Building a path to data-driven education
Students surveyed in a 2013 EDUCAUSE study said interactive learning components—such as chatting with students and instructors during lectures, participating in real-time polls, reading electronic textbooks, and video conferencing—“engaged them more in class and made them feel more connected to what was being taught.”
In addition, keeping students connected through interactive mobile tools fosters student-centered learning and discipline-centered skills—like creating searchable notes, performing real-time research, peer-to-peer feedback, and more—both of which are crucial to increasing student engagement, according to the Center for Research on Learning and Teaching.
Mobile learning also offers educators another benefit: a better way to assess student engagement in a data-driven, quantitative way to continually improve the learning environment.
Mobile devices provide a unique framework for effectively tracking and quantifying student behavior, interaction accomplishments, strengths, and engagement. Using predictive analytics to understand students’ past performance and recommending corrective courses of action through prescriptive analytics is instrumental to creating a more personalized learning environment and eliminating the static epidemic of students working and learning at a uniform pace.
The social factor
While collaboration and ongoing improvement are natural outputs of a mobile learning environment, experiments performed by biobehaviorists suggest that educators play into our innate tendencies to crave social support in a community-based setting. A social-based approach to learning fulfills students’ need for social support by encouraging a cooperative “network of experts” to inform their education process.
That’s why the social aspects of mobile devices offer further promise for the online classroom. The habitual, almost automatic process of interacting and staying connected to the outside world via mobile devices is a familiar part of students’ daily routine. The average student spends 123 minutes a day on a computer, and the majority of this time—31 minutes—is spent on social networking sites, as reported by Campus Quad. In an age of student-directed learning, educators can’t neglect students’ comfort with social sharing experiences.
(Next page: One more benefit of mobile classrooms—accessibility)
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