Mobile Advocacy in Nursing Programs

Introduction and Advocacy

Nurse educators, students in nursing programs and nurse practitioners are all very busy with their responsibilities for teaching, learning, and patient care.  Mobile technologies have an opportunity to aid nursing professionals with their various responsibilities in the classroom and with their clinical activities providing a digitally mediate forum for: educating new nurses; providing continuing education opportunities for nurse practitioners; a way for students to stay in contact with their professors and preceptors; a way for preceptors to monitor activities of nursing students in the field and provide them with feedback on their clinical work; and connecting nurse educators and their students through social networking tools to a global network of nurses.  Having a mobile device with mobile data and internet access can provide nurses with a powerful tool that can improve the care they provide their patients, improve their educational outcomes and allow access to information, learning materials and experts, all in the palm of their hand. 

This paper advocates for nursing education programs to require their students to have some form of a mobile device, either a smartphone or tablet, as part of their curriculum requirements.  Additionally, nursing programs should provide essential medical and nursing applications, databases, and content for their students to use on their mobile devices.  Utilizing these mobile devices with the appropriate software and resources will provide great value to nurse educators and their students, in the classroom and as part of their clinical learning environment.  

Challenges in Nursing Education

In post-secondary education, nursing education programs span the range from associate degrees to doctoral programs.  One of the main challenges nursing programs face is a scarcity of nurse educators at a time when the nursing profession is seeing increasing student enrollments in community colleges, for-profit educational institutions and universities.  Nurse educators, students and practitioners face various challenges in the classroom and in their clinic learning environments; mobile technologies can help address some of these needs.

Nurse educators face challenges including:

• Increasing enrollments in nursing programs and not enough qualified nurse educators, makes it difficult for educators to provide personalized contact with students in the classroom and significantly more difficult to keep in contact with students in their clinical learning environments, which may be in rural and remote areas (Yoost, 2011). 
• Keeping up-to-date with technological innovations that students expect as part of their classroom education. 
• Keeping up-to-date with technology nursing students and practitioners use in a clinical environment. 
• Keeping up-to-date with current medical practices and procedures. 
• Providing busy students with flexible options for their learning.

Nursing students face challenges including:

• Very busy schedules both in the classroom and in the clinic. 
• A large amount of medical information to learn in the classroom, through textbooks, and working in the field.
• Conducting their clinical work in remote locations can make students feel isolated from their instructor or preceptors (Park, Van Neste-Kenny, Burton, & Kenny, 2010). 
• Students have many heavy textbooks and reference books to carry around.
• Due to work and family obligations, which could include overnight shifts, students cannot always make it campus for every class, but they need to keep up with the syllabus and course materials.
• In the clinic, nursing students may have to make patient care decisions without guidance or consultation with their instructors or preceptors.  

Nurse practitioners face challenges including:

• The need to continue learning after completing their nursing program.  Participating in continuing medical education programs is critical for nurses.
• Very busy schedules necessitate the need for flexibility in terms of how they receive instruction. 
• Managing patient care for multiple patients and tracking their recovery.

Use of Mobile Devices in Nursing Curricula

Adding mobile devices into a nursing curriculum can benefit both students and their instructors by providing: manageability of course materials and student learning artifacts; ability to review course materials on-demand; convenience and immediacy of access to instructors, course related information and subject matter experts; and collaboration with classmates and global experts. 

With an influx of students into nursing programs and scarcity of nursing instructors, educators need tools that allow them to manage their communication with students, manage students in the classroom and online, and assess their students’ outcomes.  While nurse educators have responsibilities to their students in the classroom, they need to be kept up-to-date on the progress their students are making in the field, and they must keep their skills current.   Needless to say, nurse educators are very busy people.  In terms of classroom management and communication, along with the ability to assess student outcomes, there are many mobile applications that can aid educators, which connect to learning management systems commonly used by educational institutions.  Mobile apps developed for Moodle, Blackboard, Desire2Learn and soon to be developed apps for SAKAI allow educators to stay in contact with their students and the latest developments within their course on their mobile devices.  Instructors can view class rosters, review discussion postings, journals, blogs and other course related activities.  Having access to their courses on mobile devices can provide busy instructors with the ability to check-in on their course and students while they are between classes or on the way to the clinic. 

Accessing course materials and participating in discussions, wikis and journals on a mobile device will also provide students with great benefits as they can participate in their courses and access learning materials while they are on-campus, commuting, or working in remote and rural environments.  Mobile devices also provide students with the ability to review lectures that have been captured in the classroom.  It is quite common that students will capture the audio in the classroom either through digital recorders or digital recording software on their mobile devices.  Many colleges and universities have invested in lecture capture systems that will allow students to review the full classroom experience with audio, video and instructional materials all synchronized together and available for review on mobile devices.  The ability to review lectures as many times as needed on mobile devices can prove a powerful learning tool for students as they prepare for examinations and their term papers.  Additionally for students who cannot attend class because of work or family obligations, they are able to keep up with the class by reviewing recorded lectures (DeBourgh, 2008).

