Open platforms at the Open University?

The Open University has been glamming up and getting the fancy frocks out for the launch of Apple’s new I-Tunes U app, a platform designed to provide mobile access to a vast catalogue of digital educational materials. The OU is playing a prominent role in the deployment of this new resource, providing more than half of the content uploaded to the repository so far.

-This is undoubtedly good news because...

• It increases the OU’s outreach potential and consolidates the University’s reputation as a front runner in e-learning (particularly mobile learning), alongside other established higher education institutions like Yale, Stanford, Duke and MIT

• Although Kindle and Android-based platforms are rapidly taking over market share, Apple is still a strong and valuable partner to work with, helping the OU to promote and further our educational mission.

-But...

The new I-Tunes U app has been stirring up a fair amount of controversy among bloggers. The reason is, as usual, a restrictive EULA. There are concerns that the authors of content uploaded to I-Tunes U might be losing control over their own material, as the platform dictates where and how the resource can be distributed. This, in turn, has led to fears of vendor lock-in, with users potentially finding that they will not be able to access certain resources unless it is done through a particular hardware – software combination.

Image: CC walknboston

Many current users of OU content will already be familiar with some of these issues. For example, course materials often include links to podcasts hosted in the OU I-Tunes U repository. Anyone who does not have an I-Tunes client installed in their computer will have to log on to an alternative OU podcast site (rarely linked to the course materials) and spend some time looking for the equivalent resource (which can sometimes feel like being made to sneak into someone’s dinner party through their backyard).

At the moment this could be considered a minor nuisance. However, if bloggers are right and the restrictive EULA of the new I-Tunes U app leads to increased risk of vendor lock-ins, it might be fair to start questioning the accessibility and shelf-life of the educational resources that we upload to the repositories.

Education in the Wild

Back in November, Elizabeth Fitzgerald of the Institute of Educational Technology, gave a coffee-morning presentation on the subject of “Location-based Learning: Education in the Wild”. Using her experience from various Mobile Learning projects in which she’s been involved, she explored the possibilities of augmenting human activity in context and adding value to locations or places with appropriate tools and materials. Two of the case studies were:

1. Students on location

This project assessed a variety of digital resources for supporting student learning about geographical landforms in the field. The resources ranged from the basic (computer-generated acetate) to the sci-fi-esque (a virtual reality head-mounted device). All suffered to various degrees with functionality issues: the acetate helpfully traced out landscapes but blew about in the wind; students could access information from the web through hand-held devices like mobile phones and tablet PCs, but not without screen visibility problems, poor connectivity and failing batteries; the head-mounted display offered the greatest potential for augmentation, but was technically complex, heavy, and not particularly hardened to the elements. The central point to have come across was the need for flexible, lightweight technologies that were easy to use. Even tech-savvy students didn’t have time for complex mapping apps.

2. Hidden Histories Tour of Nottingham

Taking a specific case study—the 1831 Nottingham Reform Riot (content was created by a local history group)—this project aimed to investigate how smart audio could be used to provide opportunities for learning in a public context. It involved a comparison of user experiences, between those on a tour led by a guide and those using only technology. This latter group had access to pre-prepared audio clips of relevant information that would be triggered when the user entered a particular zone. The findings indicate that users preferred the ‘human’ experience of a tour. It was not only the case that the technology (again) suffered from functionality issues (trigger regions often require the user to ‘hit’ a precise spot to activate the device); using the technology fundamentally changed the group dynamic. The users found themselves listening to their own mobile device rather than interacting among themselves, as frequently happens with a human tour-guide.

(For more information about the broader local history project, see: For more information, see http://peopleshistreh.wordpress.com/)

In both cases, ML technology can’t replace ‘being there’. Therefore, we need to find ways of getting the technology to offer something different without making it an individual sterile experience. In what ways can ML technology be used to encourage interaction and teamwork?

Bells and whistles in Mobile Learning?

Amazon has recently announced that Kindle, its ebook reader, has been topping the sales charts in the run-up to X-Mas for three weeks in a row. The results are especially significant when compared to Apple iPad sale figures – Amazon Kindle is currently outselling Apple's star tablet by 1,000,000 to 964,000 units.

