9/9/2014 Teaching America's First Course on Mobile Phone Learning (EDUCAUSE Quarterly) | EDUCAUSE.edu http://www.educause.edu/ero/article/teaching-americas-first-course-mobile-phone-learning 1/7 Teaching America's First Course on Mobile Phone Learning by Dominic Mentor and Nabeel Ahmad Published on Wednesday, September 22, 2010 0 Comments Key Takeaways Teaching a cutting-edge educational technology course requires making connections to preexisting knowledge in a conceptual educational framework. A new course advised students on projects covering international health, language learning, and interactive classroom response systems to demonstrate the potential omnipresent use of mobile phones for learning interventions. Carefully considering how to reach nontechnical people and how to determine their needs will help improve the diversity of and interactions with mobile phone learning opportunities. In 2008, we (Dominic Mentor and Nabeel Ahmad) were in the same educational technology doctoral cohort at Columbia University's Teachers College, pondering issues of computer literacy and computer access that still challenge the educational realm. We realized that in many communities around the globe mobile phone ownership has helped people bypass some digital divide issues. From Africa and Asia to the Americas, rural, impoverished communities or those with limited computer literacy have affordable technology in their hands and use it to great effect. 1 The technology of choice is the mobile phone because it gives people the ability to communicate and connect with friends and family, schedule appointments and reminders, and play games. Dominic's focus on social connectedness through text message communication for educational and business purposes complemented Nabeel's exploration of mobile device effects in the workplace on learning and job performance. Normally, people would not think of mobile phones as suitable for education, yet both of us believed that mobile phones offered unique and ubiquitous educational opportunities. The onset of the mobile revolution saw many schools offering mobile computing courses where students learn to program for an iPhone or Android app. 2 Despite this upswing of mobile programming courses, no graduate course yet covered the use of mobile phones for teaching and learning. We decided to create one. Class Overview While presenting mobile-learning workshops, we quickly found that interest in the subject matter often came with apprehension — many prospective students asked if they needed to have programming skills or possess a technical background. They don't. In fact, in our m-learning course students design the learning activity and inform the human user interface. If programming is needed, students have the instructional design models in place for a programmer to follow. Because the course is situated within the computing technology division, students have access to programmers there as well as at Columbia's computer science department. The students' role is to understand how to leverage the educational value and proper use of mobile phones for learning. As one student commented: "I had no clue so many opportunities were available via mobile learning. It truly opens up the