Flickr: Creative Tools

3D printers in schools will be common.

Big data, open content, mobile learning, and digital printing are the big themes represented in this year’s NMC Horizon Report: 2013 K-12 Edition. The report is a collaboration between the New Media Consortium, the Consortium for School Networking, and the International Society for Technology in Education, pulling together an international group of experts to discuss trends and measure how mainstream emerging ed-tech approaches have become.

As with all of its reports, the group makes near, middle, and long-term projections for technology trends, as well as broader observations about the direction of the field and its challenges. What’s striking in this year’s report is that many of the projections for the K-12 space match those made in February in the NMC Horizons Report on Higher Education.

Here are the big takeaways.

TRENDS

The presence of the Internet in students’ lives outside of school, and especially on mobile devices, is allowing for more online and blended learning models in classrooms. That trend is supported by an increasing tolerance and even excitement among teachers for mobile devices as learning tools. As the cost of devices continues to come down, they proliferate in classrooms and can be powerful learning tools.

Print and digital textbooks are getting some serious competition from open-source content, which has captured the imagination of educators who are finding valuable content outside the prescribed realm of textbooks.

At the same time, educators feel less isolated and more inspired by relationships with colleagues fostered through social media. Some are even discovering new joy in their profession with increased access to lesson ideas and new teaching practices.

CHALLENGES

The big challenges for better using education technology are similar to ones that have long existed. There isn’t enough professional development to help educators feel comfortable using new strategies and it often isn’t part of a school’s culture. Resistance to trying new approaches remains prevalent and the status quo continues to exert a powerful inertia on the system, preventing a broader use of good ideas.

Traditional models of schooling are experiencing more competition than ever before with charter schools, for-profit operators, online learning and MOOCs pushing for change. Similarly, traditional teaching that relies on lectures and tests is being challenged by blended models of instruction.

There’s a large demand for personalized learning, but the technology tools don’t yet support the goals of those who want to use it — a big gap still exists between overall vision and available tools. Meanwhile, even as teachers are shifting to more formative assessments taken continually throughout the school year, assessment policies have not always shifted to match this change. But educators think there’s potential for digital tools to help collect formative assessment data unobtrusively.

NEAR-TERM PROJECTIONS

In the next year, the NMC Horizon Report for K-12 predicts that the expectation for constant connectivity will push schools towards cloud-based computing. This trend can already be seen as schools farm out parts of their infrastructure to the cloud, but new devices like Google’s Chromebook designed to sync with the cloud are further pushing adoption.

Mobile learning has been a hot topic for several years, but it has not reached the 20 percent penetration level that NMC uses to designate a tactic mainstream. This could be its year. Some educators surveyed said they jumped on the idea of using smartphones in class right away, while others said they were more wary of the potential distractions and disruption the devices could cause. Still, the educational app market for mobile devices has exploded and shows no signs of slowing down, indicating that as the tools get better and better mobile learning will become common place.

MID-TERM PROJECTIONS

The mid-level predictions, set for two to three years from now, line up most closely with trends in higher education. Both reports — K12 and Higher Education — noted the power and increasing prevalence of learning analytics, the practice of analyzing real time data from digital learning platforms and using that information to shape teaching strategies for individual students.

Student-data can now be used to tailor curricula and to suggest resources for students akin to the algorithms businesses use to market products to consumers. Similarly, in higher education learning analytics are being used to tailor the advising process. Perhaps even more significantly, the MOOCs that challenge the higher education paradigm rely heavily on learning analytics to direct, grade, and guide learners.

The second projection notes the rise in high-quality open content available to students around the world. Started by MIT more than ten years ago, this movement has grown rapidly and garnered excitement, especially as a way to equalize access to education. It also gives students much more choice in the learning they consume. Open-content in the form of MOOCs are already disrupting the higher education space, but this report indicates K-12 is not far behind.