Mobile technologies provide a significant level of convenience for both students and educators. Nursing students can have several large textbooks and reference guides that they utilize in their course work that are heavy and awkward to carry.  Being able to reference these materials on a tablet provides students with all of their textbooks on a mobile device that weighs less than two to three pounds.  In addition to lightening a student’s physical burden of carrying textbooks, students can more easily take their reference materials into the clinic or hospital, they can easily search their materials for the information they need, and the digital textbook be can more engaging with high-quality videos and simulations embedded into the text as reference information. 

For educators, student interactions can be moved online, they can review student work, and more easily monitor students working in remote areas.  Online office hours provide both the instructor and students with conveniences so that office hours can be offered at greater frequency and both students and their instructors do not need to be in a physical location together.  Since students and instructors have very busy schedules, the convenience of meeting in a virtual office through mobile devices affords a significant level of convenience and interaction with students. 

Nursing students who are completing clinical requirements within a nursing curriculum can feel disconnected from their classmates and instructors.  Mobile technologies for nursing students allow them to keep in contact with their instructors and fellow students through mobile services like: SMS (text messaging), using audio and video calling capabilities built into modern smartphones, sending emails, and utilizing social networking technologies.  All of these capabilities can increase collaboration between students and their instructors.  These collaborative activities can be critical as they will keep remote students connected to the experts they need access to, ensuring that they will successfully complete their course of study. 

Use of Mobile Devices in Clinical Learning Environments

Mobile devices with access to mobile data or WIFI can be valuable for nursing students as they enter the clinical phases of their curriculum; the student’s clinical learning environment could be far from campus and their instructors.  Mobile devices can provide a wealth of benefits for students, including a way to cite examples of their learning experiences for their instructors to review and assess. 

Content for mobile devices can prove exceedingly beneficial for students in clinical environments.  Through their mobile devices, students can review recorded lectures or access medical reference materials and databases that can improve the care nurses provide to their patients.  With access to these resources on their mobile devices, nurses can make quicker decisions without needing to check-in with their instructor or delay prescribing care until their next visit with the patient.  A South African project provided nurses with mobile devices pre-loaded with medical databases so that as they were working with their patients they could more quickly diagnose a problem and prescribe care in the field.  If they had any questions regarding a particular condition, they could send an SMS to an expert back at the hospital for further guidance (Qualcomm, 2011). 

E-portfolios are becoming important assessment tools in nursing programs, especially as students are completing their clinical requirements.  An e-portfolio allows students to post learning artifacts from their work in the field and instructors can review the work students are doing as well as monitor their activities and progress.  Learning artifacts could include: journal or blog entries, audio recordings of the day’s activities, or a video of work with a patient –if the patient provides consent to be recorded.  All of these learning artifacts can be created on or with a mobile device.  The e-portfolio provides a history of the student’s learning and progress throughout the curriculum, which may be helpful as they apply for jobs or continue their education (Garrett & Jackson, 2006). 

Nurses are working in multi-cultural and multi-lingual environments.  Using mobile devices, potentially using a video-calling feature, nurses in remote locations could connect patients to native language speakers to help diagnose a patient’s condition and prescribe a course of action for their care.  For patients who maybe taking a mixture of medications, it is critical that they know how the drugs will interact with each other and their side effects.  If nurses can have someone explain the instructions for their patient’s medicines in their native language through the mobile device, it could literally save their patient’s life. 

Using mobile devices can aid in the learning process for using electronic medical records.  More hospitals are moving to electronic records and if nursing students have a deep understanding for how to read electronic charts, it will make them more effects as they graduate from their nursing programs and begin practicing.  Tablets can be an effective form factor for reading electronic medical records and entering data into the records.  Mobile devices can also aid nurses in recording and track dosing information for their patient’s medications and provide a patient history that they can reference when visiting their patient in the future.

Why Advocate for Requiring Mobile Devices in Nursing Education Programs?

Given the responsibilities and workloads that nursing students and nurse educators are responsible for, mobile devices can provide a better quality of life as they manage their busy schedules.  Advocating that nursing curricula require students to have mobile devices will increase the costs students pay for their education, but the benefits outweigh the costs.  Many students come to campus with mobile devices: smartphones, tablets, or both types of devices, so the costs for requiring these devices may not add to their financial burdens.  If prospective students understand that mobile devices are a requirement for their program, they can budget for these devices as a cost component for attaining their degree.  Students should be encouraged to purchase the most modern devices with the fastest processors, highest resolution screens and most memory they can afford, since they will need to use these devices over their two or four year program.  Nursing programs should not dictate which devices students should use, they should be supportive of the devices students come to campus with, but at the same time, they should also recommend mobile devices as students may not be conversant with the latest mobile technologies. 

