DOWNTIME LEARNING AS A COMPLEMENT OF INSTITUTIONAL EDUCATION

New mobile technologies and the changing behaviour of human society, increasingly dependent on an Internet connection, give rise to the question of whether it is not necessary to offer new teaching methods.

These must bring more effectiveness education. At the same time we need to know how effective is the classic institutional education system. When looking at the current competencies of graduates of all school levels we must state that the society consider them as insufficient. We judge it by the results of the research studies and by the experiences of students self-education.

Even in times of strong information expansion it is still the aim of education to equip pupils and students with such skills enabling them full-fledged personal and professional life. Contemporary mobile technologies can support teaching/learning process in their free-time. The question is if today's students use these facilities already themselves in this manner, i.e. in the so called “Downtime learning”? Training using mobile devices may not only take place at school or at a designated homework time, but whenever a pupil has a downtime, i.e. at the bus stop, waiting in line, in the bus, train etc.

Pupils/students are mostly looking for such resources having few text and more multimedia content. Our investigation shows that students consider them more attractive.

In the paper we present some results of the research study presenting basic elements and orientation of the downtime learning. From our investigations we can further say that mobile technology are currently implemented in the school, but the level of integration is not so pronounced as if they imagined their parents or the children/youngster themselves. However, the downtime learning materials needs to be specially prepared for this purpose.