Innovators wanted!

You may already be aware that the University’s mobile app is now available for Apple and Android devices, with a Blackberry version coming soon. But did you know it allows you and your students to have mobile access to course and module sites on NILE?

The Learning Technology team is looking for innovative staff with an interest in the potential of mobile learning, to help put this part of the app through its paces. We’d like to hear from any staff who want to use mobile learning with their students – even if your plans are simply to ‘mobilise’ your existing sites on NILE. Tell us what works and what doesn’t in the new mobile interface, and share any questions, course design tips or changes you’ve made to your sites.

If you’d like to do something a bit more adventurous, that really takes advantage of the affordances of mobile learning, we’d like to hear from you too.  Mobile learning has a lot of potential to allow you to do things that you might not otherwise be able to do in your teaching. This might include simple things, like using student-generated content (photos, videos, audio recordings etc that they can easily create on their phones), or allowing students to use their handsets to feed back in lectures. Or it might involve more complex projects, like supporting students doing authentic tasks on placements and field trips, building quizzes or games, experimenting with augmented reality… Needless to say this side of things is not restricted to what’s possible through the University app, so if you’d like to go beyond that, we’d love to hear about that too.

We are looking for pilots to run this academic year, so if you have an idea please get in touch, even if you’re not clear on the details (we may be able to help you work these out). The team will be on hand to help you get started, and to support you and your students throughout the module – we may even be able to lend you some devices to use.

You can find out more about the app at www.northampton.ac.uk/mobile. If you’re interested in giving it a try, please email the Learning Technology team at: LTSupport@northampton.ac.uk.