Dear geography teachers,
using mobile phones as an educational tool? Interacting with and augmenting local geographical phenomena via virtual assistants? With ETH’s learning platform OMLETH (Ortbezogenes Mobiles Lernen an der ETH / Location-based mobile learning at ETH), it is possible to go mobile and complete tasks in situ. The platform was developed as part of an Innovedum project at ETH Zurich:
With OMLETH, teachers can conveniently develop their program as a nature trail in the web browser and implement lessons out of school with the support of tablets and smartphones. This kind of teaching strategy allows the student to process learning content directly on the spot.
OMLETH was continuously evaluated and improved in cooperation with various partner institutes and learning experts within and outside of ETH. Numerous secondary school teachers in geography have already successfully implemented dozens of learning modules with OMLETH – not only for teaching, but also for high-school diploma theses. These studies have shown that this educational method is highly interactive and constructivist, and can have a positive effect on the learning objectives.
As a next step, we aim to evaluate the learning effectiveness of this new teaching strategy in an experimental setting. We are looking for individual teachers or groups of teachers who would like to use OMLETH and compare student’s learning achievements gained in regular classroom-based teaching versus location-mobile learning. These activities are planned for late summer / fall 2017.
In order to use the summer holidays as inspirational period, we recommend to organize an initial meeting right before or just after this time. It will contain an introductory trail around the school building, testing OMLETH on desktop computers and finally a presentation of the study design. Technical questions will be answered at any time during the study.
Further information about the platform and the study can be found at https://omleth.ch/workshop/ (in German).
If you have any questions or comments, please do not hesitate to contact us by phone. To plan your first meeting, please send us your registration by July 30 2017. Thank you!