Another reason that nursing programs should not dictate the mobile devices students should use in their program is that mobile devices are a deeply personal technology.   What one student finds easy to use, may not fit the needs of another student; this policy will provide a greater support burden for technical support staff.  As students move into their clinical learning environments, form factor will become important and personal.  Some nurses may find that a mobile phone fits easily into their pockets and a small lightweight device meets their clinical needs.  However with the recent popularity of tablets and the hundreds of medical applications available for tablets, a larger screen device may be better for some nursing students.  The point is, students should choose which device they feel will allow them to become successful nurses. 

Nursing programs should provide their faculty with mobile devices for use in their teaching environments, be it in the classroom, online or in the clinic.  Educators need to be familiar with how nurses use mobile devices, medical applications and databases as they provide patient care.  As this paper advocates that nursing programs need to be open to supporting the devices students come to campus with, it is important that nurse educators are provided by their institution with multiple mobile devices on various operating systems so that they can also provide a level of support for their students.  Also it is important that nurse educators stay up-to-date with technologies for medicine and health informatics.  Mobile devices will be an important technology that practitioners will need to utilize in the field and developing a deep understanding of these devices is essential for effective use in the field. 

Administrators who manage nursing programs need to understand the benefits of utilizing mobile devices within their programs, and why it is important that they require these devices within the curriculum.  If program administrators support the requirement that students must have and utilize mobile devices within their programs, this will help engrain a culture of support for mobile technologies by faculty, support staff and students.  Support from those in leadership positions within an institution can help implement these changes to curricula, but it must be in collaboration with the faculty so that they do not feel as those this is a top down policy decision for which they have no input.    

Supporting faculty by providing them with mobile devices is an investment that the institution will need to make for their programs to stay relevant to the communities and hospitals that they serve.  Administrators will need to invest in support staff for faculty and students.  Support staff will play a critical role for insuring that mobile devices are effectively implemented into curricula.  Beyond technical support, training and orientation sessions will be needed for both faculty and students and time must be allotted in the nursing programs for such sessions; these cannot be one off training sessions, training must happen throughout the program as new technologies emerge. 

Administrators can take actions to help alleviate the costs of utilizing mobile devices within a curriculum.  First, administrators can partner with mobile providers to gain discounts for their students.  Since these mobile devices will be used for educational purposes, mobile phone providers could offer the institution a bulk discount on the devices and the data plans if a certain percentage of students use the provider’s services and devices.  Second, students will need reference materials, databases and textbooks for their mobile devices.  Administrators should work with content providers to lessen the costs to students for this content; if the curriculum is standardized across the institution, bulk purchases could be utilized.  If for example, all first year nursing students must purchase: the Medical Encyclopedia and Human Structures App, maybe the institution can negotiate a discount for its students?  Or through a technology fee, the program can help offset the costs of digital materials for their students.

Further Thoughts for Discussion

There are certain needs that fall outside of an educational context that must be addressed when planning to implement mobile devices within a classroom or a clinical learning environment.  Considerations must be addressed for the following needs:

• To assist program administrators and faculty with evaluating the usage and success of mobile devices within their curriculum, quarterly or half-yearly surveys should be administered to gauge student usage of mobile devices.  Collecting this survey data will provide administrators and faculty with information needed to make adjustments to their programs to better serve the needs of their students. 
• Students need access to content and databases that will assist them at the point-of-care and this information needs to be easily accessed and searched.  This may require nursing programs to partner with publishers and database providers to design applications that meet the needs of nurses in clinical learning environments (Kenny, Park, Van Neste-Kenny, & Burton, 2010).
• Hospitals and clinics need to update their policies regarding the use of mobile phones so that these devices can be readily available for students to utilize in the field.  Students may need to be trained on the proper use of mobile devices so that they are not using their devices for personal use when working. 
• Data entry on mobile devices can be difficult especially when managing a large number of patients throughout the day.  Data entry mistakes are easy to make on mobile devices when you are not in a rush, but when moving from patient to patient it may be even easier to make data entry mistakes, which could have life and death ramifications.  To aid nurses, standardized codes should be developed and used as a form of shorthand for nurses to use when entering information into mobile devices. 
• Mobile devices are only as useful as their batteries allow them to be.  Hospitals and clinics need to provide mobile device charging station so that in downtimes, these devices can be charged for use throughout an entire shift.  It may be important to choose devices with removal batteries or provide nurses with cases that contain batteries so that the device can be utilized throughout a shift.  

