This course is a five-week faculty workshop designed for situated learning: participants would learn more about mobile learning by engaging in an entire course through a mobile device. The course objectives were:
- Evaluate the technological and cognitive affordances of the tool.
- Outline a strategy for mobile technology integration for one lesson.
Specific Design Elements & Rationale
Evaluate Technology | App Version of Organizational Tools
The course was built utilizing existing assets available to faculty, such as Voicethread, D2L Pulse, Zoom, and Google Docs. In addition, specific additional apps were chosen to allow them to learn to evaluate a user experience and identify affordances. All course materials were accessed and activities were completed through applications. For example, the weekly discussion took place within a Google Doc copy of the module reading, which both allowed me to recreate for accessibility and create a more dynamic, yet authentic discussion.
Situativity | Activity Feed
The primary course outcome was for faculty to learn the benefits and challenges of mobile learning, and to be able to evaluate tools themselves for their future courses. My goal as facilitator was to model the situativity they were actively considering through full use of mobile for learning. Another example of this utilization is in the homepage, which used the Activity Feed feature instead of announcements.
This allowed students to reply inside of the Brightspace Pulse app to messages, and ask questions, rather than using email (external to the app).
Seamless & Social Learning | Flipgrid & Yammer
In addition to the discussion of cognitive and technological affordances in the Google Docs, students had to summarize a chosen app in a short Flipgrid (available free through our organizations Microsoft license) video. This was meant to highlight the affordances of that particular tool for social learning over other formal assessment tools. The culmination of the course was a course design plan document which they had to share with their peers via Yammer (available free through our organizations Microsoft license), and provide critique for each others’ designs there. The seamless learning comes from having participants work within apps and were encouraged to work from different locations to better understand a potential student’s position.