The appeal of Kindle devices could be summarised in three points:

• Most models are extremely simple. Kindle uses a minimalist interface that requires little or no training from the end user.
• Most of them are truly portable. Most Kindle devices have a battery life of weeks (thanks to their low energy use). In addition, the 'E Ink' anti-glare screen technology allows users to read text in a broad range of environments – be it tucked in bed just before going to sleep or lying on a beach towel just before going for a piña colada.
• Perhaps most importantly, they are cheap. In fact, so cheap that Amazon allegedly makes a small loss every time they sell a unit. Some Kindle devices cost more to produce than the price they are sold for. The business strategy followed by Amazon here is to secure as much market share as possible through the sale of cheap devices in order to make profits later on through the sale of digital content (i.e. Amazon ebooks).

It's still early days; however, if this commercial trend continues, the repercussions for mobile learning could be very significant. As university departments become increasingly starry-eyed with the possibilities offered by internet-enabled devices equipped with webcams, GPS sensors, gyroscopes, touchscreens, liberal amounts of internal memory and high definition audio, it is becoming hard to ignore the sobering statistics. The most popular – and fastest selling – ebook reader among young students (from GCSE level to undergraduate level) is not a high-end, versatile tablet with all the bells and whistles, but rather a simple, cheap device that is designed to do one thing – display black and white text and images.

Image: CC Clive Darr (modified).

Large scale academic publishers, who have a well-earned reputation for being able to sniff out financial opportunities from quite a distance, have already started to react to this trend. The most popular ebook format for academic textbooks is currently Kindle's .mobi file. (This format was originally developed by a company called Mobipocket, who were bought by Amazon in 2005.)

Those who design and deliver digital learning services, like the Open University, face a tricky decision. Should we invest in innovative formats and platforms that push the boundaries of mobile learning, or should we go along with the prevailing current trend and prioritise plain text and simple image formats?

On the one hand, avoiding all the bells and whistles might:

• Allow mobile learning providers to reach out to a broader audience by tapping into the largest market share
• Seem a sounder investment strategy in the short term. (Why pay for the development of content and services that most of your potential clients are unable to use in their devices right now?)
• Improve digital accessibility. Plain text and simple images with descriptive captions are relatively easy to adapt to existing digital accessibility solutions (e.g. text-to-speech engines and versatile font renderers), whereas complex interactive elements are extremely difficult to access and navigate by users with a visual and/or hearing impairment.)

On the other hand, avoiding the bells and whistles might:

• Result in a poorer learning experience from those users who are able to access the services. (Interactive and multimedia-rich educational resources are more efficient than plain text and black & white images at conveying complex ideas and helping students to meet learning outcomes)
• Lead to a vicious circle in which users purchase the device that will allow them to access the largest amount of resources and producers generate resources in the format that will allow them to reach out to the largest number of users (thus creating a situation that stifles competition, promotes vendor lock-ins, and incentivises lack of innovation)
• Represent a risky long-term strategy if/when innovation does arrive. Mobile technology evolves at a very high speed. Is the digital learning provider willing to lose their competitive edge when the technological boundaries shift and the bells and whistles become available to large sectors of their user base?

Various providers have already started to test the waters with affordable tablets and / or ebook readers that incorporate elements such as touchscreens and colour displays (e.g. Kindle Fire). These low-cost devices seem to have their fair share of glitches and they still aren't quite attractive enough to take over tablet market. However, it's worth keeping a close eye on developments in this area. With lower prices and further innovation (fueled by fierce competition in mobile technology), today's bells and whistles might soon become tomorrow's standard issue in a mass market.

It’s not just about apps...

This week’s post is in an interview with Rhodri Thomas, Senior Project Manager in the Learning Innovation Office. Rhodri, who is something of a mobile learning guru at the OU, keeps his own blog on Mobile Learning support, which we urge you to check out. (At the moment you can see him give a presentation on mobile connections across the OU.) What he doesn’t know about mobile learning activity at the OU, isn’t worth the mobile it’s texted on. Here are some key points that emerged from our discussion:

A whole range of stuff can be covered by the description Mobile Learning:

· There’s the technology itself.

