Mobile: The next chapter in education

When students start to access educational content on mobiles and tablets, learning will become available to all and sundry, ranging from anyone in a rural area to someone on a plane

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No need to blame yourself if you do not remember the structure of an atom or the way the moon causes tides. We can all blame it on the boring books that we had tried to read in school but which could never catch our attention. But the gen-Y, as they are now called, may not be able to lean on to that blame!

Education has changed, thanks to Coursera, Khan Academy and many such online lecture platforms that now provide high quality education to millions, outside the classroom walls or the hard-to-get-in Oxford campus. While technology to deliver online education and collaboration has grown tremendously in the past few years, mobile is just knocking at the doors here, or should I say thumping. Another disruption in education is about to unfold.

When students start to access educational content on mobiles and tablets, learning will become available to all and sundry, ranging from anyone in a rural area to someone on a plane. But this learning will itself change from what we used to so far see as printed text books. Learning content has been moving to 3D content, with 3D smart classrooms now being part of most affluent schools. When students start to access this conent on mobile devices, which are rich with a number of sensors (such as camera, accelerometer, gyroscope, location), the educational content will be designed to use these sensors to make the content even more engaging and tactile. Gone will be the days of just flipping through books. Soon we will be able to move the sun around the earth and see the effect it has on the weather in our location!

Like every other industry where mobile has been used to get more information about the user (such as location), content consumption through mobiles can provide significantly deeper insights about the content and the student. The frontal camera of the mobile device and provide insights whether the student is engaged or not. From this, we can derive information such as a particular part of the video content is not engaging for most students. The location of the mobile device that is accessing a particular educational content can provide insights into the places and times where people of similar interest consume the content. This can provide insights on where a physical meet-up should be planned to discuss a particular course. The orientation of the phone device can provide information on how a class is structured – are all students collaborating while consuming this course content, as depicted by the circular orientation of the students’ positions, or are they interacting in multiple small groups, or is everyone just facing the board? Such insights can provide important information about the learning content consumption and can help content creators (aka the erstwhile publishing houses) on how to design and create the educational content for this new mobile world.

So these future possibilities with mobile education are definitely exciting, they are in fact critical to many living in developing countries. When we look at the infrastructure and instructor quality in most classrooms in rural areas in such countries, mobile education is as perhaps the only hope to improve the quality of education and engagement with students. Mobiles provide an opportunity to leapfrog infrastructure challenges. A school where students sit in open spaces under the trees, perhaps setting up a physical chemistry laboratory would not be a feasible proposition. But delivering quality simulations on mobile devices is a possibility that mobiles can provide, rather soon.

As we get excited about the mobile education world, our humility should ensure that we still remain connected to the physical world of books and classrooms. Mobile education will therefore also provide significant possibilities to enhance our experience of traditional learning by embedding in the physical world. Not only mobile, other wearables such as the Apple Watch or a Google Glass can capture the physical world context and provided additional material to supplement learning in the class. Such augmented reality possibilities will perhaps be the Holy Grail in education in the coming years – maintain a balance where technology can be used, while keeping the traditional values the system that is built on the pillars of a teacher and fellow students.

We may miss our text books though, definitely the smell of those fresh pages at the beginning of an academic season. But just until we simulate smell on a phone next to you!

- By Nitendra Rajput, senior researcher & research manager, Mobile Enabled Industry Solutions

The thoughts and opinions shared here are of the author.