Mobile Services in Education: International Experience and Perspectives of Implementation

MOBILE SERVICES IN EDUCATION: INTERNATIONAL EXPERIENCE AND PERSPECTIVES OF IMPLEMENTATION IN RUSSIA

Ekaterina Mikhaylova,

third year student, Moscow State University, Russia

The paper summarizes the process of spreading of mobile learning conception all over the world. The aim of the research was to track the evolution of understanding the key terms, to point out the main trends of current situation, to collect best international practices of m-services in education and to analyze the perspectives of their implementation in formal educational institutions in Russia. The most valuable part of the paper is the description of a show-case which was piloted in MoscowStateUniversity. It consists of project characteristic, its advantages and drawbacks. The research methodology includes analyzing and systematic methods, building models, induction and deduction. Having a great empiric base we composed a common strategy of m-services project implementation and found out two types of factors which were hindering or helping us. The possibility of extrapolation of this strategy is limited but countries of Central and Eastern Europe may use the gained experience because of the commonality of way of development, mentality and the same level of technologies.

1. The term of mobile learning

One of the key theoretical problems of mobile learning is the absence of one official definition of mobile learning. There are two main approaches of understanding the term “mobility”: the base of the first comprehension is “mobility” as a freedom of location, the absence of any dependencies on geographic location or time period. The last evolution in this direction is a developing idea of sequence-determinated services (i.e. changing of the museum guide information according to the already seen exhibits). It means that from the “Learning somewhere and sometime” researches shift to the idea of “Learning everywhere and every time”. Thus, the main trend in the territorially-time interpretation of “mobility” is the intellectualization of data collecting, analyzing and processing technologies.

According to the second way of understanding, mobile learning is a type of learning via “mobile technologies” (from ordinary cell phones to easily moved tools – iphones, netbooks, laptops). The scientists try to widen the utilization of new applications (java, web 2.0, etc.) but at the same time they don’t forget about the traditional ones. Such diversity helps to create new services, to renovate the content of them and to extend the audience of m-services users.

As Vygodsky told, the more channels of perception we use in learning process – the higher the quality of education is and the more effective efforts of students become. In order to use all channels of perception m-services start executing text, game, video and audio. Nowadays mobile learning is streaming to be used in informal educational institutions (chess club, soccer team, dance school, etc.) and in informal atmosphere (cafes, trains, at home). That’s why we can underline that the majority of current Western European mobile learning projects focus on the marginalized youth, trying to “interrupt” it from entertainment and foster the gaining knowledge process.

The author chose the descriptive way of concept determination. Learning process is held both in formal and informal institutions and consists of two crucial parts: learning itself and organization of learning process.

Figure 1.Learning process structure

Source: Author

1. The review of mobile learning conception today
2. Worldwide overview

Many theorists of mobile society refer to mobile services as to the tool of increasing the quality and speed of interaction between users and upgrading their satisfaction level. These obvious benefits are welcomed in the majority of life spheres but to our concern the most notable they are in educational field because it is based on openness to innovations and flexibility of changes. At first time scientists posed a question whether it would be useful to create some mobile services in this sphere. The reason to doubt werestrong competitors - high-speed developing Internet and electronic services. However, time passed but the level of this kind of technologies penetration still is not high and equal all over the world. It was understood that mobile platform is a “sister-in-law” for electronic one. The complexity of e-services popularization led researches to m-services. The same happened to e-government, e-university and e-learning.

Figure 1. Internet Connectivity vs. Mobile Connectivity

International Telecommunication Union, 2006

The idea of mobile learning has been developing in the world for last 10 years. Plenty of theoretical researches and technology-implementation reports were published. The degree of success of projects differentiates significantly – from total failures to absolute victories.

The development of mobile learning is not homogeneous. There are three regions with different trend of mobile learning comprehension. In the United States the GDP, purchasing power of citizens and standards of life are high, all kinds of technologies are quit easy to get both from physical and financial points of view. These distinctive features of the country made the concept of mobile learning not very popular because electronic equipment is wide spread and the possibilities of e-services obviously are much higher.

The second area includes African countries and is characterized with alternation of densely and poorly populated “civilization islands” in endless deserts. The core idea is connected with remoted education for students from mountains, bogs and other categories of hard to reach places. The control under the knowledge mastering and scientific guiding in field researches of African students are done with mobile tools. High level of poverty gives born to such difficulties as recharging cell phones, low level of technology penetration (even for the mobile network), not complete efficiency of using mobile tools (because of being afraid to break them, learning via public, not private equipment is held down).

