Brisbane (AU), March 2010 - Gaining nearly a fifth of the total global smartphone market, Apple's iPhone has now cemented itself as a leader in mobile devices. And it seems to have an application for just about anything. Now the question arises for teachers and trainers as to whether the iPhone is just a bit of fun or if it can be used for real teaching and learning.
Training provider William Angliss Institute, in partnership with hotel-giant Rydges, set out to find some answers in their 2009 E-Learning Innovations project.
As part of their training for Certificate III in Cookery, new apprentices at Rydges go through a skills-recognition audit that includes a workplace assessment of practical skills and results in the development of a gap-training plan. The task was to see if the heavily paper-based assessment process could be performed by assessors using an iPhone application.
William Angliss worked with a number of assessors to develop a wish list of functionality for the setup, content, and reporting of the application. They found that people with experience in iPhone application development in Australia were rare, but that online forums provided a wealth of information to assist with their research phase.
William Angliss' iPhone application was developed by an external consultant and consisted of a database-driven website that allowed the creation of assessment questions and the allocation of a learner to an assessor. A native application (installed on the device) was developed, called 'Connecta', which is a free download from the iTunes store. The native application enables the iPhone camera function to be triggered from the 'Connecta' webpage, where images are compressed, resized, and submitted back to the web server as supporting evidence.
During development, William Angliss encountered a number of problems, such as copyright, licensing, and gaining final publication approval from Apple. All of these development issues are documented in the Connecta iPhone assessment tool project-development website. Project Manager Michael Frost said the success of the iPhone application for assessment means they will look to roll it out further in 2010.
"We've developed an e-assessment tool that can be used across any industry to conduct assessments in the field and capture and submit evidence of competence", he says. "The iPhone process is simple and does not require any complex procedures, making it easy for assessors to use. It's a matter of logging in, selecting the learner from the list to be assessed, ticking the multiple choice and true/false questions, capturing any supporting images, and sending the information to the web server."
ELearning Innovations projects are funded and supported by the Australian Flexible Learning Framework.
