MINE - Mobile Learning in Higher Education

Mobile technologies are an important part of our daily life and we carry them with us all the time. Mobile learning is already used a lot in informal and non-formal learning, but in the context of formal learning it is not much used, yet. In the area of formal learning at universities, there is a great need for pedagogic scenarios to encourage educatorsto use these new technologies. It is suggested that educators will need to move beyond the didactic approaches still frequently found in higher education. Social constructivist approaches have been advocated, along with the development of communities of practice to support educators. In addition, more emphasis on learners is required, to understand how they are already using mobile devices to support their learning and to encourage their active participation in mobile learning in formal settings. This paper will present some of the work of the ERASMUS+ funded MINE project which has brought together teachers and learners from a range of European institutions to help develop competencies for active mobile learning in higher education. On the one hand, mobile learning is defined by the use of different mobile devices such as smartphones, tablets, and notebooks and on the other hand, by the use of free and open knowledge resources. Additionally, the development of an open feedback culture and new forms of performance assessments are important components. The European teaching and research project MINE - Mobile Learning in Higher Education aims to increase the use of mobile technologies in higher education and contribute to the development of teaching and learning scenarios in this field. The use of mobile learning in higher education should also increase the participation of the learner in the learning process. Within this project, a curriculum for university teachers will be developed to prepare university teachers with all competences they need to implement mobile learning in their teaching. But also students need some preparation, because most of them are not used or have not enough media competences to use mobile learning. Because of that a second curriculum for a students course will be developed as well within this project. The aim is to produce open educational resources (OER) on the way, especially to be used for mobile learning, but there will also be practical examples of mobile learning, which can be easily adapted for other teaching subjects. All relevant documents and results of this project will be published under the creative commons license and can be downloaded from the project website. At the conference, we would like to present our findings from the international project in 2016 and 2017. At the intensive program in February 2018 teachers and learners from a range of European higher education institutions discussed different possibilities to integrate scenarios of mobile learning in education. These included the use of podcasts, augmented and virtual reality, the production of videos with students and teachers, the use of learning management systems and the integration of social media (for example blogs, Instagram, and Twitter) for learning. The presentation will use some of the MINE scenarios to elaborate on the possibilities and problems for active mobile learning in higher education across Europe.