I was discussing a PhD project with a colleague at the HELTASA conference a few weeks ago and she was describing her plan to me. She’s interested in the possibilities that mobile technology brings to higher learning, specifically in nursing education. I gathered that she was talking about mobile as a combination of hardware and software as a means of accessing content, although we didn’t really get into how she was defining mobile for her study.
What I found most interesting was that she was starting from the point that she would be using mobile, and then looking for a problem that she could use it to solve. This seems to be the wrong way around.
We often find people wanting to add complexity (e.g. using mobile devices in the clinical context) without really thinking about whether that added complexity brings with it any benefits. And then asking if the cost of the added complexity brings about a greater benefit. Before adding anything to the curriculum we need to ask ourselves, “What are we going to get in return?”
My colleague wanted to use mobile devices to figure out students’ prior knowledge i.e. she began from the premise that she would be using mobile devices. When I asked her why she didn’t just use pen and paper, she was confused. She said that she couldn’t use pen and paper because she would be using mobile devices. And therein lies the problem. She didn’t say that she wanted students to collaboratively come up with a dataset of “prior knowledge”, or that she wanted all students to see each others’ work, or any other reason that digital or mobile would have an advantage. Her sole reason for wanting to use mobile is that she wanted to use mobile.
By adding complexity to the curriculum without conducting a cost/benefit analysis, you will most likely include a set of unintended consequences, like increasing the actual financial cost of the course, increasing the workload of teachers, or confusing students. Without having a definite objective in mind, which would be enhanced or otherwise facilitated through the addition of the new feature, it’s difficult to argue convincingly for its inclusion.