Conclusion

This paper is advocating for a broad policy regarding the need for nursing programs to institute policies requiring students purchase mobile devices as part of a nursing curriculum.  Nursing programs vary by institution, and administrators and faculty must work together to best utilize mobile technologies in their curriculum.  It may be controversial to require these devices since some faculty may not want to use these devices or know how to use them, and students may not like being required to purchase another piece of technology for their program which will add to the costs of their education. 

However, the long-term benefits for the program and students are significant.  Utilizing mobile devices within a nursing program may provide institutions with a competitive advantage, as their students will utilize modern technology in their education, which is valued by hospitals and clinics. Nursing students who have used mobile technologies in their nursing programs may have an advantage when applying for jobs as they will require less training on mobile devices and apps than students who may not have had experiences with mobile technologies in the classroom or the clinic. 

References

Aptara Inc. (2011, March 07). Havard's Nursing Guide to Drugs App - Aptara. (YouTube, Producer) Retrieved July 12, 2011, from http://youtu.be/yycrkClGd_Y

DeBourgh, G. (2008). Interactive Classrooms and Mobile Learning: Clickers, Podcasts and Vodcasts. Retrieved July 13, 2011, from Nursing Link: http://nursinglink.monster.com/training/articles/5503-interactive-classrooms-and-mobile-learning-clickers-podcasts-and-vodcasts-

Fields, W. (2010, October 1). How is Health IT Affecting Nursing Education Trends. Retrieved July 13, 2011, from YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rLzk-9hNUZM

Fields, W. (2010, October 1). Mobile Technology and Apps in Healthcare. Retrieved July 13, 2011, from YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RMFPKnmhnHw&feature=related

Garrett, B., & Jackson, C. (2006). A mobile clinical e-portfolio for nursing and medical students, using wireless personal digital assistants (PDAs). Nurse Education Today , 2006 (26), 647–654.

How Mobile Technology Affects the Quality of Nursing Care. (2010, November 11). Retrieved July 12, 2011, from YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GLlUU1qukpU&feature=related

Kenny, R., Park, C., Van Neste-Kenny, J., & Burton, P. (2010, August 13). Mobile Self Efficacy in Canadian Nursing Education Programs. Retrieved July 14, 2011, from AU Space: http://hdl.handle.net/2149/2767

Park, C., Van Neste-Kenny, J., Burton, P., & Kenny, R. (2010). A Moble for Mobile Faculty Presence In Nursing Education Practice. Canadian Journal of Nursing Informatics , 5 (3), 21-42.

Qualcomm. (2011, March). Mobile Health Information System: Providing Access to Information for Health Care Workers in South Africa. Retrieved July 14, 2011, from http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&cd=2&ved=0CCEQFjAB&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.qualcomm.com%2Fdocuments%2Ffiles%2Fwireless-reach-south-africa-case-study.pdf&rct=j&q=Mobile%20Health%20Information%20System%3A%20Providing%20Access%20to%20Information%20for%20Health%20Care%20Workers%20in%20South%20Africa&ei=2CYqTr6RO4StgQev7uGeCw&usg=AFQjCNFzgvA-hjDXgCovwmO0tX9YM5SS2A&cad=rja

Sensmeier, J. (2010, November 11). Can We Transform Nursing Practice through Informatics and Technology? himss. Retrieved July 14, 2011, from YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w8_5G_BPB1s&feature=related

Yoost, B. (2011, June 26). Mobile Technology & Nursing Education, Practice. Retrieved July 15, 2011, from Advance for Nurses: http://nursing.advanceweb.com/Columns/Nursing-Informatics/Mobile-Technology-Nursing-Education-Practice.aspx 

Milestone for week 4 - Mobile App Design

This week’s Milestone question in EPSY590ML SU11 asked us to look more at the design of app.  I am choosing an application I have had on my mobile phone for quite some time and added to my tablet as soon as started configuring it with apps.  The app is quite popular, it is: Astro file manager.  It is a great tool to manage files on a mobile device as it acts like Finder on a Mac or Windows Explorer in Windows.  For students who are constructing learning objects with their mobile devices, eventually the objects are stored somewhere and Astro allows you to: edit, move, copy, delete existing files and to create new files.  Students can create folders to better organize and manage the content they create with their mobile devices. 

