Trends in Distance Education and Open Learning: Policy ... - ADEA

9. Teachers trainingCan mobile learning and training answer to the high demand of continuing learning inprimary and secondary teachers in Africa? If yes, which model is to be adopted?There have been much discussion on the main development technology, developmentlanguage and development environment of remote teaching system design based onmobile learning,(Parson et al, June 2007).The UniWAP mobile teacher training project; the main aim this project was to assist inteacher training through relatively simple technologies, SMS and digital pictures, to enablestudents to create digital portfolios in a central database built from materials created in afield (Seppala and Alamaki, 2007). Trainee teachers were able to share their experienceswith each other through messaging.Another research study carried for continuing education and training of teachers on ruralareas based in m-leaning in China (Jingdong and Zhen, 2009) has revealed the importanceand advantages of m-learning for teachers’ training, which are personalized training,economic and continuity, the experiments conducted had been SMS applications coupledwith WAP on mobile terminals. The key issues identified in this research were firstly theneed for proper integration of m-learning within other VLEs inclusive of extracurricularbroader services such as social educational services like weather temperatures which makesense in China, secondly the need to have higher multimedia functionalities other thanSMS with more advanced cell phones, and thirdly the mobile technology to be adaptive tocomplement the core study acquired in traditional classroom settings.29