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mContext partnership

During 2009 the Centre for Learning Innovation partnered with scientists from NICTA to trial the mContext application in a high school setting. mContext is a client-server application that was used to deliver a wide variety of digital learning resources to Apple iPod Touch devices used by Year 11 Ancient History students at Merrylands High School.

See the mContext Channel 10 news item

See our mContext information video

Download the mContext brochure (pdf 145 kB)

mContext has numerous implications for the Federal Government’s Digital Education Revolution hardware rollout plans as the tool will allow large volumes of data such as textbooks to be stored and used on mobile devices at school and at home. mContext also removes the need for mobile devices to be constantly connected to the Internet as data is stored locally and changes are updated whenever the mobile device synchronises with the server.

The outcomes of the mContext trial were very positive. Students:

• login or authenticate and then click ‘synchronise’ to receive all teacher scheduled learning resources to their personal mobile device
• can easily find and access their daily or weekly lesson material (causing less class disruptions)
• can use the TiniWiki application as a reference in all classes, as a complete copy of Wikipedia is saved to their personal mobile device
• can work offline (ie: data does not have to remain on ‘the cloud’) and reduce their use of bandwidth
• don’t require home internet access as they have copies of the digital resources on their mobile device
• can mark-up or add comments to local content and these annotations can be aggregated/monitored/managed by the class teacher as an assessment or focus for classroom discussion
• can share individual markups and comments.

mContext includes a very high speed search function that brings users to the exact location of a term in any document or video. The search feature can also locate any student tags or comments.

Both students and teachers and teachers find the mContext client-server technology very easy to use. Student accounts are easy to create: either manually and/or as part of an integrated approach with the Department’s Enrolment and Registration Number (ERN) database and/or future Learning Management System.

mContext has enormous potential to deliver a digital textbook revolution due to its integrated security features and data compression.

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