But there are limitations to Astro and maybe the limitations I perceive with this app are due to my mindset of thinking that my mobile device is a computer operating system, which is it not.  It is a mobile operating system.  Or maybe I did not understand the User Interface well enough to figure out what this limitation.  Tonight I am preparing for a trip to San Jose for the Sloan C conference – am flying from coast to coast tomorrow – I wanted to utilize my time on the airplane to do some research and writing for the other summer class I am taking.  I have been using my tablet to accumulate my research that I want to spend time reviewing while I have quiet time on my flights.   What I found is that my old reliable Astro app did not make it possible to share or send multiple files; I spent about 15 minutes trying to find a solution and gave up in favor of downloading a new app from the Android Market called, ES File Explorer which did exactly what I wanted it to do: allow me to email multiple files from my SD card.    As much as I have liked Astro and found it to be useful, I may have found its replacement tonight with ES File Explorer.  In what turned out to be a frustrating experience at first, provided me with a thought-provoking situation – the choices we have today for software and mobile apps are incredible.  Sometimes all of these software choices can create a glut of useless or ineffective apps, but ten or fifteen years ago we did not have the flexibility on with our computer software of that time, which we have on our mobile devices today.  If an app does not meet my needs, I just go to the Android Market, either on my computer or on my mobile device and download it over the air.  I know there are applications like DropBox that are probably better suited for my current need, but this file manager application does not require me to register with it, which give my lack of time tonight was an advantage.  

Using QR Codes

About a year and a half ago I downloaded to my Nexus One an application called Barcode Scanner v3.6, I think downloaded this particular app because I had read in some article it was an “essential” app you should have on your mobile phone.

It utilizes the camera on my phone and the data connection.  It seemed like an interesting application, it can scan 1D barcodes, QR codes and data matrixes.  I really did not find a use for it, so it was one of those apps that just took up storage on my phone.  One day I was looking through my contacts and saw an option to share a contact, and one of the options was the barcode scanner app.  I thought was pretty interesting that I could create my own QR code to share this contact on the fly.  After creating a few QR codes with my contacts, I started thinking about the convenience factor of sharing contacts through QR codes, but I did not do anything with this application again.  One of the downsides to sharing contacts this way is that the person you are sharing your contact with must have a QR reader, but the fact that my phone was producing QR codes is interesting.  Now that the topic of the week is QR codes I spent some time exploring my mobile devices using QR codes – this was design principle 9 in the University of Wollongong article - Personalise: Employ the learners’ own mobile devices.

Last night I began using both of my Android devices to explore QR codes on my mobile devices and found a few interesting personal uses, which will lead into a discussion of using these for educational purposes.  First and foremost I learned I can create QR codes for more than contacts.  In a discussion from a previous blog posting I discussed the ecosystem within the Android environment – it may be similar in iOS, Windows Phone 7, Blackberry and WebOS - that built into many of the applications is the option to share information you have created on the mobile device.  Typical sharing options include sharing via: email, Bluetooth, SMS, Facebook, Twitter and QR Codes.  The convenience options are allow me with the push of a button to share this information. 

As I was employing my mobile device for exploration of QR codes I found the following Apps utilized QR codes and I can construct my own codes:

·      - Contacts

     - Catch Notes for creating and sharing documents

     

     - Articles from News sites like Pulse

 - 

- The Android market App allows you to share links to apps via QR codes

  

    - Google Maps and Places

     - Sharing YouTube video

  

There are many other applications that can create QR codes for sharing, but these are the ones available to me on my devices.

I was traveling home this week and while on the plane I was preparing for a meeting where I was going to provide an orientation to the web conferencing software I work with.  Using my tablet to jot down some notes for the agenda of this meeting.  Using Catch’s sharing capability I created a QR code for the agenda.  I took a picture of my mobile phone with the QR code and the agenda - it may not be the clearest picture, but I find it difficult to take pictures of mobile applications:

There appear to be some limitations to QR codes.  Firstly, the codes work well for encapsulating text oriented information, which for mobile devices is ideal, but mobile devices are quite advanced these days easily supporting video and images.  For sharing text-oriented information, QR codes work well.  Someone had posted a video of a panel discussion this week regarding QR codes and using them for multiple purposes, mostly from a marketing perspective.  The person from Microsoft mentioned a limitation of QR codes which do not reside in Microsoft Tags.  Once a QR code is produced, it is static meaning that you cannot change the content it represents, whereas Microsoft Tags can be updated once produced.  For marketing purposes, the Microsoft Tag would appear to hold greater benefits. 

In thinking about uses for QR codes for educational purposes I can think of:

• Sharing content – students using mobile apps like Catch can create documents and then share these documents with other students so that they can view them on their mobile devices.  This could be an instant peer review on a mobile device. 
• Expanding the field trip experience – when taking students on field trips, using their mobile devices they can access QR codes to gain more information about what they are seeing.
• At academic conferences QR codes can be used in the program guides to provide more information about the session speaker or links to their research.
• Universities could use QR codes in their advertisements for their programs, potential students could access the codes to learn more about a given degree.

·      There are many more potential uses for these codes.  

Formative Assessment with Mobile Devices

It seems that once schools, colleges and universities go beyond the technical challenges of implementing formative assessment tools, there could be great benefit in using these tools in the classroom or lecture hall.  I understand that the technical challenges can be daunting and implementing these technologies into everyday use will take training and a reassessment of curriculum.  A classroom clicker could easily be replicated onto a mobile platform, so a move to mobile platform could be less of a disruption.  Ensuring that students have access to mobile devices is key to using mobile formative assessment.