LONG-TERM PROJECTIONS

3D printing has captured the imagination of people at all ages, especially as movements towards design learning take off in K-12 schools. The report notes that digital printing machines cost much less now, and that within five years it would be possible for schools to own one. Teachers can use these them to explain design concepts and to prototype building projects.

The only really new prediction in the report is for virtual and remote labs to provide students access to scientific experiences even as school districts cut back on physical lab spaces in schools. The report notes that virtual labs would allow students more time and space to practice techniques and make mistakes. Also, “in virtual and remote environments, an experiment can be conducted numerous times with greater efficiency and precision.” Some schools are already using these remote labs to save money. Still, this prediction begs the question, what could be lost if students no longer practice the physical act of science?

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By Matt Levinson

When asked why he became a scientist, Nobel Laureate Isidor Rabi attributed his success to his mother. Every day, she would ask him the same question about his school day: “Did you ask a good question today?”

“Asking good questions – made me become a scientist!” Rabi said.

Questions are critical, and how to manage and navigate a good question requires practice. “Coming up with the right question involves vigorously thinking through the problem, investigating it from various angles, turning closed questions into open-ended ones and prioritizing which are the most important questions to get at the heart of the matter,” say authors Dan Rothstein and Luz Santana in their book, Make Just One Change: Teach Students to Ask Their Own Questions.

The hardest part about using design thinking in class is getting the question right and staying in the question. Educators regularly notice how challenging it is for students to stay in the question.  Student conversation can veer off track and the students can lose focus. It takes discipline for students to learn how to dig deep with focus on a design question.

For teachers, in designing learning experiences for students that are embedded with technology, the wording and focus of the question are paramount.  The question needs to be deeper than simply “Should or shouldn’t we use the iPad with this project.” The question needs to be open ended, elastic and invite multiple interpretations. Learning outcomes based on the question need to be defined and articulated,  and experiences to achieve those outcomes need to be created with student engagement in mind. Engagement alone is not enough. But engagement matched with outcomes around a carefully worded question propels student learning.

[RELATED: For Students, Why the Question is More Important Than The Answer]

“I’ve seen students with iPads and the novelty is there and the engagement is there, but it’s not clear that novelty and engagement will lead to increased academic achievement,” writes Stanford Education professor Larry Cuban In The LA Times.

Blogger Mark Gleeson puzzles over the conundrum in “iPurpose before iPad,” urging schools to avoid viewing apps as “one trick ponies” and with an “action/activity emphasis.”  Instead, he calls on schools to ask if iPads fuel learning with “depth and skill development.”

DESIGNING CURRICULUM

One big challenge can be how to frame curriculum design using the technology so that it moves beyond novelty and engagement into deep learning.  This takes time, patience, and observation.

Bjorn Jefferey, Co-Founder of Toca Boca, writes in a blog post for the Joan Ganz Cooney Center:  “Play with them, talk to them, observe them. What do they need to develop? Start there. Then—once you know that—you can start thinking about ways to do this. Perhaps all your kids really need is to develop a certain skill a little more, or perhaps to dive deeper into an interest that they have.”

Beyond observation, teachers can invite students into the conversation around the design of the learning experience.  In that conversation, students will gravitate toward modes of engagement and often, but not always, this engagement will include and involve technology. It can be amazing and illuminating, once this door is opened, to see and hear the myriad ways that students understand learning and engagement. What’s more, this conversation can serve as the bridge for the teacher less versed in tech tools, but well versed in learning outcomes and design questions.

For example, in one class recently, as students were creating recipes for a good life, one student suggested the teacher use the app Show Me could be useful as a way to explain the recipe and to share with other classmates. The student had used the app in a different class and shared the knowledge in his humanities class. The teacher listened to the student and was open to using the app.

These “small” moments pop up every day in a classroom where technology is present.  The key for teachers is to be open to the moment and opportunity when students see where it can be used and add value.  Partnership with students and collaborative inquiry are critical to schools seeking to further understand the role technology plays in deepening learning.

And, as Isidor Rabi noted, lifelong learning begins with a good question.

