Steve Wang and Yan Sun, faculty at Nottingham University, have developed a wonderful example of educational content formatted especially for delivery through Apple’s iPhone and iPod touch. You can visit the BioCourseware site through a regular web browser to get a feel for the general interface–big buttons designed to be touched, not clicked; a clean, easy-to-use interface; and even multimedia support (check out the virtual yeast cell for some nice multimedia).

If you can, though, check out the site on an iPhone or iPod touch. In particular, take a look at the periodic table–hold your device in portrait layout and you’ll see the elements in a list. Rotate to landscape layout and the interface automatically switches to an interactive periodic table, in the format you learned in high school. There’s also a couple of dictionaries, a calculator to figure out cal concentration (which, according to what I just looked up, is a measure of “how many solutes are needed to get the target concentration”), and an HTML reference to boot. This all fits in your pocket–how many pockets would you need to fit all of these resources in print form?

The neatest thing about this, from our perspective, is that Dr. Wang is using technology we use every day to develop the Stratepedia web applications, and since they’re web-based they’re easy to deploy and keep up-to-date. The mobile web is to a point where it’s a viable means to deliver instruction–how might we put it to use?

(By the way, I read about this on iThinkEd, a nice blog about using iPhones in higher education.)

Tags: iphone, mobile learning