For both students, teachers, and professors having access to formative assessment information will allow for a check of the student’s knowledge acquisition and understanding.  For my case study, I reviewed the Khan Academy, a grassroots effort to bring better understanding of math, science, finance and the humanities.  This project started off recording instructional videos and posting the videos to YouTube, but there are also self-paced exercises that fall into the category of formative assessment.  These exercises would provide an interesting mobile application, but the Khan Academy has not moved to developing mobile technologies rather focusing on its library of video lessons and exercises on the internet; these exercises could be accessed through a mobile web browser which would be quite beneficial for students.

In further thinking about this topic I came across a micro-blog site from a researcher at Columbia University’s Teachers College.  Kate Meersschaert followed a class of 7^th graders as they created audio clips on their mobile devices to describe their understand inequalities as they apply to a real world context.  The students observed liked using multimedia for their project, but there was a heavy dependence on tools not supported by the school.  The teacher discusses some of the limitations including: dependency on cloud services and they have no control over the service – if the service goes down so does the student’s assignment  Additionally the lack of time was noted as a limitation.  Creating multimedia, even for adept students, does take time and when introducing technology projects into the curriculum, it is important that students have time to produce a quality learning artifact.  The time to produce such an artifact may mean reconfiguring the curriculum or taking other topics out of the curriculum.   

Security and Policy Related to Lecture Capture

For a number of years I worked for a company selling lecture capture solutions to universities on a global basis and some of the hurdles we faced was related to the policies and security for the recorded lectures.  Beyond lecture capture solutions being challenging to setup, configure and manage, universities had to create new policies around many issues related to the recordings.  Since the content was “portable” – it could be downloaded to mobile devices, faculty had questions about the trade-offs of student benefits versus their intellectual property.  This weeks topics related to privacy, security and policy was like a walk down memory lane. 

The concept of recording lectures seems as though it would provide great benefit to students for remedial purposes and if for whatever reasons they could not attend class, students could review their course content at their own pace.  Students have been recording lectures for a number of years with tape recorders or digital recorders, so it is not a new phenomena, but for a university to centrally support lecture capture systems become disruptive for faculty, students and administrators. 

Faculty had series concerns about the security of their lectures, their intellectual property.  It was interesting to have discussions with professors who felt as those their importance was depleted by implementing a lecture capture solution; I would commonly be asked: if the university records my lecture why will they need me the next semester?  I heard similar questions when universities were implementing learning management systems in the late 1990s.  Questions about intellectual property were very common as it is important that content was secured so that it was not used inappropriately or rebranded as someone else’s lecture.  For these types of inquiries there were technical solutions that added layers of security to the recorded lecture so it was less “portable”. 

Another policy question that commonly arose was around who “owned” the recorded lecture, that question depended upon the country, the university and the contract the professor signed.  In many instances the lecture was the professor’s, but in some cases the lecture was a possession of the university.  This new technology raised many questions faculty and administrators needed to answer on the fly, yet policies did not exist. From a privacy perspective, many faculty felt as though an intruder had entered their lecture hall with the recording technology capturing their lecture.  There were concerns that the recordings would be used for tenure and promotional considerations, yet for many universities this was never an intended consequence for implementing these systems and policies were need to ensure that the lectures were used for instructional purposes.  Additionally, many institutions implemented an opt-in policy for recording lectures so that professors would choose to have their lectures recorded, however students did not always like this option since having accesses to recorded lectures in one or a few courses and not in all of their courses reduced their satisfaction with their student experience. 

As the primary beneficiary of lecture capture systems were students, policies were commonly needed to make sure that this service was used properly and as universities intended.  First and foremost was the concern about the recording itself and how it was to be used; in fact some universities made students sign academic use policies ensuring that they did not redistribute lectures to other students or other web sites.  A secondary concern was related to student attendance in the classroom, would face-to-face classes remain relevant?  For the most part this was not a significant concern versus the benefit realized for students, but this disruptive technology provided an opportunity for faculty to use the class time with students differently; instead of lecturing for the entire class period, students could review a previous semester’s lecture prior to coming to class and more group activities were utilized. 

Working with many universities as they implemented lecture capture solutions was an interesting experience given that this new technology had significant policy and security implications that many universities were just beginning to grapple with as they implemented this service for their students. 