Matt Levinson is the Head of the Upper Division at Marin Country Day School in Corte Madera, Calif. and the author of From Fear to Facebook: One School’s Journey.

Flickr: Flickingerbrad

By Justin Reich

The Someday/Monday dichotomy captures one of the core challenges in teacher professional development around education technology. On the one hand, deep integration of new learning technologies into classrooms requires substantially rethinking pedagogy, curriculum, assessment, and teacher practice (someday). For technology to make a real difference in student learning, it can’t just be an add-on. On the other hand, teachers need to start somewhere (Monday), and one of the easiest ways for teachers to get experience with emerging tools is to play and experiment in lightweight ways: to use technology as an add-on. Teachers need to imagine a new future—to build towards Someday—and teachers also need new activities and strategies to try out on Monday. Both pathways are important to teacher growth and meaningful, sustained changes in teaching and learning.

In this four-part series, we’ll use the Someday/Monday template to explore four dimensions of using tablets, such as the iPad, in educational settings, examining how teachers can take students on a journey from consumption of media to curation, creation, and connection. Here, we’ll start with consumption.

Part I: Consumption

In the apocryphal photo of the iPad, the tablet rests in the lap of Steve Jobs, sitting on the stage at the iPad release demonstration, reclined in a leather chair. This was a device made for reading and watching, for sitting back, for passively consuming media. One of the signature challenges of the surge of interest in iPads is helping educators imagine the device as more than a library of books or a rolodex of apps, but as a flexible, mobile device for creating multimedia performances of understanding. Educators using iPads should start by thinking about how the device can foster critical reading of text, images, audio, and film, but consumption should be the point of departure on a journey towards more active student engagement.

To oversimplify, there are two kinds of reading that students are asked to do in school settings: focused and connected. In the focused reading mode, we hope young people will engage deeply with a text. As Mark Ott, the chair of the English Department at Deerfield Academy recently told me, “Students used to sit at a desk with nothing but a copy of Thoreau’s Walden and experience sustained engagement with Thoreau’s ideas. We want to preserve that experience in a world where devices are constantly competing for their attention.” Whether the copy of Walden is the $4.99 paperback or the free digital copy from the iBooks library, educators still believe in the importance of focused reading.

In the connected reading mode, we ask students to treat texts as nodes in a network of information. We ask them to quickly synthesize multiple readings and websites in research projects. To follow contemporary media narratives, like the recent violence in Boston, they trace stories across Twitter hashtags, livestreams of police scanners, blog posts, and newspaper articles. We ask them to read in communal settings, leveraging social technologies to allow users to share notes, highlighted passages, questions, and ideas. In an extreme form of this connected reading, Diana Kimball, a Fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University, has formed a “24-hour book club” where groups sign up to read the same book in a 24-hour period, using Twitter to share reactions, favorite passages, questions, hunches, and insights.

Focused and connected modes of reading are both vital, but they require different habits, disciplines, and settings, and they serve different ends.

Someday

Most emerging technologies for the iPad support connected reading experiences rather than focused reading experiences. SubText allows teachers to place students in to reading groups, where they can share notes, highlight passages, ask questions, engage in discussions, and respond to teacher prompts. Reading becomes a shared, communal act, not just in classroom discussion but during the experience of reading. For collaborative research, Zotero’s web interface works great on tablets, and the tool helps groups and individual students organize diverse sources for research projects and manage bibliographic information.

A great summer project for literature or history teachers would be to explore some of these new tools and imagine how differentiated reading experiences in classes could be more social, how literature circles or book groups could collaborate in reading at home and then discuss their insights together in class.

Tablets already have tools to help reimagine connected reading, but features or apps that scaffold focused reading experiences seem further off. E-reading apps may eventually collect data about students as readers, providing some insights around pace, focus, and attention. For instance, eye-tracking and usage-tracking tools could provide measures of student reading engagement, allowing teachers to help students set goals around sustained reading. For Monday, however, it will be practices rather than apps that help students develop the capacity to read deeply.

