Nokia believes in education for all and harnessing mobile technology to provide modern learning solutions for everyone.
Mobile phones – now almost ubiquitous amongst secondary school pupils – provide new and exciting opportunities to support and develop learning and teaching. To this end, Nokia has been running a Mobile Learning for Mathematics project in South Africa since 2008, collaborating with the South African government, Nokia Siemens Networks, as well as operators and content providers.
The service focuses on active skills learning by delivering interactive study packages to students’ mobile phones and encouraging their participation in mathematics. The content is embedded in a school curriculum but provides multi-faceted learning experiences through short, engaging exercises, tutoring, peer-to-peer help, as well as competitions, tests and self-assessment – this is highly motivated grade 10 pupils – particularly those with no computers and no maths on their mobiles, even out of school, in the evenings, weekends and holidays – testing themselves to continually improve their scores and competing with their peers.
The service is free for students through the country’s two main operators, MTN and CellC, and it is available on all phones, not just Nokia ones. With an easy interface for both learners and teachers, it allows pupils to understand and develop their own competencies. Teachers, on the other hand, can easily add ad-hoc tests to their pupils, tap onto a practically endless exercise bank and gain an understanding of the students’ competence levels and improvement areas.
Nokia’s Mobile Learning for Maths:
- Combines formal and informal learning
- Fuses learning and social networking
- Provides free access and content for students
- Improves learners’ motivation and skill levels
The results from the project are highly encouraging: 280 students in six schools participated in the first phase in October 2008 to June 2009, but this grew to 4000 students and 72 teachers in 30 schools in the second phase a year later. There were more than 180,000 visits to the service in the first four months with half of all students and two thirds of teachers participating, and those who used the service were very frequent visitors indeed. Learners whose teachers did not take part in the programme still used the service independently. Remarkably, about 70% of all usage took place outside of school hours. The outcomes suggest that the mobile learning service increases retention amongst students while also boosting motivation for both learners and teachers.
Furthermore, it has actually proven to improve the learners’ maths results and skill levels based on the normal end-of-term tests that students complete as part of their school curriculum. And as with so many other things in life, practice makes perfect: Tests showed that the more the pupils used the service, the more exercises they completed, and the more their results improved, which demonstrates that they retained what they learned and were not simply guessing.
There is now great interest in the service elsewhere and the demand is high to expand the concept to other countries and beyond maths. The Finnish National Board of Education will start piloting the service in Finnish secondary schools this academic year. Nokia is also exploring further possibilities of building global communities of pupils and teachers using the service and exchanging information and tips across borders.
The positive results and enthusiastic feedback from students, teachers, schools and authorities alike is certainly underpinning the huge potential of using mobile technology in formal learning. By reaching and engaging young learners through exciting new tools and ways of communication one can bring education out of the classroom and into the real world.
(Thanks to Riitta Vänskä – Senior Manager, Mobile and Learning Solutions, Sustainability Operations at Nokia and to Danielle Balentine of Indie Village Creative for the video documentary).