The use of mobile devices for education has been an interest of mine since 2011. But a lot has changed since the days of the iPhone 4 and the Nexus S: smartphones, which used to be the cutting edge of consumer technology are now ubiquitous to the point of being taken for granted. And technology vendors, who used to think of mobile as an afterthought, are developing apps and services with mobile compatibility as the first priority.

And I’ve seen attitudes shift among faculty too. As recently as 2015, many faculty I interacted with saw using smartphones for learning as so radical as to be frightening. In the last year, many faculty seem to view the notion as so obvious as to be boring.

Given these shifts in technology and attitudes towards the technology, this is a good time to check in on the current state of mobile learning, and it’s trajectory going forward.

The taxonomy of mobile learning

As the DePaul Mobile Learning Initiative has worked with faculty on integrating students’ own smartphones into their teaching practices over the years, we noticed that our projects were falling into one of three categories:

• Untethered Studying – In these activities, students do the same kinds of activities they would normally do either with a computer or offline to enhance their learning, like reading, reviewing instructor lectures, or practicing on flashcards, but because they were accessible via mobile device, students could do them anywhere–on the train, in a waiting room, etc. Evaluating these activities using the SAMR model, we would generally classify these activities as technological substitutions or augmentations, where the underlying activity changes little even though its performed via a new technology.

• Classroom Integrations – These are activities that use mobile devices to enhance their participation in a physical classroom space, like classroom response systems such as Poll Everywhere. Using the SAMR model, these would classify these as augmentation (at least relative to pre-smartphone clicker technology), providing enhanced functionality for the same kind of learning activity. 

• Experiential Learning – These activities allow students to use the outside world as a learning resource, with mobile devices providing the ability to structure and capture the experience. Goose Chase is an example of this, and it allows faculty to designate GPS coordinates students need to go to and questions they need to answer when they get there. These integrations can easily be transformative in the SAMR model.

Mobile learning in a responsive world

Last year, D2L released Daylight, a new unified, responsive user interface for its learning management system that functions just as well on a mobile device as it does on a desktop. D2L is hardly alone in this–responsive design is now the standard design strategy for web and app developers.

With this trend, the line between mobile learning and other instructional technology is blurring. Classroom apps like Poll Everywhere are as likely to be accessed from a student’s laptop as a smartphone, and untethered studying apps are no longer a distinct category–it’s the same content on mobile or a desktop. While there is still work to be done in ensuring that the content of these responsive tools is as mobile friendly as the tools themselves, mobile learning may disappear as a distinct field–at least when it comes to untethered studying apps and classroom integrations. Mobile compatibility will be an essential component and a given for all instructional technology, and fluency in mobile workflows will be an expectation for all instructional technologists, not just mobile learning specialists.

Experiential learning apps, on the other hand, remain a domain unique to mobile learning.

Moving past pilot projects – the adoption curve

And where are we on mobile experiential learning apps? I recently attended the 17th World Conference on Mobile and Contextual Learning and while there is no shortage of case studies and pilot projects, one of the themes that emerged was the difficulty of moving beyond innovators and winning broader adoption.

That reflects our experience at DePaul as well. While we’ve had several successful pilot projects, the main mobile-learning activity we’ve seen expanding usage in is classroom response systems like Poll Everywhere, which is moving more into the domain of a general instructional technology rather than being mobile-specific.

There are a few reasons for this lack of adoption:

• Mobile experiential learning depends greatly on the discipline and the local educational resources available to the instructor. An art history instructor in Chicago can easily structure an activity around the Art Institute. For an instructor of ancient philosophy, it’s harder to find such a resource that would enhance student learning. 
• Software is still lagging behind. While certain apps can be repurposed for this kind of activity, there are few purpose built for it, which means the user experience is lacking. And there are whole categories of activities, like collaborative mapping, for which no current app is suitable. 
• Many instructors still don’t know how to implement these activities. The use cases they have seen don’t exactly fit with their own class, and they haven’t been given the space to imagine how to implement a similar activity in their own classes.

Overcoming these challenges to reach the true potential of mobile learning will require the continued efforts of developers, instructional designers, and instructors.