Monday

To help students learn sustained concentration—there isn’t an app for that, yet. In the meanwhile, students need to learn both habits of mind for disciplined reading and how to control their technology environment to minimize distraction.

Howard Rheingold in his fine book NetSmart, praises the art of Attention, the habit of keeping at the front of one’s mind the purpose of using an online environment. If the purpose is focused reading, then students need to learn to recognize every move away from the text and into another online space as a distraction from sustained engagement. If the purpose is connected reading, students need to recognize how to strike the right balance between exploring a networked of hyperlinked texts while not wandering away from the core purpose of one’s reading. The first step in helping students developing these skills is naming “attention” as a skill: having students reflect metacognitively on their attention strategies and weaknesses and think about how best to exercise their own attention muscles.

Students can also learn to create a digital environment conducive to concentration. For iPads, iOS 6 has a Guided Access feature designed to help people get stuck inside a particular app. Somewhat hidden under the “Accessibility” menu in the General Settings, Guided Access allows users to “lock in” to a particular app, disable all notifications, and require a password to log out. It cannot disable distraction, but it can set it a few more clicks away. (If you have a toddler, this is also a helpful way of keeping them from accidentally logging out with the Home button or swiping to a new app). Actually shutting down all apps before reading can be a kind of ritual of concentration, like clearing way books and papers from a desk before sitting down to read. It is also more slightly more difficult to jump into a game that needs to load or a web browser preloaded with interesting pages. Such are the 21^st century methods of creating a clear desk for reading.

One of the central arguments of Rheingold’s book is that while digital tools can shape our cognitive experiences in undesirable ways, many of the drawbacks of technology are not inevitable. We simply need to develop new habits to make the most of our new tools. If our tools can distract us, then we need to learn more about focusing attention and managing distraction. Used wisely, we can choose to read Walden alone, in quite repose, or we can read Walden in community with peers and mentors, allowing students divided by home geography to read together as the Transcendentalists might have done in Emerson’s manse. Without these deliberate efforts to rethink reading we may find, as Thoreau said of the emerging technology of his own time, “we do not ride on the railroad; it rides upon us.”

B. Justin Reich is a Fellow at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society, as well as Director of Online Community, Practice, and Research at Facing History and co-Director of EdTechTeacher.

Flickr: jhaymesisvip

Smartphones, tablets, and other mobile devices have gained popularity as educational tools in part because of the belief those devices could cut across the digital divide created by socioeconomic boundaries.

Now a new study reinforces that perspective, finding that students’ access to mobile devices, in this country anyway, is more often a question of parents’ attitudes toward mobile learning than a family’s income or the mobile device provisions of that family’s local school district.

The report published by Grunwald Associates and the Learning First Alliance with support from AT&T, found that, according to data from a representative nationwide sample of nearly 2,400 parents, more than four in five K-12 students at least occasionally use some sort of computing device, including mobile devices like tablets or smartphones, or laptop computers.

Further, although there was some association between parent income and the 18 percent of students who don’t use devices at home, more than half of those non-using students were found to live in houses where parents own at least one such device, often a smartphone.

The cause of non-use in those cases is “some other reason that probably revolves around the attitudes of parents and, by extension, the students toward the smartphone,” said Peter Grunwald, the president and founder of Grunwald Associates, a research firm based in Bethesda, Md., known for its work on ed-tech related projects. “The ubiquity of mobile technology in everyday life I think comes through loud and clear in this study. Families own multiple devices, even families that are not well off.”

Income did affect the number of computing devices per household, however. Overall, the study found families with an income of under $25,000 were found to own an average of 3.3 devices per household, a figure that includes desktop and laptop computers, tablets, and smartphones and other mobile devices. Families with an annual income of more than $150,000 had nearly twice that many devices, on average.

In terms of support, a majority of responding parents saying they believed mobile devices could be positive educational tools for their children. “Majorities of parents believe that mobile devices and applications offer fun, engaging ways of learning, connecting and communicating,” the report states. “When it comes to mobile devices and education, most parents believe that these devices open up learning opportunities, benefit students’ learning and can engage students in the classroom. Many parents also believe that mobiles and apps teach academic skills and content.”