Mobile Application Case Study: The Khan Academy

Overview of the Khan Academy

Sal Khan, a former hedge fund analyst living in Boston, Massachusetts in 2004, began tutoring his cousins who were living in New Orleans, Louisiana and in need of a deeper understanding of mathematics.   What began with short and focused instructional videos with Khan teaching unit conversion using a virtual blackboard and talking through the logic of solving these problems, expanded to a library of over 2,100 instructional video lessons, 100 self-paced practice exercises and metrics to analyze the learner’s progress available for anyone in the world to use.  He formed the Khan Academy as away to share his video lessons and help students better understand various math and science topics explained in ways that were different than how he was taught in the classroom and through textbooks.  In referring to his experiences with math and science and the reason he is building this catalogue of lessons, Khan states:

“A lot of my own educational experience was spent frustrated with how information was conveyed in textbooks and lectures. There would be connections in the subject matter that standard curricula would ignore despite the fact that they make the content easier to understand, enjoy, and RETAIN. I felt like fascinating and INTUITIVE concepts were almost intentionally being butchered into pages and pages of sleep-inducing text and monotonic, scripted lectures. I saw otherwise intelligent peers memorizing steps and formulas for the next exam without any sense of the intuition or big picture, only to forget everything within a matter of weeks. These videos are my expression of how the concepts should have been expressed in the first place, all while not compromising rigor or comprehensiveness.”  (http://www.khanacademy.org/about/faq)

Khan refers to himself as the faculty of the Khan Academy since he creates all of the instructional videos. The Khan Academy has become viral; students and parents have found Khan’s resources exceedingly beneficial and a supplement for their foundational understanding of math and science.

Here is an example of one of Khan’s lessons:

What Christensen envisions as student centered learning enabled through computer-based learning systems, ultimately developed from bottom-up or grassroots efforts may start to be realized through the Khan Academy.  The Khan Academy fits with Christensen’s believe that change can happen from forces outside of the traditional school system, and Sal Khan could not have embodied someone coming from outside the system any better given his background as an analyst at a hedge fund.  All of the videos developed by Khan are freely available for anyone to use - in the classroom, at home or on the go through various mobile applications.   The videos run from a couple of minutes up to twenty minutes focusing on:

-       Mathematics

-       Science

-       Humanities

-       Finance

-       Test Preparation

o   SAT Math

o   GMAT

o   California High School Exit Examination

o   Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Joint Entrance Exam – IITs are some of the top engineering institutions in the world

o   Singapore Math curriculum

Students, parents and teachers have found Khan's lessons extremely beneficial because learners have the opportunity to review topics and concepts that they may not have fully comprehended in the classroom or by reading the textbook.  As Christensen discusses, in the classroom once a topic has been taught the class moves on together to the next topic regardless of all learners’ comprehension of the material.  These videos allow learners to review concepts that they did not understand at their own pace, and they can review the video lessons as many times as they need to with the options to pause the video and go back to specific concepts using the scrub bar.  If a student is learning a new topic and needs a remedial understanding of foundational concepts, the instructional videos provide learners an opportunity to spend time reviewing materials that will allow them to begin learning the new concept.  

School districts are beginning trial the Academy’s lessons as part of a math curriculum, providing students with the ability to work at their own pace and learn new mathematical concepts.  The Santa Rita Elementary School in Los Altos, California is currently piloting both the self-paced practice exercises and videos; the exercises encourage students to achieve ten correct answers in a row before they can move onto a new topic.  If the student does not understand how to solve a problem they will have access to link to video lessons explaining how to solve the problem.  Teachers and parents have access to detailed metrics to track how a learner is progressing through the self-paced exercises, how much time is spent with exercises and their success with the materials.  

In the News and Media

The Khan Academy’s grassroots success has attracted media attention and funding from the Gates Foundation.

Khan has been named one of Forbes Names you Need to Know:

The Khan Academy has been featured in the News Hour: 

 

  Khan gave a talk at TED in 2011:

 

Distribution Platforms

The Khan Academy has multiple distribution platforms for delivery of their online lessons utilizing social media and mobile technologies including:

        - The Khan Academy website - http://www.khanacademy.org/

        - YouTube channel - http://www.youtube.com/user/khanacademy?blend=1&ob=5

         - iTunes U

        - Various mobile applications that link to the Academy's library – Since Khan distributes these lessons freely, mobile application developers for iOS and Android have created applications that draw upon the catalogue of video content.  The mobile applications range from replications of the catalogue of lessons, which will link out to specific videos on YouTube and are viewable on mobile devices to applications that will play the video lesson within the mobile application. 

Mobile Application

The mobile application reviewed for this case study is the Khan Academy application created by Dennis Bond which is found in the Android Market.   This application catalogues the available lessons and links out to YouTube video for learners to review the lesson.  With YouTube built-in as default application on Android devices, the linkage between the application and YouTube is rather seamless.  The application is simple, which for younger students is advantageous so that they can easily find the lesson they want and then view it on their mobile device.  Bond’s application is not endorsed by the Khan Academy.  Below are screen shots of the application

Please note: the mobile application linked from the Khan Academy website, created by Irynsoft was not reviewed for this case study as it would not properly launch on two Android devices, an HTC Nexus One (Android 2.3.3) and Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 (Android 3.1). 

