Spreading the word that Athabasca University is leading mobile learning in Canada is one of Dr. Rory McGreal’s goals.
He is vice-president of research for Athabasca University and he was thrilled when the International E-Learning Association chose Athabasca University’s Mobile Learning Project as the winner of the 2011 E-Learning award.
The announcement was made at the organization’s annual conference in Piest’any, Slovakia on September 22.
“Athabasca University was probably one of the first universities to start doing research into mobile learning about eight to 10 years ago.” McGreal said.
The university submitted some of their mobile learning courses to be considered for the award.
“One is a full grammar course in English as a second language that is available free of charge for anyone in the world who wants it,” he explained. “It works on even the most basic mobile phones. Another course for immigrants in the workplace, we’ve done a French course and accent reduction.”
The university has been pushing to design more courses and to find a way for the courses to reach more people.
“We are now in the process of designing courses so they can be used on any kind of device, not just mobile ones,” he said. “One of the major things that we’re doing is creating a database in XML, a computer language, so we can download our course materials onto any kind of device, mobile or on your desktop, tablet or a simple phone, or be printed.”
Just before McGreal moved to Athabasca, he was traveling through a village with no electricity in the Philippine Islands.
“There was a farmer up to his knees in a rice patty behind two oxen and he was digital messaging,” he said. “In the year 2000 in Canada, nobody was digital messaging. The phone companies here had huge exorbitant costs, which they still do compared to the rest of the world.”
McGreal saw the potential in the little computer the farmer was holding.
“When I came to Athabasca I started encouraging people to start thinking in terms of using mobile devices for learning,” he said. “In the year 2000 the Philippines did more digital messaging per person than any other country in the world.”
McGreal later found out that the main developers for mobile learning were in developing countries.
“They were way ahead of Canada,” he said. “I was quite shocked by that.”
Mobile learning in Canada is not within the general public’s grasp because of ridiculously high rates.
“Canada is way more expensive using mobile devices than other countries,” McGreal said. “That slows us down. In most countries you don’t pay to receive an SMS message. You pay to send it, but in Canada you pay to both send and receive it.”
One of the reasons Athabasca University hasn’t implemented an SMS learning messaging system is because it would cost the students to receive messages.
“They are doing that in other countries and it is quite effective,” McGreal said.
The award means recognition throughout the university.
“Hopefully it will encourage us to do more, better, faster and implement more of our course materials in a fashion that is mobile friendly,” he said.