Further, although parents’ attitudes toward mobile learning were found to be influenced by whether their children experienced mobile learning opportunities at school, parents also reported being far more likely to consider supporting their students’ education with a mobile device than their children’s school districts.

Some 45 percent of parents said they either had already purchased or planned to purchase a mobile device to support their children’s education, and 56 percent said they’d be willing to purchase a mobile device if their child’s school required it. About half of parents’ high school students carry smartphones to school, parents said.

By contrast, only 16 percent of schools had a policy that allowed students to use their own mobile devices in class, according to parents, while only 17 percent said their children were required to use a mobile device—owned either by the school or the student—as part of their education.

“I think it reflects … the disconnect between the school environment and the broader household environment in which kids exist,” Grunwald said.

More from the study:

MOBILE IN SCHOOLS: By high school, half of all students (51 percent) carry a smartphone to school with them every day. So do more than one in four middle school students (28 percent). Overall, 25 percent of all K–12 students take a smartphone to school every day, according to their parents, including 8 percent of students in grades 3–5.

Sixteen percent of all K–12 parents, and almost one in four parents of high school students (24 percent), report that their child’s school allows students to use family-owned mobile devices in the classroom—often called a “bring your own device” (BYOD) approach. Given that half of all high school students take a smartphone to school every day, however, some students seem to be powering down their devices in the classroom, or using them under the radar.

Some schools require students to use portable or mobile devices—which could be school- or family-owned—in the classroom. This could be a signal that technology that can move between homes and schools could become essential for academic learning. Overall, 17 percent of K–12 parents report that their child’s school requires students to use at least one portable device (such as a laptop, notebook, netbook or ultrabook) or mobile device in the classroom.

More than half of parents believe that schools should make more use of mobile devices in education. At the same time, many parents look to teachers and schools for guidance on helping children use mobiles and apps for educational purposes.

Parents aren’t waiting for schools to make the move to mobile learning. Already, 45 percent of parents report that they plan to buy, or already have bought, a mobile device to support their child’s learning. Fifty-six percent of parents say they’d be willing to purchase a mobile device for their child to use in the classroom if the school required it.

GIRLS VS. BOYS: Parents of girls were slightly more likely to support the use of mobile devices for education than were parents of boys. Grunwald said the finding is consistent with past research that has shown girls to be more consistent and more intense users of social media for the sake of socialization and community building.

YOUNG VS. YOUNGER: Parents of students in grades K-2 were more likely to vouch for the effectiveness of mobile education than parents of students in grades 3-12. Although the study did not directly explore the reasons why parents of younger students showed that response, Grunwald said the discrepancy goes beyond parents of younger children simply being younger themselves, and thus more tech savvy.

“A substantial part of this correlation is attributable to the perception that some of the newer devices, in particular tablets, do in fact lend themselves to younger kids’ use,” he said. The evidence for that conclusion comes from previous research in the field, he added.

LACK OF INFLUENCE: While the study focuses mainly on quantifying use habits and attitudes of parents and children, there is little direct data to explain what influences these, Grunwald said, meaning any conclusions as such are educated guesses at best.

“We’d also like to look at this notion of influence in greater detail,” he said. “The influence of parents on kids, the influence of families on schools, and also the degree to which schools are going to be looked to for guidance by parents in terms of selection of education applications and the like.”

SMILE/Stanford

For many of us, the conversation around mobile learning has shifted from asking whether mobile devices present educational opportunities to how they might best do so.

From that second question, a new initiative has been launched: SMILE, the Stanford Mobile Inquiry Learning Environment, an idea, which, in practice, is almost staggeringly simple. Essentially, SMILE is a learning management system that allows students to create, share, answer, and evaluate questions in a collaborative manner through the use of cell phones.

