A research project looking at the use of mobile technologies such as iPads in secondary schools will be pioneering in its application of “choice modelling” techniques to the field of education.
Choice modelling specialist Dr Paul Burke, from the UTS Business School’s Marketing Discipline Group, is part of a multidisciplinary team that has secured an Australian Research Council (ARC) grant of $305,500 over three years for the project on technology-enhanced learning.
The project will investigate the complex factors that promote or inhibit mobile technologies becoming part of quality teaching and learning and brings together a team of researchers from the University of Technology, Sydney (UTS) with expertise in education, IT, social sciences and marketing.
The team is made up the Head of the School of Education at UTS, Professor Peter Aubusson; Professor of Education Sandra Schuck; Professor of Software Engineering Didar Zowghi; technology-based learning specialist Associate Professor Matthew Kearney; the Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, Emeritus Professor Theodor van Leeuwen; and Dr Paul Burke.
Mobile technologies are ubiquitous in Australia but knowledge about their effective application in school education is patchy, the research team says.
'Mobile technologies are ubiquitous
but knowledge about their
effective application is patchy'
The project will aim to come up with cutting-edge instruments for technology-enhanced learning that have been tested and validated in an Australian educational context.
“Some people are using these mobile technologies well, some people are still playing around with them,” Dr Burke says. “The aim of this project will be to identify the things that maximise the advantages and minimise the negatives.”
The project builds upon earlier work where the team started to apply marketing research methods known as choice modelling and best-worst scaling to the education sector.
Choice modelling and best-worst scaling are tools that help to quantify the relative impact of various factors on decision making. In earlier projects the team used them to seek to understand the factors that drive teachers’ use of interactive whiteboards and their decisions about staying in or leaving the profession.
In this project they will be used to assess to explain to trade-offs that occur when teachers and students make decisions about the use of mobile technologies. Which factors – usability or accessibility, for instance – are more important than others?
This research project gets under way in 2015, with one of the first tasks being a survey of the use of mobile technologies in secondary schools.
Photo: Students using iPads in class. Credit - Dr Wesley Fryer/Flickr