Week 2 Case Study

Two Case Study Comparisons

1. “Multimedia learning with mobile phones” City College Southhampton

City College is located in the center of an urban area and serves a diverse population. It appears this case study article was published in 2005 and that this college is located in the United Kingdom. The college has the large population of students who speak other languages in the region, so it provides a lot of English (ESOL) courses. With funding from National Research and Development Centre for Adult Literacy and Numeracy it has become a pioneer in the use of mobile learning.

The challenge for this project is to find an innovative way to teach and motivate a wide ethic group of adult students to learn English linguistic skills so they can integrate more easily with the larger college community and take an active role in society.

Their innovative solution was to use the camera and audio capabilities of a cell phone in conjunction with a web publishing software called mediaBoard that allowed the students to play an active and immersive part in their own education. MediaBoard is a multimedia web based message board that allows students and faculty to send SMS or MMS from mobile phones. For example instructors could post any type of media such as text, images, video or audio files so they students can prepare for a class activity. In turn the student can post back images or comments that are relevant to them on the topic. An added bonus here is that learners with limited mobility can gain from other students and participate by asking questions. The mediaBoard allows learners a two-way communication and can be offered via the web to others outside of the class. Additional uses for mediaBoard include: icebreaking activities, group collaboration, data sharing for things like field trips, virtual tours, and collaborating with other in the same disciple outside the college. It also has the potential for formative and summative evaluation.


2. “A digital key to productive learning” University of Sussex

This project is also done in the United Kingdom at the University of Sussex. In 2003 the Informatics Department in the School of Science and Technology received funding to undertake the Sussex Mobile Interactive Learning Environments (SMILE) project. The target group was a mix of postgraduates and third year undergraduates.

The challenge was to explore the educational use of a XDA (PDA with integrated mobile phone features). Students were given the device to use as their own for the duration of the project. They were to develop and evaluate their own collaborative and interactive learning experiences within a broadly constructivist framework.
Unfortunately the support and cost of the devices (1 device to 3 students) took away from its viability. The Sussex IDEAS Laboratory came up with a simple and inexpensive technology to allow students essential course resource in a mobile fashion with USB storage devices. Students then added new resources from their own research, which were then uploaded to a centrally shared resource bank. Because of the flexibility and convenience the students actually preferred the USB to the XDA.


Similarities and Differences

The target groups in the two projects were both adult learners; however I would say the Sussex group was made up of learners at a higher level of education. The Southhampton learners are dealing with the real challenge of learning the English language, while the Sussex learners are a mix of postgraduate and undergraduate learners who are trying an innovative way to make their research resources mobile.

In my opinion the Southhampton project addresses a real need with a specific performance objective to help the diverse student population with improving their linguistic skills. The Sussex project strikes me as more of a pilot project to see if they can find a better technology. I see the USB device as mobile storage but not as a mobile learning device. It is not a device that can be used to communicate or to provide interactivity between students or teachers.

I really like the solution from Southhampton and see this as an excellent application of mobile learning. They have taken a need and applied a range of good pedagological strategies to it. Including; active and immersive learning, group collaboration, flexibility, encouraging the learner to applied the knowledge to their own situation, using a variety of multimedia with the ability to do remote real time interaction. I think the Sussex project was probably not well planned as they did not have enough XPD’s and ran into cost and support problems. They found a good storage device but I think as a mobile learning project it failed.