Benefits for Learners

The Khan Academy provides learners with another set of resources to utilize that may better align with their learning styles.  For students that have access to mobile devices or computers, accessing these video lessons may provide them with another way to approach solving a problem and ultimately aid in their comprehension.  The Khan Academy's grassroots efforts have turned into a worldwide phenomena, and overtime it will be interesting to see how projects like the one in Los Altos progress.  Additionally the metrics which are being collected on the website as student utilize the self-paced exercises will provide Khan with data to help him improve the lessons and tools available in his ecosystem.   Khan's resources have helped students enhance their learning and will continue to do so in the future.  

Week 2 Thoughts on Mobile Learning - Twitter

I started using Twitter this week and found it to be very interesting from the perspective of how easy it is to use, but yet how difficult it is to post a thought in under 140 characters.  I used Twitter on both my laptop and mobile phone; I was traveling to White Plains, NY so I had some opportunities to use it.  I started with a nonsensical posting about being at the airport, just to give it a try.  But later in the day as I was reading through familiar technology blogs I noticed how easy it was to post an article or video to share with those following me; right now that is just 6 other people, maybe that will grow over time?  Now that I have 10 tweets under my belt, including tweets with links to pictures and videos, it is easier for me to understand why Twitter is so popular – it is truly easy to use, but the experience is pretty much the same on my laptop or my Nexus One. 

But that led to my next question, which would pertain to blogs in general: what value I am producing in my blogging and micro-blogging that will attract people to follow me?  I am not particularly witty or all that interesting.  I am sharing interesting content pertaining to mobile learning, e-learning and mobile technologies, but it is not as though I am producing any ground breaking content that I feel is worthy of placing up on Twitter.  Over the course of the semester I hope to do so, but not yet.

In relating my use of Twitter to the Christensen reading, tools like Twitter can be one of many resources for starting down the path of student centered learning.  Maybe Twitter allows teachers to distribute resources they come across to specific students or groups students based on their needs?  I understand Christensen argues for computer-based learning to facilitate student centered learning, but as these systems evolve, maybe a lower tech solutions would be a start down the path to student centered learning where the teacher has more control over the path they are guiding their students by using Twitter as a distribution mechanism?  One of the articles I read this week, which is linked below, discusses faculty having multiple Twitter identities.  Having multiple identities maybe provide teachers the ability distribute appropriate learning materials to students as students follow one of their teacher’s identities?

Over the course of this week I tweeted the following articles I thought I would share on my blog in case you did not see these on Twitter (@bradbeecher).

This video details Stanford University’s use of mobile technologies, the team at Stanford later sold their product to Blackboard and became Blackboard Mobile:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WRw5TPVZhuw&feature=share

I read the Chronicle of Higher Education quite frequently; this is one blog they run called Prof Hacker – Tips about Teaching, technology and productivity.  I found some interesting postings here:

http://chronicle.com/blogs/profhacker/

Another article from the Chronicle, University of Western Ontario is a large publisher of case studies. Their business school will be the first major publisher to distribute cases through iTunes and the iBookstore.

http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/quickwire-canadian-business-school-uses-itunes-to-distribute-its-case-studies/31846?sid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en

This is an innovative use of Twitter for teaching, the entire article is good, but the last couple of sentences are very good:

http://chronicle.com/article/Twitter-Meets-the-Breakfast/127379/

I think augmented reality is pretty interest, but it is a technology still in its infancy.  This posting is not focused on education, but it does show some of AR’s potential:

http://www.engadget.com/2011/06/22/augmented-reality-app-concept-conjures-movie-scenes-shot-in-your/?a_dgi=aolshare_twitter

This is another article focused on Twitter, it discusses how professors are managing dual identities through Twitter:

http://chronicle.com/article/College-20-Academics-and/127936/

This is a bit more light-hearted, but it reminded me of Christensen’s focus on student centered learning.  If you do not have Xfinity, you can probably find this on Hulu, but once you load the link scroll ahead to 17 minutes and about 35 seconds.  This is where Lisa Simpson meets her new teacher:

http://xfinitytv.comcast.net/tv/The-Simpsons/3745/1642737557/Lisa-Simpson%2C-This-Isn-t-Your-Life/videos?skipTo=0?skipTo=0

I am adding this last link to my blog posting after I wrote the initial post.  I found this site last summer while taking EPSY 415, it is an update to Bloom's taxonomy -> Bloom's Digital Taxonomy.  I found this very interesting to review last year and I come back to this site from time to time:
http://edorigami.wikispaces.com/Bloom's+Digital+Taxonomy