Post-lockdown Mobile Learning: Aspirations and Cautions
Before recently, mobile learning was in the background of edtech. A concept established long ago, it has been developing at a steady pace, but didn’t cause ripples in the conservative educational system. M-learning was duly appreciated for its convenience and cost-efficiency, yet in the light of the global concern about using mobile phones in schools, its adoption in the classroom was tentative, sporadic, and mostly reliant on an educator’s initiative.
However, when the pandemic and the ensuing lockdown disrupted the conventional way of educating, things turned around for mobile learning. As teachers in almost two hundred countries were urgently required to readjust the learning process for online delivery without compromising its efficiency, mobile educational apps were rediscovered and quickly became a staple of remote education. Already, Statista reports a visible surge in mobile educational app downloads during the first quarter of 2020 compared to previous years.
Global mobile education app downloads, 2017-2020
Today, the m-learning market is burgeoning, with edtech unicorns making exceptional profits from homeschooling and startups springing up with innovative tools, set to compete with industry leaders for their market share. However, as the pandemic subsides, will mobile retain its importance in the post-lockdown classroom or will it be sidelined by the traditional education once again?
Let’s see whether the pandemic altered the general attitude toward mobile application development for learning purposes, and whether there are omnipresent characteristics of the technology that will facilitate its wider acceptance in educational institutions around the world.
Barriers to Ubiquitous M-Learning Adoption
Mobile learning has gained a new importance during the pandemic and holds more potential than ever due to recent technological advancements. Nevertheless, its implementation is still fraught with persisting challenges that may prompt current adopters to give up m-learning when the lockdown ceases.
Risk of Digital Distraction
Mobile phones have an inherent disadvantage — they are very distracting. This is a universal issue that to some extent affects phone owners of all ages, but children and teenagers, who lack adult discipline and self-control, are particularly prone to misusing their devices, especially when they are bored. Constantly diverting their attention away from the lesson and to social media, notifications, and games, a student is half-present and fails to retain information.
In this regard, the introduction of mobile learning in classrooms is highly likely to take its toll on students’ academic performance. As the novelty of educational games and skill-building apps wears off, won’t the student get tempted to let their attention wander, especially when the alluring phone is already in their hand?
There is indeed a high probability of it happening if mobile learning apps are designed conventionally. However, a mobile development company can take respective measures throughout the software creation lifecycle to make it resilient to learners’ distraction. For one thing, educational content should be structured in bite-size chunks for immediate comprehension and be as interactive as possible to keep students engaged. It is also vital to get rid of any unrelated elements, from ads to decorative frills, to avoid overwhelming the user.
Lack of Adjusted Teaching Practices
Educators’ insufficient competence in handling mobile-first courses is another stumbling block on the way toward full-scale m-learning integration. Even though more and more teachers are recognizing the potential of mobile, their training as a rule does not provide a satisfactory pedagogical framework on how to properly use mobile apps and solutions in a classroom. As a result, only the more tech-savvy or determined teachers explore m-learning and by trial and error integrate it into their academic programs, while others, unaware of the technology’s potential or overly conscious of their skill gap, steer clear from educational mobile apps.
Top-down measures are required to equip school teachers and university professors with ample understanding of emerging edtech and its application, mobile learning in particular. Education officials need to expand teachers’ degree or upskilling programs with courses dedicated to mobile learning. There, educators can become familiar with the technology’s opportunities and specifics, learn how to balance traditional and technology-enabled teaching and how to integrate m-learning tools to their students’ benefit.
Mobile Learning: The New Black for Forward-Minded Educators
Amid the COVID-19 crisis, m-learning was finally recognized as a sustainable educational technology. A solid part of many remote education strategies today, mobile apps are making lessons more creative and hands-on, turning tests into engaging games, and laying out complex abstract concepts in an easy-to-grasp way. In the long run, the wide acceptance of mobile learning methods promises to prepare children for the technology-saturated world we live in and bridge the disturbing gap between low-income students and their well-off classmates.
Nevertheless, to continue reaping the benefits of mobile learning down the line, education systems will have to reduce the knowledge and skill gap that discourages many teachers from implementing the technology. Apart from this, creators of education apps need to think out usability design to make their products more enticing than social networks and games.
All in all, nobody knows to what extent the global remote experiment will alter primary, secondary, and tertiary education and whether there will still be room for all the virtual learning strategies in use today. Still, the unique opportunity offered by m-learning — to take lessons from classrooms and put it in the pockets of pupils to study anytime, anywhere — is so valuable in the modern quick-paced, knowledge-driven world that the technology is bound to gain a foothold in the educational ‘new normal’.
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