Managing Mobile Distractions

[mchild76]

Sitting in a work group this morning we discussed several new initiatives coming our way. As the team leader responded to inquiries on how new platform updates would impact what students see as they log into the LMS this fall, several alerts cascaded down from the top: an email received, a 15-minute reminder for the next calendar event, a text message. As I think more about designing courses with mobile in mind, this stands out to me.

The impact of distraction on learning is a hot topic in my house as my daughter heads off to college in just a few months. I feel I have such a short time left to reinforce some positive study habits which have gone awry senior year. Lately, I’ve noticed her flipping between algebra homework, YouTube, and online games. I find myself slipping her gentle reminders on the impact this is having on her test performance as I remind myself she’s an adult now.

Not that long ago I was an online graduate student myself. The mobile app for the LMS was handy for staying up-to-date with assignment changes and class discussions. It was an easy way to read journal articles as I sat waiting for Girl Scout meetings to end and the like. As I prepare to develop content-specific study resources using our LMS for our more traditional students, I’m looking at it much less as a convenient add-on and more as a learning engine. How can I manage the distribution of instruction in a way that laughs in the face of distraction?

Chunking information and repeated testing is the approach I imagine. What kind of time can I ask for - fifteen minutes? Give me fifteen minutes without clicking on that alert, and you can feel better about your comprehension of “how cancer can be linked to overactive positive cell cycle regulators.” How do I track that learning for students? Where do they see their progress through a module?

In my traditional course design, I use end-of-module checklists, visual timeline graphics at the top of a page, and the like. These options, though they are somewhat flexible, still seem fairly linear. I still imagine myself sitting down at my laptop every evening at 10 o’clock as a graduate student and going through the checklist for the week. It doesn’t seem useful for truly flexible mobile delivery. For anyone who uses the Canvas LMS for this type of chunked mobile learning, how do you address progress tracking?

[laurakgibbs]

Hi mchild76! One thing that I've found helpful is making questions of attention, focus, study habits, etc. a topic of discussion for the class. So my goal is not so much to solve these problems for the students but to make them more self-aware so that, hopefully, they can find solutions for themselves. I put it out there as a topic in the Orientation Week for people to write and reflect on, and then there's an extra credit option that students can complete each week if they want about learning, studying, growth, etc. Since that assignment then produces some kind of artifact in their blog, that means what they written up in turn becomes a potential learning experience for the students who read their blog, etc. etc. I also include these kinds of materials in the daily announcements; the items about procrastination are especially popular. Humor goes a long way! (like in the meme in your post ha ha)

My guess is that my students (mostly college seniors) have overcome a lot of the study distraction problems, and procrastination is the bigger issue that they are dealing with. Not that distraction is not a problem... but the procrastination problem is the really bad one.

Anyway, here are some links:

Learning by H.E.A.R.T. site

Growth Mindset site 

(plus I'm migrating that to a Canvas-based site which is evolving here: Exploring Growth Mindset.... the theme of focus and attention shows up especially here: 3. Work! Exploring Growth Mindset )

[mchild76]

Thank you for the links. I took part in one of your recent live sessions on Growth Mindset and found how you weave those pieces into your course to be very useful information. One of my challenges is convincing the faculty I partner with in course design process there is time in our 8-week course cycle to address developing some metacognitive skills. Your presentation was very helpful in respect to that challenge. In my house we are dealing with procrastination and distraction for sure.

[laurakgibbs]

At first I worried about folding in these additional materials (all the meta- stuff), but I found that it improved the other work that students were doing in the class so much that I just wish I had made the decision to do that sooner!

And procrastination is something that EVERYBODY wrestles with I suspect... which means you can never have too much procrastination humor. Here's one of my favorites... it's positively mythological, ha ha.

