Supporting Mobile Access to VLE Resources through MobiGlam

Mobile Access To Learning Services In Higher Education

In the University context, there are several attempts to support students in managing, organising and enhancing their learning experience through mobile access to a variety of activities. The University of Birmingham introduced a mobile learning organiser that provided a set of integrated tools to students: a Time Manager, a Course Manager, a Communication Manager and a Concept Mapper (Corlett et al., 2004). As indicated by the names of these tools, they provided various activities to help learners organise their schedules, communicate and take notes on their mobile devices. Additionally, desktop based applications were provided to help tutors in creating content for some of these tools, for example, time schedules, events and deadlines. Such content can be downloaded as demanded by students on their devices through the mobile organiser. An evaluation of the mobile learning organiser took place with seventeen students from the University of Birmingham where students were loaned PDAs with the dedicated software (Corlett et al., 2004). Additionally, they were allowed to download any additional applications for their personal use. The results showed that students used the organiser mainly for communication and time management purposes.