Sophie returns home after a long day of piano lessons and school. She goes up to her room and checks the notifications on her phone. Delighted to note a new lesson updated on her online art history course, she promptly joins the virtual lesson. While most students her age would choose a show to binge-watch on Netflix to unwind after a long day, Sophie decides to go through the course contents. And all of this has been made possible with the marvelous effects of blended mobile learning.
Making education accessible to those with smartphones and stable Internet access, blended mobile learning can supplement, if not substitute, formal education systems. Living in the time of Google Cardboard, augmented reality in classrooms, and blurring boundaries through futuristic edtech, blended mobile learning offers students an excellent opportunity to learn and flourish at their own pace. Read on to know more about the benefits of blended mobile learning –the future of education.
Blended mobile learning: what is it all about?
We have come a long way from the traditional classroom setting of chalkboards and students poring over their copies, taking down notes from the teacher. We live in the age of fast-paced technology offering real-time solutions for our problems. So, why should education lag behind?
Blended mobile learning offers an integrated educational model that goes beyond the traditional classroom as we know it. Coursework for blended learning models does not follow a strict timetable. Hence, students can opt for self-paced courses according to their areas of interest.
Blended mobile learning combines virtual and in-person sessions. Course content for blended mobile learning includes readings and handouts as well as e-learning app content. Course supplements for blended mobile learning, in universities like the University of New South Wales, also take into account blogs, video lessons, and presentations, to name a few.
Blended learning models: varieties galore
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- Online: Students can take part in the sessions through video conferences to help online with a few face-to-face meetings.
- Flex Learning: Enables students to gain knowledge mostly through online or learning app mediums along with a few small group-setting meetings for lessons.
- Personalized blend: Tackles the studies as required by the students with physical and virtual classroom spaces.
- Self-blend: Students take up online courses as supplements to traditional forms of formal education at schools.
- Face-to-face learning: Mainly concerns face-to-face learning with smart classroom features and the use of homework apps.
- Rotation: Students can take turns at face-to-face and self-paced learning options with fixed but flexible schedules.
5 reasons why blended mobile learning is making its mark
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- De-stresses learners
Learners can get instant access to learning material, no matter where they are. Students can thus, take up lessons from where they left off while waiting at airport terminals or after a long day at school. This nature of flexible learning schedules that takes into account the learner’s life and other engagements itself are a de-stressing factor for most. Blended mobile learning can thus, boost the learners’ efficiency and productivity by many a notch.
While they continue to gain access to knowledge and skills that fit their individual learning styles, the better equipped they become for a competitive future. The sheer variety of learning content also helps students find better ways of channelizing their creativity and potential, bringing out the best in them all.
- Caters to different learning styles
Living in the age of distractions, each learner has their own pace of learning. In fact, some would go as far as to say that students active on digital devices are less likely to complete homework. However, blended mobile learning takes care of that as well.
Learners can now avail of coursework materials and quizzes as per their levels of difficulty and learning pace through blended mobile learning systems. The developmental mathematics courses on the NROC Project, for example, feature a wide variety of learning strategies through instructional videos, voice-over text, games, and tutorials for each math skill.
Blended mobile learning makes it easier to leverage individual learner interests through tailor-made internships and projects that figure in all sorts of various learning styles and speeds.
- Makes way for dynamic feedback
Learning Management Systems (LMS) in blended mobile learning offer a feature named reporting. It lets educators find a graphical representation of information within LMS for keeping track of the progress of students. They can also tweak the course materials to fit the learning needs of the students.
Testing different types of material for slow learners or plagiarism checkers for students prone to accidentally quoting information from external sources are just two examples of how the feedback system works. The educators can also predict the learning pace and style of learners at an early stage in blended mobile learning. The feedback system helps educators in tracking both the performance and progress of learners.
- Improves collaboration and communication
Course participants in blended mobile learning get to collaborate and team up for challenges and engage in discussions over the coursework. The learning methods help them share their lessons, review answers for quizzes and provide feedback for improvement as well. Therefore, the dynamic online discussions work the same way for instilling collaboration as group projects or team exercises in traditional classroom settings.
You would occasionally find students of computer science and IT reaching out for programming help through blended learning programs online, such as at Wild Code School. Additionally, updating learners on important test dates, announcements about lessons has also become easier through blended mobile learning systems.
- Makes learning fun
Blended mobile learning is also making big strides because it can increase the engagement level of learners. And in doing so, it never loses focus from the main goal: providing insightful education. Students under amiable teachers usually do better in studies for the simple fact that their approach to education is a world apart from the uptight educators. Blended learning takes precisely this into account and combines the goodness of education and entertainment to form a new variation of learning.
New-age learners, the ones who grow up on a steady diet of gadgets like the iPad and Smartphone, quite naturally take to blended learning, all thanks to its gamification features.
Summing it up
The learning process itself, as well as the learners, forms a significant part of blended mobile learning. Blended learning is breaking barriers in terms of how we perceive education. As we move towards a more fast-paced and tech-based time, it is best to opt for strategies that help the next generation take to education naturally. And what better way to do so than blended mobile learning?
Consider these 5 benefits discussed in this post the next time you think of how it can help in bringing about a better tomorrow in education. Thus, with blended learning opportunities in a digitized world, the basic rights to education for all look like an achievable goal indeed.
Author bio:
Selina Johnson, a Melbourne-based web developer, is associated with MyAssignmenthelp.com as a custom homework expert. When not answering students’ queries on “Please do my homework for me,” she likes to blog on education, travel, and technology, among other topics. She can also be found at the local tennis club, sweating it out with her fellow fitness enthusiasts over the weekends.
