Mobile Learning

The number of mobile devices with internet access has exploded over the last few years, with a wealth of services available from almost anywhere. Internet connected mobile devices are reshaping the way we go about our personal and professional lives – whether that is accessing email on the go, checking the weather, pulling up directions or just trying to find something you need quickly on the web – but this isn’t just limited to our social hours increasingly we are looking to access professional and academic content online.

Here are the 5 trends that are powering the growth of the mobile web:

1)        3G – basically means faster networks meaning using the web is easier. Also better ‘all you can eat’ data packages from the networks which have brought the costs of using mobile web right down to affordable.  

2)        Social networking explosion - Facebook is increasingly becoming a desktop + mobile communications hub. Increasingly people want to interact with social networking sites on the move, update their status, chat. Twitter, Mixi (Japan) etc.

3)        Video - Users want to find, select and view and upload video on their devices. 

4)        VoIP - consumers want to chat via voice, messaging and video via wired and wireless devices

5)        The growth of smart phone penetration.

IngentaConnect the flagship online aggregator of academic content which hosts 4.5 million articles from 13,500 publications and has 2.5 million end users has put its money on mobile in order to grow their market.  IngentaConnect isn’t the only academic outfit who is engaging with mobile many libraries  have developed impressive mobile sites. One thing to factor in is that student expectations are high this new generation of students expect to be able to access information on mobile devices and institutions are responding to this demand.

Here is a roundup of some of the good stuff libraries have been developing:

Standford University have created an iPhone app which allows users to access information about Standford such as news, athletics information, campus maps and course information.

Oxford University have create a mobile web site which includes things like webcams, results and the facility to search the library catalogue, find a library near you etc.

Other institutions allow users find details of their nearest computer centre and how many free PCs there are.

The University of Nebraska provides links to mobile accessible resources such as PubMed and PsychINFO.

IngentaConnect mobile will allow users to search for academic content, bookmark it and create alerts. Users will also be able to email the article details to themselves or a friend. There will also be a ‘Tweet this’ option to allow users to share the article on Twitter. These are all nice to have features but what we are seeing in the academic markets is that mobile is going from a ‘nice to have’ to a must have feature as their student population are used to accessing content anytime anywhere.

Outside of the home markets mobile brings an opportunity for IngentaConnect publishers to grow their audience when one considers that this will allow the emerging markets who have leapfrogged phone lines for mobile to access this wealth of academic content that has not been available to them in the past there is a chance that the results could be explosive!