Students use mobile devices — typically android phones that are connected to the same network — to create their own multiple-choice questions about a given topic. Their classmates answer those questions, and evaluate them based on their difficulty. While the devices need to be connected to each other, they don’t necessarily need to be connected to the outside Web, which is a key issue for some communities around the globe, said Paul Kim, the assistant dean and chief technology officer of Stanford University’s Office of Innovation & Technology and SMILE’s creator.

The drive to make questions that score higher on their peers’ difficulty index ultimately spurs students to think about the subject material in a deeper way, Kim says. And while there are some shortcomings—such as the lack of allowance for longer-form responses like written answers and essays, and a reliance mostly on more simple content elements such as texts and still photographs—the system’s simpleness allows it to be used in a variety of educational environments, ranging from a rural village in southern Africa to a medical school classroom at Stanford itself.

But creating such a project is one thing. Actually putting it into practice is another. So Kim, who has also helped launch SMILE in India, Argentina, and suburban Northern California, shares some of his tactics and lessons learned about how best to launch this project even in communities that are unlikely to have Internet access — or sometimes even electricity.

USE EXISTING TOOLS

Despite reaching out to poor and particularly rural communities around the world, Kim and his team have striven to use as many already-existing resources as possible, even if the devices themselves have to be procured. For example, for a power source on a SMILE pilot project in a remote Indian location with little access to electricity, Kim’s team used the batteries commonly found in motorcycles and rickshaws. Another SMILE project in Southeast Asia is adapting the software for use on tablets students already have through a government initiative. Even SMILE’s central premise—using children rather than a curriculum to create questions—fits the use-the resources-you-have approach.

“Try not to bring in anything new, because you’re not going to find anybody who can service,” devices brought in from the outside, he said. “You’re not going to find any replacement parts. So you have to work with what is already out there, and that was my conclusion.”

ALWAYS PLACE CONTENT IN CONTEXT

Part of why SMILE appears to work in under-served communities is because using student questions makes a shortage of content access less important. And as the project has grown, the launch of Global SMILE will provide another workaround for sites with Web access, since it will archive and curate the best student-created questions, and making them available to users worldwide.

But in this initiative, as well as any other aiming to reach diverse student populations, Kim says it is important to keep any content in a context that make sense in the world in which the students live. That can be easier said than done when simple Western essentials like running water and toasters are non-existent in a rural African student’s life.

For example, “if you are using books that talk about microwave ovens and blueberry cakes baked from the oven,” Kim says, “it doesn’t make sense in a rural village setting.”

EMBRACE SECULAR AND RELIGIOUS PARTNERS

SMILE has worked with populations served by a host of nonprofit, philanthropic organizations, meaning partnerships can often create a more efficient way to administer the program.

Sometimes those organizations are secular, such as the Peace Corps, which has aided work with students using SMILE in Tanzania. But other times, religious charities have also helped provide resources and lines of communication for SMILE projects. Kim acknowledges that affiliating with religious groups can be a delicate issue, but says doing so is often the most cost-effective way to implement a mobile program.

“They don’t need any extra incentive. … They just want to reach out to more people,” Kim says. “It could be controversial. But I always tell people that I work with all religious organizations out there, and it has been nothing but success.”

PUBLICIZE YOURSELF, THEN LET THEM COME TO YOU

Despite advances in mobile education it can still have a stigma among some educators. For that reason, Kim says he has never purposefully targeted specific countries, regions, or communities for the implementation of SMILE, because letting those communities find him is a more authentic way of insuring buy-in.

“A lot of people come forward, and they say, ‘Oh we’d like to do this in our country, in our region, in our school.’” Kim said. “So I’ve been responding. … It’s been always one place leading to another.”

Erin Scott

In developing countries, where smartphones and dependable cellular networks are still scarce, it’s been difficult to gauge the real impact of the mobile education movement. But with the combination of different factors — the advent of new technology, decreased pricing for data, a worldwide lust for mobile education, and a persisting patience for smaller screens and lower connection speeds in nations where there is little alternative — the landscape in developing countries may be at a tipping point.

