A Summary of APAC MLearning Conference 2011

This year’s Asia Pacific Mobile Learning and Edutainment Conference 2011 was held at Bandung, Indonesia. The conference is an annual event organized by Commtechasia which lasted for two days and was graced by keynote speakers from various fields of the mobile tech sector.

The APAC MLearning conference was introduced by Wemel Cumavoo, Co-Founder of Asia Pacific Mobile Learning & Edutainment Advisory Panel, together with Ir. Syamsul Aliah and Prof. DR. Ing. Kalamullah Ramli from the University of Indonesia. Several presentations were delivered on the day. Professor John Traxler of the University of Wolverhampton spoke on Mobile Learning in Asia, and Dr. Serkan Toto, a renowned consultant for web and mobile industries in Japan shared his experience on Mobile Learning in Japan.

The second day of the conference was equally exciting. Several academic papers were presented by scholars from Malaysia and Kazakhstan. Christine Ling Lee Bong from Open University Malaysia presented the implementation of mobile learning in an ‘Open and Distance Learners’ (ODL) environment. OUM would send the study materials through sms according to the programs they chose. Therefore, the learners must manage their learning time and schedule.

“With SMS as one of the learning methods, they are teaching and persuading learners to develop a self-regulated learning,” she said.

Several mobile learning programs that has been going well, among others, such as that presented by The British Council. Neil Ballantyne and Danny Whitehead presented how their mLearning Tools are currently being used. Learning can be fun, they say, pointing to their various mLearning apps as proof. Whitehead explains:

Everyone can learn on the go via their mobile devices. Not just in classes, but also in the office, at home on the sofa, people can learn through the applications on their mobile phones which is more convenience to them.”

Mobile giant Nokia was also in attendance. Narenda Wicaksono, Developer Marketing Manager of Nokia Indonesia gave a presentation about the company’s mobile learning program. Nokia has already presented the Nokia Life Tools application, which we discussed at Penn Olson last month.

“In Indonesia … this application already has one million subscribers. Because it’s not only easy and requires no internet connection (it uses text message service), but it’s also affordable so that people in remote rural areas can gain useful knowledge pertaining to their daily lives,” said Narenda.

Nokia encouraged the community to be more creative and develop more applications which can be useful in the future.