Secrets of mlearning failures: confronting reality

Abstract

Having implemented and evaluated over 35 mlearning projects in a variety of contexts in higher education over the past 6 years the researcher is ready to share the untold secret: not all mlearning projects succeed! This article critiques three of the researcher's mlearning projects that can be classed as ''failures'' and compares them to successful projects to draw out critical implications for mlearning project design and implementation to avoid common pitfalls leading to potential project failure. This article uses the researcher's six critical success factors identified across the 35 mlearning projects to evaluate these three projects, and concludes that projects resulting in ''no significant difference'' in pedagogical outcomes are the result of attempts to shoehorn old pedagogies into new technologies. Lecturer professional development and sustained collaborative support are critical to fostering new pedagogies utilising the unique affordances of mobile devices.

Critical success factors for transforming pedagogy with mobile Web 2.0

“…In these projects, mobile social media was reassigned from the category of a purely social tool for informal use into a powerful tool for enabling student‐generated content and collaboration within student‐generated learning contexts. Without these reconceptions, the mlearning projects invariably failed to produce any significant pedagogical change (Cochrane, ).…”

Mobile Social Media and the News: Where Heutagogy Enables Journalism Education

“…The students responded well to the heutagogical (student-determined) teaching approach, and some outstanding course work was achieved. The lecturers found critical success factors (Cochrane, 2012) of modelling use of the tools, creating supportive communities of practice within the tutorial groups, and creating sustained interaction that facilitated the development of ontological shifts (particularly during online digital identity assessment) most effective .…”

“…The technical steward had previously applied a heutagogical framework across 40 mobile-learning projects (Cochrane, 2012;Cochrane & Bateman, 2013;Cochrane, Black, Lee, Narayan, & Verswijvelen, 2012). He guided the establishment of a Community of Practice (CoP; Lave & Wenger, 1991) which included five practice-based journalism lecturers familiar with MSM tools applied within news work, who were interested in exploring net-centric pedagogies within their teaching.…”

Development of models for the formalized description of modular e-learning systems for the problems on providing ergonomic quality of human-computer interaction

“…Even the most advanced technologies and devices, used without a comprehensive systems analysis, may lead to a decreased effectiveness. Some aspects of such problems are analyzed, for example, in [9,10].…”