Affordance of Ubiquitous Learning through Cloud Computing

The advance of mobile technology has empowered learners. The affordance of mobile technology can be exploited to make education more pervasive and equitable. It expedites the pedagogical shift from teacher-centered to student-centered learning, enabling a ubiquitous learning environment that will promote students' engagement through multiple modalities. We explore ways to maximize the power of mobile learning technologies to increase enrollment, reduce attrition, improve teaching efficiency, and enable green technology without sacrificing the quality and placing extra burden on faculty. As mobile learning technologies pose challenges to most educational practitioners, a generic mobile learning framework was developed to address this issue. Our hybrid application approach utilizes mobile devices' native functions and existing Web 2.0 applications. Additional applications to fit in the framework are created to allow non-technical instructors to develop mobile learning content to engage student learners in informal settings.