· Then there’s the user end of things, which addresses the needs of the student who’s out and about, so that they can multi-task as they travel (e.g. on public transport) and have access to content online (such as OU course material).

· There are devices that know where you are and allow you to exploit that information (e.g. geolocation apps).

· And there are devices that are able to handle multi-media.

Some background to ML development:

· User testing (such as surveying students and taking feedback, which IEY carry out) is helping to identify what websites and technical devices people are using.

· Currently, the most common activities continue to be quite traditional—i.e. reading material, catching up with assignments, participating in forums.

· But times are changing: more people are using tablets (such as ipads) and broadband speeds are getting quicker.

· In the US Higher Education sector, the focus has been for some time on developing apps. UK universities are looking to expand into this market, but most apps simply present a campus user experience and services (e.g. maps).

· For the OU, the Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) is important for building a continuous narrative from the production of course materials to their delivery for distance learners in an online environment.

7 key points:

· We shouldn’t be thinking about just ML apps, but more holistically in terms of the mobile web and services more generally.

· The question at all times should be: What tools are needed to do the job?

· Taking that one stage back, careful thought needs to be given to what it is you actually want to do. Apps work better with specific tasks in mind.

· In fact, ML should be seen as part of a bigger picture. For example, ML often works best when mediated through face-to-face engagement, such as when tying ML activities to tasks undertaken back at ‘base’.

· Flexibility is the thing. That is, the ability to switch from a ML web service (which you can use to work on a set of tasks wherever you are) to a desktop service (once you’re back in the office) to ML apps (if you have a specific task that needs being done).

· In short, mobile technology needs to be integrated into the learning outcomes from the beginning of the process.

· And for this, academics need training in and exposure to the range of ML possibilities that are available to them in their subject.

So, it seems that, as usual, some kind of training is needed. But, perhaps even more importantly, we ourselves need opportunities to play with the tools on offer. For, how can we come up with interesting uses for ML, if we haven't any experience of it

Size matters in Mobile Arts

Arts digital learning materials tend to be more multi-media heavy than those of other discipline areas. This is because Arts subjects, by their very nature, lend themselves to the use of animations, recorded music, 3D scans, images of paintings and sculptures, interactive maps, video ethnographies, and so on. Often, these resources are not there to simply illustrate a concept, but rather as a core element of the syllabus in themselves.

·The Good

The creative use of multi-media elements in digital educational resources offers an excellent opportunity to make teaching materials attractive in an aesthetic sense (i.e. the eye-candy factor). The relation between aesthetics and cognition in digital interface design is discussed by Stephen Anderson here.)

·The bad

The problem is that most of the multi-media resources that work perfectly well in a desktop computer with a 22" monitor at home do not work very well at all in a 3" smartphone screen used in the middle of a busy street. When using a small screen, there is a compromise between details and overall perspective, the interface design is altered and the navigation experience is affected. The bottom line is: most large images do not display well in smartphones.

·The ugly

Tablets solve many of these problems. Their screen size is large enough to display most maps and paintings in sufficient detail and their hardware is generally perfectly capable of coping with video and audio. However, the use of tablets leads to another two problems:

1. When used outdoors, most tablet screens have an ugly reflection (I know, it was a stretch to fit this under “ugly”!), which could, in many cases, defeat the purpose of truly mobile learning.
2. The serendipity factor. We carry our phones in our pocket most of the time, but we don’t always carry our tablets with us, because they are not as portable. Many of the mobile learning apps and web resources that we download are a result of serendipity (e.g. bumping into an interactive display in a museum, walking past a poster in the departmental noticeboard, having a conversation with a friend...). If a user does not have the right device to access a mobile learning resource on the spot, it might be a wasted opportunity for the content distributor to get the message across to the right audience.

Image: CC Michael Reuter.

There is currently no perfect solution for the display-portability compromise in mobile devices. Arts mobile learning resources are especially vulnerable to this problem because of their heavy reliance on multi-media content. Therefore, it could pay off to consider from a very early stage not just what our Arts mobile learning resource will contain, but also which device it is most likely to be accessed through (and, by extension, when and where it is most likely to be accessed by the end user).

