Mobile Learning

Auckland University has successfully implemented a first-in-the-world, SMS-based “learning on demand” service for its students.

The “StudyTXT” service, operating since October 2005, provides small amounts of information to students which can be stored on their mobile phones for later recall – the contemporary equivalent of study flashcards. The service is free to all Secondary and Tertiary education providers in NZ, so the only cost to students is the SMS call cost – about 30-50 cents a download, with students taking advantage of cheap off-peak rates to swap notes by phone.

Original news source at Computerworld.

At our Board of Studies Mobile Learning workshop in February, we ran an interactive “treasure hunt” activity to demonstrate some of the ways mobile phones could be used to facilitate learning experiences. As part of that activity, we communicated with all of the “teams” using SMS.

Rather than use a mobile phone (which would have taken ages to type messages into with the little keypad) we used a service called BulkSMS (http://www.bulksms.com). Once you’ve created a profile, it allows you to create and store recipients, recipient groups, and saved messages. And it’s quite cost-effective: using the standard (not economy or premium) service level, SMS messages cost about 8 cents each to send out, and messages arrived at Australian phones almost instantaneously, despite the service being based overseas.

From our experience, it’s cheap, reliable, and provides some features you just don’t have if youre using a mobile phone to do SMS, such as a log showing which messages were delivered to which phones, and/or if any failed.