Nowadays, mobile phones have become a must for people from all over the world. They are the best way to stay connected with friends and family members, access e-mail and stay in touch with business associates. Because of its widespread use and features and functions such as mobility, reachability, localisation, and personalisation, mobile phone technology also has great potential in learning environments. With this in mind, the British Council recently held a MENA (Middle East and North Africa) Mobile Symposium to discuss the impact of digital and mobile learning on English-language education across the region. The symposium aimed to encourage young people to use digital and mobile products and services to enhance their personal and employment opportunities by improving their English-language skills. According to Cisco statistics, the number of mobile users in the MENA region is expected to reach about 850 million soon, with an annual growth rate of 77 percent. For this reason, the British Council has been developing what it calls “learning English mobile resources” especially designed to be used on mobile phones, PDAs, and mini-computers, as well as on many types of mobiles. The products include materials from the council website that are adapted for mobiles as well as applications in the form of games, audio materials, and learning tools. The aim is to create short, engaging, and interactive content suitable for students to use anytime on their mobile phones, saving time and money as well as learning English effectively. “The campaign started in Egypt two months ago when the British Council launched an SMS campaign in partnership with Vodafone Egypt which targeted Egyptian youth seeking jobs and helping them learn business English through SMS,” said Yomna Al-Meshad, MENA's regional mobile-learning manager. According to Al-Meshad, the idea started in 2010 in the British Council's East Asia offices, where mobile applications teaching English grammar and vocabulary on the i-pad and i-phone were developed, and it was then followed by a SMS campaign in the Czech Republic. Another 12 countries followed, and in October 2012 the campaign was rolled out in the MENA region, though discretely. “It was available in application shops in 2010, but without marketing activities, as the British Council was not promoting it at that stage,” Al-Meshad said. Al-Meshad believes that it is about time that Egypt introduced this developing world technology into its English teaching, especially now that more and more children are using mobiles. She explained the process of mobile education. “We push English content on mobiles in many forms: games which young learners can play for 60 seconds; or word challenges in which you have 60 seconds to fill in a word from multiple choices to complete a sentence.” Scores can be posted on Facebook to encourage students. The three main methods for mobile services are through SMS, where you receive content in a message, through Interactive Voice Response (IVR), which helps people acquire listening skills by presenting a number of real-life situations they can listen to by dialing numbers on their phones, and through an MMS service that is very popular in the Middle East and North Africa. “We use it in mobile-learning [m-learning] in Asia in collaboration with the mobile operator Maximums to push English material in audio and video,” said Al-Meshad. However, there are some reservations about the third service, as it is not yet widely used. Lucy Haagen, an m-learning consultant for the US state department and a participant in the council's symposium, said she had a bright vision for the future of m-education. In 2008, she was teaching at university, and an experiment was done giving all freshmen students i-pods and seeing how they participated in using them. “I got interested in that and did some work using i-pads with immigrant Mexicans in a school in our area to help them record their classes and practice speaking. Then I got involved in a project in South Africa because of a friend who was doing teacher-training there and in the process we came to an understanding that there were huge problems in classes,” recalled Haagen. With 50 or 60 children in the same class, not all of them could read the blackboard, the teachers were often illiterate themselves, or they had no textbooks so would spend all their time writing on the board. Students would simply copy this down, Haagen said, and as a result no real learning was taking place. Haagen found a solution to such problems by applying for a grant from the MacArthur Foundation, which supports digital learning, and 200 phones were donated from another foundation in America. These were taken to English classes in South Africa, and students began using them for reading and writing exercises. The advantages of m-learning from Haagen's point of view are that English-language learning is made more realistic and interactive than using the current techniques. “I'm very excited about what we call ‘flipped education'. A teacher spends a lesson doing a presentation that he can record on video and then students can watch that for homework. This is more interesting for them, and as a result in class they can spend their time actually speaking and using English,” she said. One of the disadvantages is that the most appropriate learning situations have not yet been identified. Ways to tackle the problem of illiteracy have been found by Haagen and her colleagues, nevertheless. In one example, they recorded a teacher giving instructions in native South African languages like Zulu and then produced an English audio version of the lesson with English text for students to use. They can then flip back to their native language if they need to. Haagen now intends to focus her work on the Middle East. “I'm very interested in the Middle East because there is a desire to preserve culture while at the same time adapting to the new era,” she said. She plans to work on material for teachers that takes the form of learning English through traditional stories or environmental planning. Aside from the Middle East and South Africa, Haagen has also worked in Uganda and she plans to work in China. To improve language-learning, Haagen believes that brainstorming on all levels should be used. “I think we need to train language-learners to discuss and focus and really find out how they learned. I think mobile companies with technological expertise need to bring teachers and students in and use their creativity and knowledge. I think social networks would be an area for language-learning in the future,” she commented. For her part, Al-Meshad also believes that the future of such learning methods is bright, if user habits change. “We plan to apply MMS in the future in Egypt, even though at present it is not widely used here,” she said.
