Students take part in mobile study system

1:34pm Monday 2nd July 2007

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YORK St John University is at the forefront of a new mobile assessment technique being used by students and tutors.

Assessment and Learning in Practice Settings (ALPS) is providing 900 students from the health and social care faculties at the universities of Leeds, Leeds Metropolitan, Bradford, Huddersfield and York St John, with T-Mobile MDA Varios to support their learning and assessment while on work placements.

Under the scheme, tutors will be able to upload assessments to the T-Mobile MDA Vario for students to fill in while they are taking part in work placements.

Each assessment can be customised to individuals, so that that they are relevant to courses and learning styles. Using T-Mobile's web'n'walk service, students can also use the MDA Vario to access learning resources from a central virtual learning repository, and can reflect on their work experience on a blog built into the assessment programme.

Finally, an assessor will use the MDA Vario to log into a secure area, connected to the university's Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) teaching and business systems, to record and store the student's assessment.

The device is pre-installed with a web browser that ensures that users can view web pages like they would on a PC.