Finally, the third group consists of European countries. Certainly, this constituency is not homogeneous. The existence of many levels of co-operation in European Union, the differentiation of programs from region to region (Western, Central, Eastern, Southern-Eastern, Northern) provides incentives for utilization of large variety of education models (both electronic and mobile). The mobile learning isn’t understood as less developed form of e-learning but as additional one, which has higher speed of information delivery, possibilities to get the feedback and level of addressing.

The last all-world tendency is commercialization of mobile learning. For modern operators who provide some value added services, mobile learning is considered to be one of the promising directions. But it needs to put some efforts for researches and for working up the market share.

Managers of R&D department of Turkcel1 Company (a leading Turkish operator) formulated a set of recommendations on how to develop a reasonable content in m-services taking into account intrinsic limitations of mobile devices such as screen space, CPU power, battery duration, and internet bandwidth. First, in order to enable as large audience as possible, the text and images should be the main tools for the preparation of m-learning content. Besides, screens should not be over-crowded: the best decision is one idea per screen. Second, operators should use vocalization - the spoken audio content that is associated with what is displayed on the screen. And, finally, hypertexts are very important in m-learning as well as in e-learning and enable a more interactive environment. These texts which lead the user to another, related information pages when clicked, open new boundaries for m-services implementation and help to control the information traffic. Chou claims that learning occurs when learners not only know what information is present in a node, but also when they know where it is located and how to find it within the web of nodes – in other words when they learn the structure or the organization of that information.

2.2.Overview of mobile services in Russian Federation

Position of Russian Federation in this triangle is ambiguous. The low level of using highly developed models of cell phones set some limits to the proving learners with more complicated educational content.There are no materials about mobile learning written in Russian that’s why there is at least a language barrier to have an access to the theory. Some projects in the field of mobile learning were carried out (mobile dictionary, mobile diary in school) but they were made chaotically and spontaneously, without the aim of creation a common educational space.

On the other hand, mobile devices are quit wide spread in the country and the popularity of mobile communications has an ongoing growth.

Figure 2. Average number of fixed and mobile phones per 100 persons in Russia

Rosstat, 2008

Russian reality represents the firm need for modern technical mechanisms which can arrange the transparent acceptable channel of communication between all learning process participants. Transparency in formal educational institutions will provide the absence of corruption and abusing powers of office.

Nowadays the social content of m-services is not much developed. Socially-oriented projects are done as alone flashes in the vast territory of Russia.

Figure 3. SMS-transactions in Russia, 2008

IKS-Consulting, 2009

The new projects don’t use the experience of the former ones. When the project is being implemented the authors usually don’t realize how crucial it is to share the information, to make a strong marketing campaign, to inspire people by example and to shape the idea of mobile learning and mobile services. In a word, implementers are technically-oriented, choosing a misleading priority of successful drawing out a user-friendly interface and convenient application.

Our research focuses on possibilities of mobile services implementation in formal institutions such as Universities. The more efficient the communication between students and professors is – the better results are and the higher motivation is. If the learners have an opportunity to save efforts for searching the information and for the organization of educational process their academic results will raise significantly.

The gap in relationships between educational process parties is very dangerous for the educational system itself. It gives space for misunderstood and kills enthusiasm. The productive cooperation between students and professors may be build only when trust is implied. To have an effective communication educational process parties should make the atmosphere in formal institutions more informal. The best way to do it without breaking the subordination system is to use informal channel of communication. Mobile devices may help to create partner interaction and to start speaking one language – language of common aims and interests.

1. International experience in educational mobile services

The generalization of international experience of m-services utilization was collected and analyzed by us in the February, 2009, and is shown in the Figure 4.

Figure 4.Best international practices of m-services in education utilization

Source: Author

Here we would like to add some worth noting international practices.

The idea of mobile campus services has been developing from 2002 and is seen as a special case of m-Government services, which correspond to the service group “m-Government for education” in m-Government service categorization developed by Zálešák (2002, 2003). The amount of created services is higher than 50 and new ones are tested all the time. D. Ishmatova in the paper “M-government for education: assessing student needs” focused on one particular stakeholder group, students at the School of Management at St. Petersburg State University with the goal to find out which services and content features students prefer and how much they value them.

Another interesting example is given by Turkcell Company – a leading Turkish operator. It provides a platform for corporate m-Learning called EduMob. The platform includes a learning management system (LMS), content management system, digital rights management system, account management system and integration of these to GSM system. Turkish experience needs to be known but the corporate learning is distinct comparing with learning in formal educational institutions, especially in the content and intensiveness.

