 Good day everybody and welcome to the video on the Design Principles for Mobile Learning. At the end of this short webinar you will be able to determine the basic Design Principles for Mobile Learning and identify the key limitations to the design and development of mobile instruction. Before you start the design activities though, you have to ask yourselves a number of questions. The first question is, is there a true need for mobile learning? What is the educational problem you are going to address and what can mobile learning offer as opposed to other educational approaches and other strategies? What are the benefits of mobile learning in this unique educational context and what are the resource requirements, physical, logistical, technological, human and monetary? Now after you've answered all these questions, you can move on to some other vital questions that are part of your needs assessment. The next question you want to ask yourself is with regards to mobile technologies. The type of mobile technology is available to our learners and teachers and the access to the internet. Are they going to complete most of the learning activities offline or online? Are our students in a situation where they can use mobile devices for hours and hours and recharge them whenever necessary? Maybe there are limitations to how long they can keep the device running. What type of devices are they using? Are they using small screen smartphones, dumb phones, feature phones, iPads or other tablets? How do people use these devices? Were there mobility patterns? Were there device usage patterns? Where and when and under what time and physical limitations will the learners be using their mobile devices? Also the context that they take their mobile activities in and that context has obviously a very significant impact on the design of both the mobile content and mobile delivery. And then like in any case of instructional design, you have to look very carefully at the learning outcome. What learning outcome are we targeting? Are we aiming at preparing students to complete a driving test, for example? Are we teaching them, helping them understand mathematical concepts? So the learners' needs and preferences would be the next thing you want to very carefully look at. For example, what media should be used for the target audience? Is text-based communication the solution you are looking for? Or maybe audio would be a preferred method. Are you designing for adult learners? Are the students mature? Do they have any prior knowledge of the subject area? Are they just beginners? Are they autonomous, self-directed students? Or are there students in a primary school that need a lot of your guidance and facilitation and support in the process, not only in the process of using the mobile learning content, but in using the devices as well. And obviously you have to select the appropriate theoretical framework. You need an overarching approach to the design of mobile learning activities and tasks. Are you aiming, for example, at a social constructivist learning environment? If so, you have to ensure to incorporate interaction with peers and other actors in the learning event. To leverage some of the existing materials would be a good option if such exists and can be actually adopted for the mobile learning ecosystem. So they would have to be changed, tailored and customized to the learning that you are developing. Let's now look at some key characteristics of mobile learning that you have to leverage through your design of learning activities and tasks. I have mentioned the key affordances of M learning in my webinar on the pedagogy of mobile learning, but let me go over them very briefly so that you can incorporate them in the design of the learning experience for your students. Whenever possible, I recommend you make sure that the learning experience is authentic, that students get to learn in context that is relevant to the knowledge or skills that are acquiring. Contextual learning is one of the most effective ways of learning. So whenever possible, embed the learning, situate the learning in the real-life environment. Now, there are activities that you would like to design as context-independent. For example, podcasts for students to listen to while they're on the go. Whenever possible, ensure that the learning experience and the learning activities are collaborative and connected. So it's a good idea to mix in both individual activities where students can concentrate on their cognitive processes and then enrich them with collaboration and communication so that the students can actually reflect on the learning and deepen the learning and then build the knowledge while working with their peers and experts. Now that we're dealing with personal devices, well, it's a good idea to personalize learning, customize it to the diverse needs of our learners. Also, make sure the learners are involved in the relevant activities. They are active, hands-on, experiential learning is a really good strategy for students to achieve very effective outcomes. Yes, learning should be relevant and meaningful. A mix of formal and informal learning is probably something you would like to also include in the design of your lessons, courses, and activities. And when we talk about various activities, it is important that you blend both focused and flexible activities. Those that student can complete anytime and anywhere. And those more focused, structured activities that students are to complete either individually or in a group or in a pair in a particular situation that the information is actually referring to. Such learning should be guided by experts and other peers to the degree that the particular student or group of students require. And always make sure that the learning experience is engaging and empowering. Mobile learning is unique. Mobile learning is not just compact, shrunk, reduced in size e-learning. Mobile learning has its unique affordances, challenges, limitations, and capabilities. When designing formal learning, keep it in mind and also look very carefully at these four aspects of the design for mobile learning. The content, the delivery methods and tools, interaction sharing and communication methods, as well as the design of learning and teaching activities. Let's first look at the content design. Here are a few recommendations that you should consider when thinking about the design of content for mobile learning. First of all, use