Designing a mobile applications curriculum: Overview

Abstract

As technology transforms higher education, changing the way that people conduct business, communicate, and learn, schools, colleges, and universities must accommodate and transform how curriculum is delivered and what programs should be delivered. In years past, reformed conceptions of teaching, learning, and education, as well as new practices, policies, and organizational settings, for teacher learning, have been introduced by educational researchers and reformers. Reviewing these new concepts and practices have transformed learning for teachers, research groups, collaboration, and higher learning. Collaborative partnerships and professional communities in higher learning have taught us that the organizational conditions are essential to the development of instructional support and design of cutting-edge programs to align with current technologies. As technology changes the way people communicate, conduct business, and learn, colleges and universities across the country strive to provide engaging, current, and individualized learning environments using mobile applications that can be utilized on mobile devices such as tablets, iPhone, and Android and wearable technology to support collaborative education and distance learning and support the Internet of Everything. With these devices in the hands of students, faculty must provide education for a growing and diverse population of anytime, anywhere access to educational resources and applications. As the managing of education in a changing society is increasing pressure on organizations, colleges, and universities to provide and accommodate network access in a secure environment, there is an urgent need for skilled mobile technologist to provide the support, design, and security needed to support current and emerging applications on mobile devices. Students must also learn to design mobile applications for mobile learning and wearable technology. Students must also be skilled at providing secure coding on these devices. The growing use of mobile, smart devices in the consumer market has also forced the software engineering community to quickly adapt development approaches of mobile applications. The combination of computing power, access to handheld devices, and ease of application transferable to market has made mobile devices the new computing platform for businesses, education, and independent developers. However, the growth of this new computing platform has outpaced the development of mobile applications. What is mobile technology? It is impossible to attribute one fixed meaning to the concepts of mobile learning. To fully understand this concept, it is critical to consider the relationships between each of the words used to describe mobile learning. The use of this foundation to understand mobile learning presents a vast challenge because there are many words and terms, which have been used to define and explain mobile learning as a miracle in the design of mobile application curriculum in education. Is there a need for mobile application curriculum? This chapter gives an overview of the need for mobile curriculum in education and explores the rationale for implementing mobile applications technology curriculum and examines what content is suitable for a mobile applications curriculum.