Mobile learning, also known as m-learning, is an educational system. Mobile learning supports, with the help of mobile devices, a continuous access to the learning process. This can be on appliances like your phone, laptop or tablet. You can learn wherever and whenever you want! Mobile and ubiquitous learning has been a key focus in e-learning and practicing broadly worldwide. Among the research publications in this area, a majority of them focused on evaluating the effectiveness of relevant practices and reported positive outcomes. The paper Success in Mobile and Ubiquitous Learning: Indicators of Effectiveness written by researcher Billy T.M. Wong focuses on the use of various indicators of effectiveness for the practices of mobile and ubiquitous learning.
The review covers a total of 50 cases from relevant literature for the period 2007–2016. Regarding the contexts of practice, the results show that 92% of the cases involved the use of mobile devices for accessing online or offline information; 40% involved social interaction among peers or between students and teachers; and 74% involved the apps or learning materials developed for specific courses. The indicators of effectiveness revolved around 10 categories, namely learning achievements, perceived usefulness, motivation, ease of use, satisfaction, learning attitude, cognitive load, system usage, self-efficacy, and social engagement. Results also show that studies of mobile and ubiquitous learning practices mostly focused on specific courses with less than 100 participants.
With the advancement of technology, mobile-learning allows educational institutions to deliver flexible education and implement innovative pedagogies without the geographical constraints. This paper presents a review of indicators of effectiveness in mobile and ubiquitous learning practices, showing how mobile technologies have been applied in a broad range of contexts, and the areas of effectiveness revealed in the practices. The effectiveness of mobile and ubiquitous learning can be evaluated from multiple perspectives. Examples include a socio-cultural perspective, such as the proportion of people in a society showing a positive attitude towards mobile and ubiquitous learning; an institutional perspective, such as the development of infrastructure for mobile technology in an institution; and an individual perspective, such as students’ learning experience. This study aims to review the indicators of effectiveness in studies evaluating mobile and ubiquitous learning practices, as well as the contextual factors of the practices which may affect the evaluation results. The method used was quite simple. The literature was collected from Google Scholar using the keywords “mobile learning” or “ubiquitous learning”, together with “indicators of effectiveness” or “success factors” in the period 2007–2016. 50 cases were collected covering information such as: countries, level of education, use of mobile devices for learning, and measures of the effectiveness of the practices. The information gathered was categorized into three areas: (1) contextual information on the mobile and ubiquitous learning practices, e.g. geographical region, educational level, number of participants, and level of intervention; (2) the use of mobile devices, e.g. the purpose of use, level of interactivity, and functions of the mobile devices; and (3) the indicators of effectiveness for the practices.
The results the results of this study represent more of the situation in Asia.They are also consistent with the finding of Sung et al. (2016) that websites or mobile apps developed for specific teaching and learning goals have been widely used. Those websites or apps account for most mobile and ubiquitous learning practices in this study, and so its results are representative of the practices. There are no observable differences in the indictors of effectiveness for mobile and ubiquitous learning practices involving access to information or social interaction. It is worth noting that less than half of the practices involved social interaction. According to Slavin (2012) and Sung et al. (2016), it is inconclusive whether social interaction with the aid of mobile devices enhances learning achievement.
The results of this study suggest the need to conduct evaluation of mobile and ubiquitous learning practices on a larger scale.
Ecaterina Filimon
