Enhancing Adult Learning using Mobile-Assisted Technology

Abstract

Education is a great vehicle that can be used by developing countries to stand in the international community. Sadly almost 25 million girls and boys aged 5 to 16 are out of school in Pakistan and this percentage further elevates as the education level increases. Moreover, it has been found that almost 85% of students are out of school by the time they reach higher-secondary schools which show high adult illiteracy ratio in Pakistan. There is a need to give special attention to adult literacy. With the advent of 21-century digital technologies, educating individuals using fewer resources by using mobile technology has become possible. The trend of mobile-assisted technology learning is increasing day by day but most of the learning applications lack the best instructional design model or framework due to which effectiveness of the learning is reduced. Although many apps are being developed for basic literacy but in very few games instructional designing of games were being focused. It is obvious if the pedagogy of the mobile is not properly integrated with the technology, then the application loses its sole purpose. There is a lack of mobile application which develop for adult literacy of unprivileged areas.The dependency of the content on the learning audience is not brought into consideration context. In addition, the relevancy and learner interest are neglected in the current available apps. Because, most of the apps focus more on content delivery with neglecting assessing learner learning. On the other hand, some concentrate more on assessment and less on content delivery. Therefore, it is essential to integrate the technical and pedagogical strengths of mobile technology into learning environments. The purpose of this research is to find the effect on the learning outcome of adult literacy by providing scaffolding, learning progress reports, relevant content, and feedback, individual recruiting interest in mobile-assisted learning platforms. As well as assessing how much timely feedback and scaffold have to help in better learning. In order to bridge the gap of adults learning of underprivileged areas, I developed mobile application for basic Urdu literacy by considering content delivery with context relevancy. Application has been developed on UDL multiple means of representation principles. Along with it Feedback and scaffolding is provided on every screen so illiterate person can use application with ease. To analyze the effectiveness of my application, I conducted a comparative research between tradition learning and learning through my UDL integrated mobile application. Better results have been f ound from mobile learning as compare to traditional way of learning. Learners which learned from mobile app have mean stats of posttest 14.69 while learners who have learned through traditional methodology have mean posttest score of 12.62. This research just focused on basic literacy of Urdu language alphabet and words. Future goal is to developed such application for whole Urdu language learning and content delivery in multiple languages of Pakistan.