Mobile Devices Aid Education, Bring Problems
Mobile devices have been brought to college classrooms to further educational goals, educators said. Operators and vendors see higher education as a promising market, they said. But “digital cheating” and security issues were on the rise too, said safety expert Ken Trump, CEO of National School Safety and Security Services. Most K-12 schools have banned cellphone use in class, Trump said.
Sign up for a free preview to unlock the rest of this article
Export Compliance Daily combines U.S. export control news, foreign border import regulation and policy developments into a single daily information service that reliably informs its trade professional readers about important current issues affecting their operations.
Faculty nationwide have used various mobile technologies like social networked mobile learning and interactive messaging to support teaching and learning, said Duke University’s Center for Instructional Technology. Abilene Christian University in Texas outfitted its 2008 freshman class with iPhone or iPod Touch. The move transforms the learning environment, said ACU Chief Information Officer Kevin Roberts, and the school expects to expand the program. The iPhones for ACU students feature applications that are specific to the school. A map application was included to track the phone and give directions to the student’s next class. The phones also has a mobile form of a program similar to Blackboard, where professors can share documents with students.
Higher education expects technology to “play a major role” in a cost-effective way as federal and state dollars become harder to come by, said Carl Done, vice president of sales-education for AT&T. The carrier’s newly launched mobile student interactive response system is a Web-based polling service, offering instructors immediate feedback and assessment. It provides analysis of responses, including tracking demographic information, ranking against criteria for decision making and analyzing comparative results that facilitate pre- and post-assessment, AT&T said. It also helps improve attendance, it said.
Interactive response systems are a rapidly growing technology in the higher education sector, AT&T said. Response system provider Turning Technologies had its technologies deployed in over 1,700 colleges and universities, including “large-scale implementations” at some 200 campuses, the company said.
Electronic cheating is on the rise too as new mobile applications like ChaCha went live. The mobile answer service has 25,000 research guides allowing users to ask any questions and receive answers via text message. Now that the school knows ChaCha exists, it will begin discussion of a policy to “moderate cellphone use” in classes, said Gerard O'Sullivan, vice president for academic affairs at Neumann College in Pennsylvania. He said the policy won’t conflict with the school’s emergency alert policy and alert system.
Safety is another issue. Cell phones have been used by students in several cases for calling in bomb threats to schools, said safety expert Trump. Text messaging sometimes creates more anxiety and panic than actual threats or incidents that may have triggered rumors, he said.
Unlike colleges’ mobile emergency alert system, the attention to mass notification systems for K-12 schools is focused on parent notifications, Trump said.