Learning by HEART: Time: Procrastination 

[rseilham]

mchild76‌: 

Wonderful topic! I have spent the last few years researching about mobile design for online courses. The main thing that comes to mind when talking about mobile is distractions. It's naturally a distracted environment and trying to force students to "not" be distracted is not a great strategy. I focus on a few items when designing courses for the mobile user:

*How is content being chunked to the user?
I often talk about the “distracted environment” of a mobile user, especially for young adult learners. Mobile users spend less time in one place and tend to multitask. Between notifications, text messages, phone calls, and their natural tendency to quickly jump into another app, it’s harder to hold attention and for the user to spend a long time doing one task. At UCF the average user spends 14 minutes per session in Canvas with a laptop or desktop and 10 minutes on a tablet, but only 5 minutes on a smartphone. The typical college student can read around 300 words a minute on a mobile device, so I focus on 1500-3000 words per page so content can be read in under 10 minutes. Chunking content to meet the mobile user doesn't require limiting or removing course content. If it’s important to the objectives, it needs to be included. My solution is to break up content into Pages and creating a table of contents. This can be done through system tools, like modules. This makes it easier for the students to quickly jump in and out of the content.

*Media choice
This is another area where improvements have been made over the last decade, but there are still two big offenders, Flash and Java. These file formats don’t work on mobile devices, and if an instructor depends on them for their content, it can cause issues for their students. Luckily there are some great formats for mobile. This includes HTML5, H.264 or MPEG4 for video and animations and MP3 audio will work on practically any mobile device. There are also some great mobile-friendly services out there, like YouTube and Vimeo for video and SoundCloud for audio. In Canvas, if you upload video or audio into their media comments tool, it will convert these into a mobile friendly format, similar to YouTube.

*File Types
Word documents, PDFs, PowerPoints and other popular file formats were developed a long time before mobile devices existed. Even though there have been some improvements in how to edit these documents on mobile devices, they still don’t create a great reading experience on mobile devices When possible move content into a Canvas Page. They are easier to edit and responsive for mobile devices.

*File sizes
When creating content for mobile users, it’s important to be mindful of file sizes. I typically focus on files no larger than 50MB. Most users don’t have unlimited data plans and conserve their data plan for personal use. Even though there are opportunities to connect to wifi networks at school and other public places, it might not be available at home or when learning occurs. It is not uncommon for a subset of users to have the smartphone as their only internet-connected device. If you asked most college students to choose between their smartphone or a laptop, it’s typically going to be the phone.

*Student prompts
When you offer the same content on the web and mobile, it’s important to avoid directions unique to the user interface. For instance, on the web, you might say, “click the submit assignment button above,” but in a mobile app, this button might not exist, or does in a different place. This can confuse the students. It’s best to keep your student prompts simple, consistent, and neutral to the interface.

*Inform
For various reasons, there might be times that content isn’t mobile friendly, and that’s okay. Not all the best resources are mobile friendly yet. This is why it's important to inform your students when this is the case. Students expect things to work on mobile, but can be very forgiving if they understand why it doesn’t and how to plan around these situations.

[mchild76]

 @rseilham ‌ - Wow - I really appreciate this.

There are a couple of things which stood out to me. (1) "The typical college student can read around 300 words a minute on a mobile device, so I focus on 1500-3000 words per page so content can be read in under 10 minutes." Having this type of specific metric can be very useful and I'd like to look more into it. Thank you for giving me a place to even begin. In our department we talk so often of generalities, which lead to exceptions, which lead to "throw out the book!" I can see this as very grounding and helpful. We typically build into modules and, more and more, into linked pages within a table of contents. I get some push back on this with the "avoid multiple clicks" argument. Using tabs in particular results in a lengthy mobile page, but some programs insist their students aren't mobile and this isn't a concern.

(2) On student prompts - when I began course design in Canvas a couple of years ago we used these quite a bit. As Canvas has updated and navigation has changed, etc. I found myself consistently returning to these providing updates which is just not a great way to spend an afternoon. Documentation still seems very important and I understand how these can remain somewhat neutral. It is a challenge to be crystal clear, yet remain evergreen.

By default we always go with the disclaimer that the course was developed and is optimized for a traditional browser and all features may not be accessible on a mobile device. But who reads disclaimers

[laurakgibbs]

Even not on mobile, keeping track of reading amounts is SO Important. My guess is that many faculty do not really take into account how much time it will take students to do the reading that they assign. For the type of reading that happens in my classes, skimming is NOT good, so I usually estimate closer to 200 words per minute, and I also encourage students to read out loud too (which I rate at around 100 words per minute). Although I know students still rush through the reading and often do not do all of it, I try to make sure that I am being clear and honest with them about how long the reading will take.