of learning, or of students proving what they in fact actually know?

No matter what process, model, system, or flowchart you use, as long as you have something designed and documented, you can use and refine it accordingly, keeping you from knee-jerk reactions to non-mastery like repeating yourself, talking louder/faster/slower, holding students after class, calling home, issuing poor grades, having them partner with “good students,” giving them the majority of the answer, and so on.

Diagnostic Teaching: An 8 Step Process To Support Struggling Students


1. Student goal-setting & progress monitoring

2. Complete all missing or incomplete assignments

3. Differentiate assessments on non-mastered standards

4. Isolate and prioritize standards for mastery

5. Choose new materials/resources that feature more transparent illustration of standard

6. Daily use of student exit chart

7. Fundamental curricular & unit design

8. Beyond-the-classroom support systems

Conclusion

The big idea behind Diagnostic Teaching is to illuminate and remove barriers to student understanding. When students have problems, you need to be able to systematically identify and fix them. This probably isn’t a huge difference from what you already do. There may be a slight change in practice, however.

This isn’t about good grades, high-level thinking, compliance, or even understanding. Rather, the goal is to establish a pattern of diagnosis–of diagnostic teaching–so that you shift your focus from teaching & reteaching to systematic, guided diagnoses of academic performance barriers.

This is a seemingly minor but important shift from thinking like a delivery driver or manager to thinking like a doctor or scientist. Another benefit? Helping students and parents see the process so they can begin to do the same.

Is Online learning important in education?

When it comes to online learning in education, the model has been pretty straightforward - up until the early 2000s education was in a classroom of students with a teacher who led the process. Physical presence was a no-brainer, and any other type of learning was questionable at best. Then the internet happened, and the rest is history. Online learning is a rapidly growing industry, the effects of which we can trace back to the 1980s and even well before that (in the form of distance learning and televised courses) – these will be discussed later in this eBook.

Now that affordable online learning solutions exist for both computers and internet, it only takes a good online learning tool for education to be facilitated from virtually anywhere. Technology has advanced so much that the geographical gap is bridged with the use of tools that make you feel as if you are inside the classroom. online learning offers the ability to share material in all kinds of formats such as videos, slideshows, word documents and PDFs. Conducting webinars (live online classes) and communicating with professors via chat and message forums is also an option available to users.

There is a plethora of different online learning systems (otherwise known as Learning Management Systems, or LMSs for short) and methods, which allow for courses to be delivered. With the right tool various processes can be automated such as a course with set materials and automatically marked tests. Online learning is an affordable (and often free) solution which provides the learners with the ability to fit learning around their lifestyles, effectively allowing even the busiest person to further a career and gain new qualifications.

Some of the most important developments in education have happened since the launch of the internet. These days learners are well versed in the use of smartphones, text messaging and using the internet so participating in and running an online course has become a simple affair. Message boards, social media and various other means of online communication allow learners to keep in touch and discuss course related matters, whilst providing for a sense of community.

In the fast-paced world of online learning the available technologies to make a course new and exciting are always changing, and course content can and should be updated quickly to give students the very latest information. This is especially important if the online learning training is being given to employees in a sector where keeping up-to-date on industry developments is of the utmost importance. This is one of the reasons why many businesses are now offering training via online learning - other reasons includes low costs and the ability for employees to study in their own time and place.

Overall, traditional learning is expensive, takes a long time and the results can vary. The importance of learning is now a given fact and it can offer an alternative that is much faster, cheaper and potentially better.

Benefits and Limitations of Mobile Learning

According to Ericsson’s forecast, 80% of the world’s population (6.4 billion people) will be Smartphone users by 2021. Another report states that more than four out of five workers now access their work related documents on the move.

This paradigm shift calls for a need to adopt m-learning to train the current Gen workforce. Lots of efforts are already being made to convert huge legacy courses to a mobile-friendly HTML5 format. But is it all just good about m Learning? How much do you know about the limitations of m Learning? This blog aims to show the two sides of the m Learning dime, highlighting its features while at the same time, pointing out its limitations to be an effective learning strategy.

Let’s start with the good things first. Listed here are the USPs of M learning as a learning support tool
 

1. Provides Easy access: Mobile learning provides easy access to learning anyplace, anytime, making it more convenient to learners. Learners have the advantage of spending their time spent on traveling, between meetings or during weekends focusing on the subject they want to learn.
 

2. Facilitates Collaborative Learning: M Learning encourages collaborative learning, allowing learners at different locations to get in touch with their peers or others teams to discuss and learn. Social learning is a happening trend which creates a sense of competition and cooperation, which will lock the learners’ attention towards the course.
 

3. Boosts Learner engagement: Training at the workplace mostly consists of verbal and desktop communication, but adapting mobile learning can bring several opportunities to engage the learner on a digital and social level outside of the work. This new dimension will erase the sense of boredom in learners’ mind about the course.
 

4. Encourages Self-paced Learning: No two learners are the same. Each one has his or her own way of understanding the content to learn. With mobile learning, learners are now able to learn in their own style, at their own pace. In a classroom scenario, occasionally, there will be a few learners who wouldn’t have understood the concepts clearly but hesitate to ask for a re-explanation. In mobile learning, nobody knows or cares how many times you revisit the course, which gives you the freedom to do it until you have understood it all.
 

5. Address all learning styles: Mobile learning can fit different learning styles as it allows learners to do the following:

•   Reading
•   Learning through videos
•   Listening to podcasts (Audio)
•   Research on the Internet

Mobile learning standouts as a great resource to facilitate better learning, as long as you pledge to keep its limitations in mind while designing one. Mobile technology helped us by bringing a lot of distant things up-close and has the potential to do the same with our learning programs. With the future of more and more mobile workforce, m Learning could be a savior for many. What do you think?