There is a current shift from the conventional educational setting of educators being sole actors in the learning process of students to the students themselves actively participating in facilitating and promoting their own learning process while enhancing their social interactions through mobile devices.
No doubt, students learn best by experience, involvement, discussing with their peers and experts, and sharing and delving into a practical problem.
It is based on this that we made this post so that you can see the positives of the marriage between both entities. But before we delve into how mobile devices can promote collaborative learning among students, we will be taking a quick look at what the concept means.
Understanding collaborative learning
Collaborative learning is an educational approach that enables two or more people to work together by mutually capitalizing on their skills and resources to learn, solve problems, complete tasks and projects.
It is the act of promoting learning among groups and encouraging them to work together by allowing them to understand and produce concepts and/or information that is being presented to them instead of the habitual repetition of facts and figures in a bid to memorize them.
That way, they can listen to the viewpoints of others, defend their own points of view, reframe ideas and articulate their points — all for the purpose of learning.
Students are saddled with the responsibility of, not only learning and succeeding on their own but also ensuring that their group is on the same page with them.
Every member of the group becomes the director, all to the learning benefit of all.
Where do mobile phones fit in all of this?
Mobile devices help people connect with one another and have access to information in real-time.
Since learning can happen almost anywhere and mobile phones have become more accessible to people, coupled with their mobility and ease of use, the culture of collaborative learning is bound to thrive.
Mobile devices allow students to become part of a realistic co-learning environment while equipping them with the needed tools to interact and learn together.
This allows students to experiment and learn from the system by themselves.
Mobile devices also promote mentally stimulating learning processes for students by enabling them to share information resources among group members with interactive materials and tasks that they can collaborate on and provide appropriate feedback.
You can see that, for collaborative learning to go beyond its present reach, educators and learners need to adopt technology — of which mobile phones are a part — into their educational ecosystem for efficient collaborative learning.
Students need to know that they do not have to physically be in the same space to learn as a group.
Don’t miss important articles during the week. Subscribe to edbuild daily digest for updates