An interview with Professor Agnes Kukulska-Hulme

Agnes is one of the leading Mobile Learning exponents at the OU, with a particular interest in enquiry-based learning. (The IET wiki lists all the projects that IET have been engaged for more than 10 years.) She has been involved in a Landscape Study of mobile and wireless learning, which documents current practice within UK Further and Higher Educational Institutions of using mobile devices in teaching and learning. She has also worked on various European projects, such as: mobilearn, which experimented with providing visitors to art galleries with tablets to acquire additional information for themselves and share it with each other; motill, which has over 50 ‘reviews’ of various projects, focused on explaining them and making them accessible to others; and MASELTOV, which is exploring issues of social inclusion and empowerment of immigrants through use of mobile learning technologies and social network services.

Agnes identifies the cost of ML as the biggest obstacle to adoption. Within many institutions, including the OU, ML is still regarded as a non-essential additional activity that takes time and does not warrant the investment, particularly when many budgets are being squeezed. A further problem is that the people being asked to include ML in their teaching often have little experience of the technology themselves. Both points indicate the importance of embedding ML in learning processes, as well as outcomes, and in training.

One final point: current implementations of ML often rely on context aware environments. That is to say, places are set up specifically for promoting particular tasks. But the challenge is how do you get from there to a world in which you can interact with things on an everyday basis?

Learning to Mobile Learn

Hello, my name's Elton Barker and I'm Aaron's colleague not only on this project but also in the department of Classical Studies. In my day job I work on the literature and culture of ancient Greece - to be honest, at time of writing mobile learning really is all Greek to me. So, why am I interested in mobile learning and what do I hope we achieve?

I was keen to join Aaron on this project since, while I'm connected to the internet for the greater part of my working (and non-working) day, I haven't used mobile learning in any of my teaching. No doubt I could make the excuse that I've only recently come to the OU; beforehand I was teaching in Oxford, where mobile learning would be taking a walk with one's tutor around Christ Church meadows while discussing Plato's theory of forms. (BTW, this is a cheap joke at my former employers' expense: Oxford is at the forefront of much digital activity in the UK, not least in Classics: witness the recent 'DIY' papyrus reading tool, trailed no less on R4's Today programme: http://ancientlives.org/.)

So, my first interest is simply to find out what kind of ML activity is going on at the OU, which from its very beginning has been at the forefront of technological pedagogy. (Remember those mathematics programmes on BBC2 late at night in the 70s?) Digital-based research is being conducted across the university in different faculties, primarily in: KMi (the Knowledge Media Institute), semantic webby folk who are looking to develop killer apps; and IET (the Institute of Educational Technology - the OU does like its acronyms), a team of IT anthropologists who analyse the use of social media in academia over coffee.

However, I don't think that it's enough to find out what's going on around the university: we, in the Faculty of Arts, also need to consider what we can use, and how, and what consequences might follow both for delivering our teaching and generally for thinking about our subject. Here, I'll be on a steep learning curve, since I'm of the generation for whom word processed essays and email exchanges with lecturers were the new thing; ML has played no role in my own education. Hell, I don't even possess a smart phone! So, the key follow up question for me is a two-parter: (i) can I use the particular app in the first place (i.e. is it as intuitive as the ipad OS on which I'm writing this post); and (ii) can I see the value of it as a pedagogical tool (i.e. can I learn with it?).

Of course, that's only the beginning. Once I've had a play with the app myself and 'got it', a whole series of questions follow regarding its use in teaching. First, can I see the value of it in what I teach, and, if so, how can I embed it within the course? Second, can I communicate that value to my colleagues in Arts? Third, can we (Aaron and I) come up with a test case of a particular app that, having done our research, we can embed in a particular course?

We'll be using this blog to post the results of our enquiries and, hopefully, raise a whole bunch of issues that will be of interest to others. If you've had experience of using ML in teaching, or indeed of being taught with ML, we'd be delighted to hear from you!