Connected learning: How mobile technology can improve education

Connected learning: How mobile technology can improve education

Education is at a critical juncture in many nations around the world. It is vital for student learning, workforce development, and economic prosperity. For example, research in Turkey has found that raising the compulsory education requirement from five to eight years increased the percentage of women having eight years of school by 11 percentage points, and had a variety of positive social consequences.

Yet despite the emergence of digital learning, most countries still design their educational systems for agrarian and industrial eras, not the 21st century. This creates major problems for young people who enter the labor force as well as teachers and parents who want children to compete effectively in the global economy.

In this paper, Darrell West examines how mobile devices with cellular connectivity improve learning and engage students and teachers. Wireless technology and mobile devices:

• Provide new content and facilitate information access wherever a student is located
• Enable, empower, and engage learning in ways that transform the environment for students inside and outside school
• Allow students to connect, communicate, collaborate, and create using rich digital resources, preparing them to adapt to quickly evolving new technologies
• Incorporate real-time assessment of student performance
• Catalyze student development in areas of critical-thinking and collaborative learning, giving students a competitive edge

Connected learning: How is mobile technology impacting education?

Beth Stone

Managing Editor, Brown Center Chalkboard

Connected Learning

Despite the emergence of digital learning models, most countries around the world still design their educational systems for agrarian and industrial eras rather than modern society, writes Darrell West in a new paper. In “Connected learning: How mobile technology can improve education,” West points out how a lack of education technology access is detrimental to young people entering the labor force as well as teachers and parents who want children to compete in the global economy. As the economy shifts and technologies such as robotics, artificial intelligence, and machine learning improve, countries will need to update their curricula in order to train students with new skills for the 21st century.

West focuses specifically on mobile technology and focuses on ways devices with cellular connectivity improve learning and engage students and teachers. He points to the variety of educational benefits mobile technologies have for learning, including the personalization of education, real-time assessment, the increase in innovative practices, and the empowerment of women and those who are disadvantaged.

The Open University at 45: What can we learn from Britain's distance education pioneer?

Ben Wildavsky | February 1, 2016 7:00am

• Ben Wildavsky

  Ben Wildavsky is director of higher education studies at the Rockefeller Institute of Government, State University of New York, and policy professor at SUNY-Albany. He is a former Brookings Institution guest scholar.

The Open University at 45: What can we learn from Britain's distance education pioneer?

Forty-five years ago, when Britain’s Open University (OU) began broadcasting its first lectures over BBC television and radio, there were many reasons to discount its importance. For one thing, the concept of providing higher education at a distance wasn’t new: the first correspondence course, teaching shorthand, was offered in the 1700s; the University of London began offering distance-learning degrees to students around the world in the mid-19th century. For another, would-be reformers had a long history of over-promising and under-delivering when it came to educational technology; as far back as 1922, for example, Thomas Edison declared that “the motion picture is destined to revolutionize our educational system.”