Supporting Mobile Instructional Design with CSAM

Abstract

Teachers’ proficiency with emerging technologies has been identified as a cornerstone of a well-rounded modern curriculum that includes the development of students’ digital literacy skills. The central role of teachers’ technical knowledge is one of the bases of the Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge (TPACK) framework (Koehler & Mishra in Teachers College Record, 109(6):1017–1054, 2006, The handbook of technological pedagogical content knowledge (TPCK) for educators. American Association of Colleges of Teacher Education and Routledge, New York, pp. 3–29, 2008; TPACK.org & Koehler, n.d.; Unwin in Bulgarian Journal of Science and Education Policy, 1(1):237–247, 2007). While frameworks such as TPACK have been promoted as useful tools for guiding teacher professional development initiatives, they have been criticized for failing to provide direction in exactly how technical knowledge can be promoted (Perk in Pedagogical reflections, 2009; Voogt et al. in Journal of Computer Assisted Learning, 29(2):109–121, 2012). At the same time, teachers’ lack of confidence in their technical skills has been identified as a barrier to greater integration of mobile technologies in instructional design (Ally et al. 2013; Ally, & Prieto-Blázquez in RUSC, 11(1), 142–151, 2014; Kenny et al. in 2010; Power, 2015). The Collaborative Situated Active Mobile (CSAM) learning design framework (Power in Learning and Teaching in Higher Education: Gulf Perspectives, 10(2), 2013, 2015) was developed as a tool to provide scaffolding to instructional design decisions involving mobile technologies and reusable learning objects. CSAM is grounded in prominent learning theory and reflects the instructional design practices represented in recent mobile learning literature. Through the scaffolding of mLearning decision making, CSAM can be used to boost the effectiveness of instructional design, increase teachers’ perceptions of self-efficacy, and fill in gaps to compliment TPACK in the development of teacher professional development strategies. This chapter describes the components of the CSAM learning design framework, as well as its theoretical underpinnings. This chapter also highlights support for the use of CSAM in research and mobile learning literature, and describes how CSAM compliments frameworks such as TPACK to help prepare teachers and instructional designers to better integrate mobile technologies into modern curriculum.

Glossary of Terms

CSAM

The Collaborative Situated Active Mobile learning design framework

ID4ML

Instructional Design for Mobile Learning

Micro-MOOC

A Massive Open Online Course (see MOOC) designed to be conducted over a limited time frame and with a fixed or limited number of participants (Coulter, 2014; Klassen, 2014)

MOOC

Massive Open Online Course. A MOOC is “a model for delivering learning content online to any person who wants to take a course” (Educause, 2014)

mRLO

Mobile reusable learning object

Reusable learning object

“Any digital object that can be reused to facilitate and support learning activities” (Polsani, 2003; University of Wolverhampton, 2016).

RLO

Reusable learning object

TPACK

The Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge framework (TPACK.org, 2012)

TPCK

TPACK