How to drive engagement with mobile devices


The mobile classroom offers one of the best growth opportunities for educational institutions—as well as flexible, engaging learning environments for students

mobile-deviceToday’s college student owns an average of seven mobile devices and spends nearly four hours a day using a smart phone, according to a Marketing Charts study.

Nowadays students expect the same “mobility” in the classroom they enjoy personally. College campuses across the country are responding by increasing bandwidth to power student demand for ubiquitous mobile access.

This year, the Association for Information Technology Professionals in Higher Education (ACUTA) reported 61 percent of universities and colleges provide strong wireless coverage (four bars or more) throughout 81-100 percent of their campuses, up from 45 percent of institutions in 2013.

More than 56 percent of the collegiate university business officers surveyed expect to raise wireless network infrastructure costs even more over the next two years.

The national trend of improving and increasing bandwidth on campus opens the door to another opportunity—making higher education itself more mobile and engaging. In this Connected Age, increasing student engagement will require educators to embrace mobile devices to build an interactive, synergistic, and accessible learning environment.

But the move toward mobile education is not just a response to students’ desire for mobile convenience. It has real academic benefits as well.

(Next page: The classroom benefits of mobile learning)

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)

Higher-education institutions building online learning communities that foster student collaboration through mobile social networking applications, especially those with video conferencing capabilities, allow students to learn in a way that’s most native to their personal socialization habits. In addition, this presents an opportunity for educators to grow engagement and improve performance.

Accessible, productive learning

The final benefit of a mobile classroom is the role it plays in fostering greater accessibility to education. Because today’s student is accustomed to quickly accessing information at the stroke of a mobile keyboard—anywhere, anytime—it’s only natural that students leverage personal mobile devices to enhance the traditional learning experience.

Mobile devices provide a platform for unhindered access to courses, discussions, materials and assignments. Shifting focus to engaging, untethered course delivery over mobile devices will not only open courses up to a larger market; it will also give students a chance to fully self-direct learning and increase productivity.

A Pearson mobile device study reported a little more than six out of 10 students believed using mobile devices can help students study more efficiently and perform more effectively, and 67 percent believed mobile devices would replace textbooks in the next five years. Additionally, 64 percent of students who participated in a Wakefield research claimed that technology saves two or more hours of studying every day.

Moving forward, the mobile classroom offers one of the best growth opportunities for educational institutions and flexible, engaging learning environments for students. As educators look for ways to empower students for greater success in the classroom, there’s no better place to start than with the mobile devices students use every day.

Rony Zarom is the CEO and founder of Watchitoo, an online video collaboration platform that helps top universities, including Yale and Wesleyan, create powerful video classroom learning experiences. 

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