JISC

This project has now completed and the final report is available at the end of this page.

The University of Wolverhampton is currently the British university with the highest proportion of under-represented groups amongst its students (THES figures on 23 Sept 2005). It hosts a HEFCE-funded Centre of Excellence (CETL) specialising in innovative support for this diverse student population. The University was one of the first HEIs to experiment with SMS and other forms of mobile learning and a programme of pilot modules, student surveys, technical trials and staff development has been underway to prepare for large-scale sustained deployment of SMS across the institution. This project will consolidate and enhance that provision and to provide the sector with a clear pedagogic and business exposition and evaluation of phone-based messaging.

Mobile learning includes the delivery and support of learning using mobile phones and in the last five years, these have steadily assumed a place in further and higher education in the USA, the Far East/Pacific Rim and the UK supporting distance learners and part-time students. There has also been a growing understanding of mobile phones’ potential for supporting learning. The University of Wolverhampton has already undertaken large surveys of student attitudes and reactions to educational and administrative SMS and is aware of many of the organisational and cultural issues of embedding large-scale e-learning as well as the ethical issues of mobile learning. The University has also conducted several pilots with SMS and is aware of the infrastructural and technical issues and the pedagogic and pastoral possibilities.

The project will refine a sustainable institutional SMS strategy to improve retention and progression by extending and enriching the contact and support of students on- and off-campus. The strategy will also provide content that complements other media and enables students to exploit ‘dead’ time and short periods off-campus, for example commuting or rest breaks at work.

Aims and Objectives

• Assess the usefulness of administrative information distributed by SMS to students studying at level 1 in HE.
• Evaluate a range of subject based learning and teaching technologies by SMS from the staff and student perspective
• Identify the staff development needs of using SMS texting for administrative and academic work
• Assess the impact of this intervention on retention and progression.
• Produce guidelines on the purposes and benefits of SMS texting at level 1 in HE
• Review the issues of implementing SMS within a large institution and a set of recommendations on effective implementation.
• Embed SMS messaging within the institutional ePortfolio
• Generate a technology toolkit for groupcasting media nuggets.

Project Methodology

The project will start in April 2006. The project plan envisages procurement, technical development, prototyping, small user trials and staff development taking place in the period up to Summer 2006; the academic year 2006/2007 will be devoted to delivery, implementation and formative evaluation. The staff and student experience, further trials and final evaluation will take place between September 2007 and March 2008.

The staff and students will be drawn from first-year modules in the Schools attached to the Centre of Excellence in Learning and Teaching. These are the School of Art and Design, looking at identifying learner needs; the School of Applied Sciences, improving tracking systems and student support; Humanities, Languages and Social Sciences, working with writing skills; and the School of Education, building on its programme of embedded skills support and School of Engineering and the Built Environment, part-time student support.

The project will comprise a generic messaging system across all five schools and specific messaging technologies for each of the individual schools to enhance the learning and teaching.

The generic messaging system will use the SITS student information management system for administrative and organisational messaging and a system developed by Ultralab and built into the Wolverhampton ePortfolio for pastoral and pedagogic messaging. This will provide targeted bulk and individual SMS texting, for all courses, awards, modules and individuals within the CETL student constituency. Tutors and administrators will be enabled to send messages that are scheduled or ad hoc, bulk or individual; these may be operational (for example a lecture cancelled or moved, deadline reminders, library book recall), pastoral (tutee interview) or educational (study guides, exam tips, seminar prep, assessment feedback, lecture summaries).

Deliverables

Pedagogic and Institutional  

• An assessment of the usefulness of administrative information to students studying at level 1 in Higher Education.
• An evaluation of a range of subject based learning and teaching by SMS from the staff and student perspective
• Identification of the staff development needs of using SMS texting for the administrative and academic work
• An assessment of the impact of this intervention on retention and progression
• Guidelines on the purposes and benefits of SMS texting at level 1 in HE
• A review of the issues of implementing SMS within a large institution and a set of recommendations on effective implementation.

Technological

A technology toolkit for groupcasting media nuggets (SMS, MMS and podcast) based upon the SMS and MMS system ‘ultra_sms’. This will use open-source technologies and be delivered as an open-source system for integration with ePortfolios via webservices, integration with standalone system for SMS and MMS and integration with messaging providers via webservices. This will include the three media types, group definitions, archiving and a webservice interface.

Stakeholders

• University of Wolverhampton: Campus Registry, Schools using SMS with their students, lecturers and administrators, IT Services, CELT
• Ultralab
• Pebble Learning

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