Top 5 Principles of Mobile Learning

Ever since the pandemic erupted and spread like wildfire, most of the nations are under an intense lockdown, which means kids don’t have to go to school anymore. Some nations have suspended opening up academic institutions until the end of the year. A good thing to ensure the safety of kids, but what about the learning process? Is it also going to be stagnated under a lockdown? The answer is no. Kids are way more advanced than what we were in our times. You cannot even question your child for using computers and mobile devices, because they are using them to educate themselves and refine their skills. 

Sounds incredible, right? But it is true. Students today have moved from studying from books to learning from their electronic devices. And the handiest of them all is their mobile phone. Just a little over half of the kinds in the U.S. i.e., 53% of them own a smartphone by the age of 11, and around 84% teenagers have a phone of their own, says Common Sense Media. With so many students making use of mobile devices, it was only smart of the content creators to create courses and learning modules that are compliant with mobile devices. And that is how Mobile Learning came into existence.

Mobile learning or M-learning is the learning done through personal mobile devices. This learning is done across various contents and interactive units that are developed to imbibe skills and knowledge directly proportional to the understanding levels and pace of the learners. There are a few principles of mobile learning that are imperative for any course offered on mobile devices for them to be actually effective and euphoric for the learners. Let us look into the Top 5 principles of Mobile Learning.

Availability

The first and foremost principle of mobile learning is the availability of the learning content and module across multiple mobile devices that are compatible and accessible by a wide range of audiences and across various geographic locations. There are a lot of courses that are available to the people of a particular country or nation, but a mobile learning course should be made available to whoever wants to avail the facility and get the most out of it, regardless of their geographic location, or the type of mobile device they own. It is an added advantage if these modules are made available with different transcripts in different languages to help the students understand much better.

Adaptability

As mentioned earlier that mobile devices are quite handy and so should be the learning on them. Mobile learning units are created in a way that they adapt to the abilities of the kids and offer rich content based on it. The pace of learning of every child is different from one another and when learning from a mobile device they should be offered the provision of taking up the learning as per their speed and grasping power. If not, then the kids might lose interest and not even want to carry forward the learnings.

Rangeability

In school kids have a fixed set of subjects that they are obligated to study with no to very little scope of getting the opportunity to study a subject of their choice. That should not and is not the case with mobile learning. Mobile learning offers a wide range of courses, modules, content, and units that can be deployed by the learners in accordance with their area of interest and area of exploration. This curbs the fact that there are limited options and choices and delivers a variety of offerings that the learners can choose from.

Interactivity

If we had to stick to reading a static form, we would still be learning from textbooks and workbooks. Mobile learning has different types of content that are interactive in nature and engage the students in the maximum possible way. The rich content provided to the students is designed in such a way that it communicates with the users while analyzing their capabilities and accordingly delivering the next course of action. Interactive learning is proven to be more effective than static learning. The responsive approach piques the interest of the students.

Credibility

We are almost around the corner of the time where knowledge and skills are going to be valued more than a degree of a certificate. And mobile learning provides both of these things. A lot of these modules are developed and built by industry specialists who are credible and on completion offer a certificate alongside ensuring that the learner has understood the concept and context of the teachings. Hence, mobile learning is credible enough to be a part of formal learning approaches.

Mobile learning has come to be at par with the previously pursued learning approaches with 89% of smartphone owners downloading applications and 50% of which are being used for learning (Sellcoursesonline). Every day new updates to the approach are being with advancements in AI, ML, Adaptive Learning, Gamification, etc. This growth is soaring at an increased speed and this growth is here to stay.