multimedia whenever appropriate. In certain contexts, for example, when your students are using only smartphones, tech space communication between students may be the only solution. However, when you are teaching languages, for example, you would like to include a little bit of audio, video, to support the understanding and the comprehension of what the students are listening to. It is also suggested that you chunk up the content that you're creating, that you put bite-size modules and elements together in a connected way that actually enables seamless continuous learning. However, also lets the learner pause whenever it's convenient and appropriate for him or her. Include access to existing content and resources that obviously are validated by an expert. Also include activities and resources that are both required and optional. Students often go outside of the structure of the course looking for additional answers. It would be nice to include some pointers and point the students to additional resources. And once again, personalize. Include personally relevant content that students can customize sometimes themselves. They can customize it to their own individual diverse needs and then can access it at any time that they needed or share it if they prefer to do so. It's a good idea to include reminders, notifications and updates for students to help them a little bit with the time management. And also if you can select appropriate educational apps that are contingent to learning and that actually aim at the learning outcome that you're designing for, it's a good idea. Why not? Also another component that quite often is included and incorporated in mobile learning is social media tools. When designing for the mobile learning delivery, you have to consider quite a number of aspects. I put them in three main groups, starting with the physical aspect, the location and the limitations of the location that the learning is going to take place. As I mentioned before, it could be context dependent or context independent learning, flexible learning at any place or just location bound learning where the information comes from the context. The students could be learning in their personal space or social space in a quiet place or very loud place. All of that has to be considered while designing. As far as the time of learning, you can have different length of the learning events. They can be brief, serious of longer episodes, really long activity, or you could be designing course-long mobile learning curriculum where you have to actually incorporate all various types of activities. And once again, we talked about focus versus flexible and mix of both is recommended. And don't forget that spaced learning, when learners learn and revisit the content information or skills from time to time in shorter chunks, but on a regular basis, actually has been found by research to be very effective. And then finally, the technology. Are we learning offline, online? Are we using tablets or phones or type of phones? Are our students using various platforms then you have to actually design, considering the various requirements and limitations of these platforms and let's not forget the usage of social networks. That should be also included in the consideration for the details of your design. And what type of interaction do you want to incorporate in your design? You might be looking at individual activities, even behaviorist type of learning where students are completing vocabulary assessment, for example. But outside of that situation, quite often you are looking into involving some kind of interaction between students. It could be formal or informal interaction. It could be interaction via their mobile devices that is combined with face-to-face activities where students are together collecting, capturing data. So sometimes students are actually communicating and completing their tasks and activities, face-to-face, but in the case of mobile learning, most of the time they are either learning at a distance or they are communicating from two different places and time and space. According to what the needs are, make sure to include the appropriate channel and medium of communication. You could be using text-based chats, you could be using Flogs. Flogs are basically blogs that are using your voice and language learning students actually really take well to this type of Flog-based activities. You could be using synchronous or asynchronous types of activities, for example, phone calls versus the email communication. And yes, I recommend that students build their own artifacts. Sure, their own artifacts. You need some kind of an exchange forum tool and design that enables students to ask questions, share their resources, evaluate each other, support each other. It's very important and it involves this type of support from the community of practice. And here I'd like to share with you a list of activities that are most suitable for mobile learning. This is not an exhaustive list, it's just a few examples. It is recommended that you blend focus and spontaneous tasks and activities, those ad hoc tasks. Also data collection and sharing should be part of the learning, personal reflection, make sure that students can access resources and get just-in-time information that they can connect with the community of practice, community of learners. They can also access their experts in scaffolds and supports. Complete assessment tasks, either shorter ones, ad hoc ones, or those that go over time and cross various spaces and activities. And include some more innovative activities as well that are using the latest technologies. For example, augmented reality tasks and games. Let me finish with a few final words of wisdom based on my experience and research. Whenever designing mobile learning, start with a learner, start with your students. Make sure it's all learner-centered. Define your educational problem, your outcomes, and design to that. Look at the technologies available and technologies that are most appropriate to be used in that particular context. And make the learning experience engaging, empowering, authentic, and active, and whenever possible, situated, and context-aware. And be prepared for change. When working with technologies, the technologies develop and change, the content develops. The content develops and change, and the expectations of your students, and the needs and preferences of your students and teachers change. Be prepared.