Some Christmas Cheer.. Mobile Learning Success Stories

I am always looking for the success stories in mobile, as a personal passion. So I will celebrate even the most silly and frivolous and 'juvenile' mobile ideas, from the crazy frog ringtones to the fart apps. But the stories I like the most, are success stories from areas of mobile that help the world. And few areas can help more, than those around M-Learning.

There are many great stories and I try to include at least one m-Learning story in my presentations nowadays as I talk around the world. M-Learning is a concept more broad than 'M-Education'. M-Education is delivering traditional education services (schools, universities) to those who formally enroll in education services. Learning goes far further, covering enterprise/corporate training in the business world, and for just random people, their personal development, for those who want to gain further knowledge.

So some stories for Christmas. I blogged here last month about the UK museums who got together with schools to make group museum-visits by school kids far more engaging and enjoyable by using mobile (and grew the time spent by the kids in the museums by 4.5x longer!). The story is one of the case studies in my 10th book, The Insider's Guide to Mobile (eBook edition available for free download). Here we have evidence of one critical element to successful mobile learning - making it entertaining, or to use that familiar term from early in the past decade, make it 'edutainment' (Education and entertainment). Now at the World Summit Awards, sponsored by the United Nations and given out in Abu Dhabi two weeks ago, we saw a similar service win a WSA award, which was SmartMuseum from Bulgaria, helping make the museum visit more engaging and interesting.

We have so many other good stories. Here on this blog we wrote about the BBC language courses that were introduced in Bangladesh. In the first month they had 400,000 people using the short language drills that cost less than a cup of coffee. The BBC Janala service has been winning many awards, including one at the World Summit Awards where the BBC told us that the service has been used in Bangladesh by over 2.3 million people. The point being, if you hvae a basic service job, like being a housekeeper or gardener, and you can learn a little bit of English, enough to understand a few work-related phrases, you can get a better job paying 2x to 3x more. Imagine your own life, if you had the ability to suddenly double your annual income - doing the same job - how much of a boost would that be to your ability to look after your family.

Along those lines, are the stories from Pakistan, where young boys and girls get to go to school, but older women were of the age, when society didn't support young girls going to school. So there are many middle-aged women in Pakistan who are not literate. They feel very much excluded from society, and they are often ashamed of this inability. Now there are basic reading courses offered that often are used by the literate friends, who help the illiterate woman slowly learn to read, and greatly increase her sense of worth and reduce the shame that is often associated with illiteracy. The point is, that these women will of course not have smartphones and aren't ever considering buying a PC. But they have basic mobile phones and it can deliver basic m-learning lessons to them.

In many countries like in China where the families have only one child, the interest is in using mobile learning to enhance the child's skills and abilities in everything from math and languages to the sciences etc to help the child gain a better overall skill set, and do well in exams, to get to a better university. Again at the World Summit Awards, one of the winners was the first Arabic language math course, delivered via mobile, called Hesabi (My Math) from the UAE, which was intended to help very basic level math education for young children, with games and quizzes. Another award-winner from the WSA awards was the Grace App which helps autistic children learn, something that really warmed the hearts of all in the audience. Meanwhile in South Africa, the school books publisher Maskew Miller Longman got together with Nokia, to deliver 'MoMath' mathematics skills drills via mobile to 10th grade high school kids, offering over 10,000 actual math drills, that work on most featurephones, usable by the phones used by over 82% of all students in South Africa - and the results? 4,000 school kids in 30 schools took part, their average math performance improved 14% in the national math tests!

In the long run, any nation's best resource is its population. As we head into the information age, there is an increasing need to educate the population. Businesses and enterprises need to retrain work forces for ever more information-intensive job skills. And the populations of all countries will need to learn new digital information age skills to be able to participate in the ever more digital world. Imagine trying to find a job today if you are illiterate, for example (or functionally illiterate). Yet mobile is helping, giving us services and applications that can help, from formal education and training to more informal learning and gaining of knowledge. Notice that most of the examples I list in this story today come from countries of the Emerging World markets, which even more makes me so happy, that we are using mobile as a way to bridge that digital divide, and bring gains to societies, using mobile. These are the stories that make me proud to be a mobilista.

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Tomi - I've sent you an email about this - our mobile language learning project for immigrants and divided communities - I need some help from you if you have some time! ;-)

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