M-LEARNING AND ITS USE IN THE SYSTEM OF CONTROLLED SELF-STUDY

Information and communication technologies (ICT) have experienced a sharp growth in the recent twenty years. Currently, the students have almost unlimited access to the modern technologies and they use them on everyday basis. They are familiarised with them much more than the older generation. The youth produces a large quantity of digital content, as for example various audio and video files, emails, SMS, blogs etc. This presents a great challenge for the educators – to educate themselves in usage of these technologies and to adapt the process of education itself to these technologies.

Despite the fact that m-learning is generally viewed as one of possible ways of e-learning development, it does not mean only moving of the e-learning to mobile devices but it is also necessary to include other approaches to education. There are many foreign researchers who see a great potential in inclusion of mobile technologies. Similarly to the e-learning, where blended learning seems to be the most efficient way of implementation, it is suitable to apply m-learning together with the traditional methods of teaching which may be enriched by a new and still unused dimension of mobile education. After quite a long time, we have a technology which is accessible to a large number of the public without significant financial limits. Currently, mobile devices are being used by the majority of the population of the developed countries. In the recent years, there have been developed many useful educational applications for mobile devices, including both educational platforms and educational methods. Thus, the differences are also among the individual levels of education (ISCED classification).

This paper aims to map the approaches to usage of the mobile devices in university environment in the Czech Republic, especially as the tools for accessing the educational content and their potential usage in direct teaching and controlled self-studying.