MOBILE LEARNING TEACHER COMPETENCIES FRAMEWORK

Abstract

Advancements in mobile and wireless technologies have increased the adoption rate of mobile learning. Mobile learning offers numerous affordances to education: time and location independence, ubiquity and context awareness, adaptivity and personalization, social interactivity and easier administration. However, for the effective integration of mobile learning in schools, teachers should have the appropriate competencies in order to integrate mobile technologies into their professional practise. Existing Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) frameworks provide general guidelines to pre-service and in-service teachers for the appropriate use of digital technologies across education. Examples of such frameworks are the UNESCO ICT Competency Framework for Teachers (ICT CFT v.3), the International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE) standards and the European Framework for the Digital Competence of Educators (DigCompEdu). While the aforementioned frameworks provide a set of competencies that educators need to master in order to effectively use digital technologies in their professional practise, they are not focused on specific educational technologies. Wireless and mobile technologies, on the other side, have introduced a set of characteristics that are rather unique to mobile learning: personalisation and adaptivity, ubiquity and context-awareness, interactivity and authenticity, self-directedness and collaboration. The current study proposes the development of a framework that explicitly defines the mobile learning competencies that teachers need to have in order to effectively integrate mobile learning into their professional practise so as to enhance and innovate education and training. The proposed framework is based on current digital competencies frameworks and incorporates the following aspects of teachers’ professional practise: mobile technologies, digital citizenship, safety, classroom management, pedagogy, teaching, assessment, and professional engagement. Moreover, the framework introduces a progression model identifying three expertise levels: beginner, competent and proficient. The proposed framework for teachers’ mobile learning competencies is aiming to function in a complementary fashion to the current general digital competency frameworks by providing explicit links between mobile learning competencies and teachers’ practise and continuous professional development. The framework can provide a useful guidance for the development of teachers’ training programs that promote mobile learning competencies and also for self-assessment to evaluate individual mobile learning competence levels.