Audience Response Systems (Clickers)

The School of Medicine owns 400 Interwrite Response PRS handsets and four wireless receivers. These can be booked out from the School’s eLearning Team. To check availability, use the calendar below.

(under construction)

Mobile Learning (mLearning)

Today’s students live in a world enveloped by the Web. News can be read from online publications, blogs can be used to publish student’s own content and they can share up-to-the minute updates using Twitter – and for the last few years students have been doing this on their phones. The computing world is rapidly going mobile with a plethora of devices and a maze of operating systems and applications (apps) (Prensky (2005, 2010).

Mobile learning (m-Learning) is based on utilizing the functionalities of mobile phones, hand held computers and other mobile devices to enhance learning. If appropriately facilitated, m-Learning can benefit students by providing instructional materials and interaction wherever and whenever they need it providing “just-in-time, just enough, and just for me learning” Traxler 2007. This increases the flexibility for students studying at a distance (Rekkedal, 2002) and potentially increases student retention (Fozdar and Kuma, 2007).

To accompany the latest mobile hardware, computer technology companies are researching and developing ever-increasing mobile communications software adapted for the small screen. Microsoft, Apple, Blackberry, and Google have all created their own mobile operating systems and are developing long lists of software applications as the use of smartphones becomes more widespread (Tapscott, 2009).

Considerations

Some of the key things to consider when considering using mobile devices in the learning environment include:

• Learning content – just enough, brief content – ‘nuggets’ Metcalf and De Marco (2006) noted that mobile devices are beneficial in making small amounts of knowledge available when we are not otherwise occupied
• Portability of the device – e.g. phones are carried everywhere, frequently used
• The mobility and flexibility of the student

Benefits of m-learning

• Mobile learning is great for people on the go as it allows anywhere, anytime, access to content -  enabling just-in-time learning
• There is a social media focus, facilitatating collaborative learning experiences that can enliven or add variety to conventional lessons or courses
• Mobile learning can also help combat ICT resistance by providing a bridge between mobile phone and PC literacy as well as appealing to tech-savvy students because of the media-rich environment
• There is a social media focus, facilitating rapid communication. This can be very beneficial for students and educators alike (e.g. feedback could be provided at a much faster rate). Such communication also enhances interaction and collaboration between and among students enabling peer-to-peer learning and support
• Using such devices can also reduce cultural and communication barriers between faculty and students by using communication channels that students like

Challenges of m-Learning

As with all forms of technology, integrating mobile learning into your teaching programme offers potential challenges including:

• The possibility that tech-savvy students will have an unfair advantage over non-technical students creating a feeling of isolation or of being ‘out-of-the-loop’. Additional learning resources may be required
• The requirement that certain media be reformatted or offered in multiple formats
• Design content restrictions because of the limited display capacity (small screen sizes) in mobile devices. The interface should convey the message using the smallest amount of text, and navigation must be built into the system to allow learners to move between screens and sections of the lesson
• It may make it easier for some students to cheat in assessments

Integrating Mobile Devices

Here are a few examples of how mobile devices can be integrated within your teaching programme:

• Record lectures or parts of lectures
• Contribute to a course blog and/or wiki
• Listen to instructor-generated podcasts
• Create narrated slide shows with your photos

Click here for some tips on constructing mobile learning

References

Metcalf, D. S., & De Marco, J. (2006). M-learning: Mobile learning and performance in the palm of your hand. Amherst, MA: HRD Press.

Prensky, M. (2005). What can you learn from a cell phone? Almost anything! Journal of Online Education, 1(5). Fischler School of Education and Human Services at Nova Southeastern University.

Prensky, M. (2010). Teaching digital natives: Partnering for real learning. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Press.

Tapscott, D. (2009). Grown up digital: How the net generation is changing your world. New York, NY: McGraw-Hill.

Traxler, J. (2005). Defining mobile learning. Proceedings IADIS International Conference Mobile Learning 2005, Malta, (pp. 261-266).

Cross-platform Video Publishing

As part of our drive to get materials as platform independent as possible (including support for mobile devices) I’ve been having a good look into how we publish video such that it works over the Internet easily, AND can be downloaded for use on devices such as iPhones, iPads, and other smartphone platforms.

In general it would seem that most cross-platform video is moving towards the H264(AVC) video encoding standard – even Flash player now supports this alongside its proprietary FLV format. Many of the modern web browsers (such as Firefox and Google Chrome) now have native support for H264 videos as part of their support for HTML5, so this would seem to be the way to go.

So, the next thing is to see if we can get this working easily in Blackboard – I’ve recently started playing with an Open Source flash-based video player called FlowPlayer, which I’ve uploaded to the Blackboard Content Collection, and which is embedding and supporting H264 videos nicely – I’m going to try using this for the latest Clinical Skills videos, to see how usable this might be for students – the main concern here is that Flash support for H264 is available from Flash Player 9 and upwards, and I’m not sure what the uptake of this version is within the NHS – then there’s the issue of getting MP4 video files through Trust firewalls, but we’ll give it a go and see.

As for encoding videos to H264, first of all, when we’re considering cross-platform support it is worth bearing in mind that while the H264 encoding format is fairly open regarding video size, quality and frame-rate, many of today’s mobile devices have rather tighter limits, governed by their limited processing power. The Lifehacker website has an article that looks at the requirements for running video on most current mobile devices, which recommends the following limitations:

• Video encoding format: H264(AVC)
• Video size: 480 x 320
• Video quality (bit rate): 1500kbps or less
• Audio encoding format: AAC
• Audio bit rate: 128kbps or lower
• Audio sample rate: 44100 or less

I’ve actually found that a video bit rate of 384kbps is quite adequate at that size, and keeps the file size down too.

For getting videos into the required format I’ve found the free software Format Factory to be excellent, both for re-encoding existing video files, as well as for ripping video directly from DVD.

This, of course, needs testing. I’ve already tried this on my Android smartphone and it seems good. Next will be to try this on our iPad and and iPhone to check they’re OK. We also need to ensure the above concerns about web delivery are not going to cause a problem.