1. The “Mobile Student” project: history and main results of one year of day-to-day running

The project was created two years ago but the implementation process started in March 2009 at the School of Public Administration, MoscowStateUniversity. At the first stage a pilot project “Mobile student” is realized within School of Public Administration itself.

Mobile services can be used both within the education process, and for improving relations between administration, academics, students and their parents (Katz, 2006; Kolb, 2008). The focus of “Mobile student” is no the education process, but administrative relations as they are more dynamic and can be changed within shorter time. The main aim of the project was to develop several mobile services for higher education institutions. The goals of the project were the following:

(1) to approve and test different information services;

(2) to assess students and academics readiness to use mobile phone for official communication and to identify their preferences of services;

(3) to identify factors that enable implementation of such services in public institutions.

Target audience of the services consists of the BA and MA students of the School of Public Administration (approximately 1000 person); users of the system consist of administrative staff and selected academics. The first stage of the project was launched in the February, 2009. First, the students were informed about new form of services and were suggested to subscribe to receive the information via cell phone on the voluntary basis. A student wishing to participate in the project had to write his cell phone number and agree for receiving the information on it. Technical part of the service was outsourced to a service-provider, the private company specialized in SMS-services for business, which developed web-interface for the service. During 10 months (March – December 2009) 8510 SMS with official information were sent to students (Figure 5). The content of messages may be divided into two parts:organization of educational process (several targeted mailings from academics concerning classes cancellation, changes of room and changes in schedule, etc.) and non-learning activities (greetings from the Dean on the occasion of Manager’s day - the holiday of the School, New Year and entering the University congratulations, announcements of workshops and meetings with outstanding researches, politicians and civil servants). The feedback survey will beconducted in May2010 and in fall semester an interactive service – Mobile timetable – will start working. This service allows students to get their personal timetable for the day in response to the SMS on the short number.

Figure 5. SMS traffic of “Mobile Student” project per 2009

Source: E-vostok Company

It should be noticed that until now communication process was the following. All the information about the education process was collected and centralized in the special unit – curriculum department. Staff of the department either called all students or put a written announcement on the special stand. Another important communication channel was the contact to class monitors (student leaders) who then are responsible for disseminating information among their colleagues. Of course this process was rather long and sometimes costly (e.g. the class leader had regularly to send 20-30 SMS or make the same number of calls). New process organization allows reducing the time and money spending of information dissemination. Also an important advantage that we can ascertain is the raise of corporate culture and identity due to the regular information directly from the Dean and his deputies.

Administrators and academics who used the service were positive in general, but expressed suspicion about the cost of the service for them (it is free), about the use of their personal phone numbers (they were not used) and students distraction from the class (it happened several times that students received the same SMS during the lecture and they started discussions about it).

Although official feedback from the users of the project will not be collected until May, it is already evident that the reaction tomobile services isn’t stable and universal. At the beginning of project implementation students referredto that innovative tool of communicationvery warmly: they expressed their satisfaction with School’s dynamism and readiness to use new technologies for informing them. The participation rate of students (about 90% signed for receiving the information through cell phone) shows the readiness to use the new service. The major concerns that were expressed concerned the cost of the service (it is free, the interactive service will cost 0.03$) and the privacy (e.g. avoiding spam or advertizing messages).

But then in the second semester of project’s work previous emotions were replaced by indifference and even irritability towards receiving the messages. We tend to explain it with the absence of new services. The project stopped being unusual and went to the routine part of life. Moreover, during the second semester many of weaknesses of the project came to the surface. We started our own observation of m-services utilization. It led us to the conclusion that there are factors-incentives and factors-spoilers which have strong influence on efficiency of m-services usage.

The first category of factors comprises “mobile culture” of the youth, high level of mobile tools penetration, interest to the information process and willing to make all the procedures easier and accessible from any place.

The second category of factors includes orientation to the lazy, not to the active and outstanding students – under it we mean that implemented services make the students’ life simpler but do not make it richer with possibilities to co-operate with professors and administration. Students have got the mechanism to minimize live interaction, even to avoid it. The accent should be moved to the creating additional channels of communication instead the replacement of traditional ones. Another drawback is forgetting about motivation of using m-services. At first it will be interesting to try them but then they will become a usual part of daily routine. But if services are not used they won’t develop. So, we need to maintain the motivation of students to utilize them. Methods of motivating are quite well-known. We advice to create special communities of m-services users with special chats and additional available content. The statistics of m-services users may help administration to find active and talented students who are keen on learning and try to get as much knowledge as possible. The last obstacle to implement mobile services lies in Russian psychology and stereotypes.