Nickhil Jakatdar, who founded the mobile video company Vuclip five years ago, said the stakes for mobile phone users in developing countries are high.

“It’s almost like they’re evolving in a different way,” Jakatdar, a native of India, said of people who use lower-end mobile phones in the developing world. “When they see a small screen, they don’t just see a small screen. They see a great opportunity.”

Vuclip already has about 45 million unique monthly users who log onto the company’s platform to watch mobile videos that automatically adjust their resolution and other features based on the level of each user’s network and device, especially for those with low-end devices.

“By no means is that experience (on low-end devices) what you would get on an iPhone,” Jakatdar said. “But it’s way better than what one can imagine when one thinks, ‘Oh, it’s a small screen on a lower level network.’”

The potential is huge for education-related content, he said. Though Jakatdar isn’t pushing for mobile learning to replace formal schooling where the latter is available, he said for users who can’t afford a face-to-face secondary or post-secondary education, or who want supplemental help in learning that videos can provide, the service could be beneficial.

Another factor that’s shifting the landscape is availability and cost of data. While data in developing countries has traditionally been more expensive for users to purchase than in developed nations, its price appears to be falling more rapidly during the past 12 months, Jakatdar said. Further, he said selling data in a packet model format similar to how it’s sold to smartphone users in the United States and other developed nations is gaining steam. That in turn may encourage users to have less concerns about the amount of data they consume, and thus seek more video content.

[RELATED: What Exactly Can You Learn On a Mobile Phone?]

A report from the International Telecommunication Union released last October found the cost of data to drop about 30 percent worldwide between 2008 and 2011, though it actually dropped more substantially in developed nations than in developing ones.

With Vuclip following the two-tiered model that has become a standard for many startups—offering free services to most users while charging users who wish to purchase premium content and features—the hope appears to be that delivering educational content to developing countries will drive up the company’s user numbers, while assisting an educational shift Jakatdar says is coming.

“I still am not sure whether a full-blown education on mobile (technologies) is going to be on the cards in the next few years,” Jakatdar said. “That seems like a little bit of a stretch practically. But I definitely see mobile being a greater supplement to education taking off.”

Vuclip’s data on its users shows that even low-end mobile devices are far from being commonplace worldwide; Jakatdar said about 70 percent of the company’s visitors are male, and in some regions—particularly the Middle East—skew toward the middle and upper classes. But in India, a nation that accounts for more than a quarter of the company’s monthly traffic, users run the gamut of socioeconomic classes, and in the U.S., users are more likely to be from low-income communities, he added.

Jakatdar says he still sees other shifts that need to happen before that vision is realized. For one, he says educational video publishers will need to shorten more of their clips into the two- to three-minute range that is more accessible for viewers.

“That seems to be the sweet spot of what a consumer can consume at any one stretch,” Jakatdar said. “The two-to-three-minute clip I expect will remain popular for quite some time.”

MOBILE EDUCATION TRENDS

As Vuclip announced earlier this month the launch of their new educational video portal, which will feature a growing collection of free online content from the Khan Academy and other authors, it also produced survey data that Jakatdar says shows a widespread belief in video as an opportunity for education.

[RELATED: How Teachers Make Cell Phones Work in the Classroom]

In the survey of 80,000 Vuclip users, more respondents indicated they would prefer to use their mobile phones as their primary source for obtaining an education than indicated a preference for a traditional brick-and-mortar school. While Jakatdar concedes those results may partly be a function of who is using Vuclip’s technology, he said it also points to the expense of formal education in the developing world compared to the dropping costs of data consumption.

Other results from the company’s survey:

• 35% of American respondents say that learning on their mobile phones would be their top choice for learning, compared to 30% who indicate that school would be their ideal channel for education.
• 54% of Americans said they would be “very interested” in receiving education via their mobile phones and an additional 21% said they would be “somewhat interested.” For males under 17, the percentage of those “very interested” grows to 62%.
• 41%  of Americans said career development is the number one learning goal.