The Technological Challenges In Mobile Networks And Communications In View Of Unleashing The Full Potential Of M-learning

The past decade has witnessed a rapid growth of mobile services and subscriptions around the globe, so much so that mobile technology seems to bridge the digital divide very much faster than traditional desktop PCs. Educationalists and institutions have quickly seized the opportunities offered by the mobile technology and numerous pilot projects, each one with its own specificities and educational scenario took birth. Concurrently, new business opportunities appeared for content developers and production of off-the-shelves m-learning products currently categorised as the second generation m-learning products. From mainframe to cloud computing, the ongoing computing paradigm shift be it at the end user or server side has been accompanied by a series of technological challenges if addressed will surely reveal the potential of how the mobile technology can be fully exploited for educational sake. Three main technological challenges from an educational perspective although they can be looked upon by other stakeholders primarily as business cases or as performance issues, are dealt with, in this chapter. Firstly, the coupling of digital audio and video broadcasting technologies with cellular 3G/4G technology could be of paramount gain to highly populated rural and remote areas such as in many African countries but also in mountainous and inhospitable areas in other parts of the world. For instance the massive training of teachers at primary level can be harmonised with such advancement. Secondly, the bigger and bigger share of multimedia content being transmitted opens up avenues for multimedia applications that are commonly recognised to be very efficient and effective in pedagogy and learning. Multimedia streaming or broadcasting is a reality today, however, besides the bandwidth and broadband aspects, the aptitude of multimedia applications remains untapped. Thirdly, the question of how if cloud computing challenges are overcome may lead to competitive edge for educational institutions is attempted. Each challenge mentioned earlier, may in itself contains others such that any technical breakthrough will have a positive impact on the way teaching and learning can take place. The chapter focuses more on the technology driven approach of m-learning while assuming that the educational outcomes and objectives are equally important.