|| Information Technology |
m-Learning is Cynamon's foray into the rapidly evolving world of education. Aiming to deliver the country's first major platform for mobile learning, Cynamon partnered with Philippine Women's University (PWU, est. 1919) to deploy and test m-Learning's beta version.
The platform promises to enhance the learning process by positioning the mobile phone as a school-sanctioned learning tool. Portable, efficient and with rich media support, mobile phones also easily symbolize the fundamentals of communication: message sent, message read, message interpreted; which, incidentally, are also steps in the learning process.
While the mobile phone is already being used to teach various subjects in other countries through voice, SMS and MMS, the m-Learning platform breaches the current limits of these protocols to better initiate a learning session and give students compelling reasons to enjoy each session.
Following a series of pre-deployment meetings, Cynamon and PWU co-established the trial parameters, including the different channels through which various content can be sent to students' mobile phones. Initially these channels were: 1) PWU 2) Announcements 3) Question & Answer 4) Campus News & Features and 5) Handouts and Training
To control the trial environment, the mobile application was customized as a single-course interface among the professor, his students, and the school administrators.
Ongoing trial affirms platform’s potential in enriching the traditional connections among teachers, school administrators, students, and different curriculum. Among other content, multi-page lesson outlines and study tips were successfully pushed to and experienced on subscribed handsets.