U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan says schools and colleges should deliver course content to the cell phones that students use to talk and text every day
So reports eSchool News…
“I don’t think we’ve had any real negative push against it or anyone refusing to use it,” Campbell [coordinator of learning resources and extended education at the School of Nursing, Ball State] said. “The biggest issue is getting the initial faculty buy-in … and we were fortunate our faculty were eager to hop on the bandwagon. I don’t see why [cell phone college courses] couldn’t go nationwide, probably pretty easily.”
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Ball State’s 800 undergraduate and graduate nursing students are required to buy an AT&T mobile device so they can access lab books, medical dictionaries, diagnosis literature, and other resources throughout the school year.
Well, there you see it – there is a push or suggestion “from the top”, that things should move toward a more mobile environment. The resistance is the instructor and perhaps it might also be from the students being forced onto a specific network.
Without over generalizing, I’ll throw out a blanket statement that it is very much the case that instructors are often the issue when it comes to change. They need to change their prep workflow, their assessment and their contact time in order to accommodate any new means of delivery. Often instructors want to have some portion of personal time and I suspect that this is one of those hidden gottcha’s behind why many profs don’t want to get more “online” in their teaching. But this is not what got my attention in the article. AT&T did.
For the life of me, I can’t see why anyone would/could think that giving the telcos more power over content (they are already trying to control ‘netbooks with 3G connectivity). In their ideal world, the content would not be delivered by the carrier, but would be hosted by the institution and made deliverable across a range of devices. Having the carrier deliver the content helps with this delivery element as they know exactly what devices will be connecting, but is that such a chore as to bind the student to possibly a second or third phone?
I know there are many countries in Europe that have a greater than 100% phone penetration, and even here in Canada, there are people with multiple devices. So this is not an unknown phenomena, but isn’t the idea behind mLearning convenience of access on any device? Shouldn’t this include network as well?
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