– Hi everyone, I’m Niya Bond, the Faculty Developer here at OneHE, and I’m so delighted to be joined by Alex Rockey. We are going to be talking about a very timely topic. Alex, I will let you introduce yourself and tell everyone what we’re gonna be chatting about today.

– Hi, everybody, I’m Alex Rockey, I’m a professor in academic technology at Bakersfield College, and my work has focused on mobile design for the last several years, so we’ll be talking about mobile design and also how it intersects with accessibility and AI.

– So this is in your wheelhouse, as you just said, I’m imagining, but tell us a little bit about how you got interested in this intersection specifically and a little bit more about the topic.

– Yeah, so it all began in 2020, so I was helping faculty support students as we were having emergency remote teaching. Students were having to complete all their coursework at home, and we did a survey at our college and we found that one in five students didn’t have access to reliable home internet. And when I started doing a little bit more digging, I found that this aligned with research from the Pew Research Center for folks across the United States. On average, about 20% of students don’t have access to reliable home internet, and so it really kind of started me off on going down the rabbit hole of mobile design, thinking about how we can create courses that are accessible on students’ mobile devices. Even though students may not have access to home internet, many students rely on their phones for access to internet in their homes, and almost every student has access to a smartphone. In many cases, that’s the best technology they have. They may have an older clunkier laptop and a newer smartphone, and so I really wanted to think about how we could leverage the technology students are already carrying in their pockets to really transform access to education. As I started digging into mobile design, I found that a lot of the ways that we can create more mobile-friendly courses also are strategies that we use to make more accessible learning experiences. So chunking content, using headers, all of those practices are things that we want to be doing for accessibility, but they also help to make the course more enjoyable and easier to navigate on a mobile device. So it can be a really great way for folks to kind of demystify how we can create accessible courses by just previewing our courses on our mobile devices. And then, of course, there’s a lot of really exciting applications as it relates to AI, ways that we can promote academic integrity by having students create multimodal assessments on their phones, leveraging the capabilities for audio and video. The more that we can have students create, engage, and bring in their surroundings, the more that we can help ensure academic integrity in our courses and make sure that students are completing the coursework and doing the learning, which we want them to be doing. And there’s also, of course, ways that we can use mobile devices in the classroom to create really engaging discussions. We could have students use mobile-friendly LLMs in the classroom to help create really engaging and interesting discussions, share different chats that they’ve had. That’s always a great way to kind of pique student interest.

– Okay, you’ve just given us so many rich things to talk about. I’m so excited. If we could start with the mobile friendly, when we’re thinking with intention about inclusion and accessibility, we’re thinking about things, like you said, chunking, headers, and I feel like there might be a misconception that with today’s modern technologies, whatever you build is gonna be mobile friendly, but I think that’s not the case. What you’re saying is we really have to get granular with our intention.

– Exactly, yeah, and one of the best ways to do that is just opening up our course and seeing what it looks like on a phone. We can have a tendency to make courses really text heavy. A lot of times as instructors, we’re designing our courses on a computer, so we see what it looks like on a larger screen, but we don’t necessarily see what it looks like on a phone, but a lot of our students are accessing our courses, our Canvas pages on their mobile device, and so it’s a very different experience just switching from that large screen to that smaller screen.

– Yeah, I love that, and then when we’re thinking about bringing in mobile devices for those kind of authentic assessments that you were talking about, I imagine that, sometimes, there might be legwork involved in kind of really helping them understand the functionalities of their mobile device as it relates to learning and how to kind of weave in those multimodal elements. Can you talk a little bit about that?

– Yeah, I’m so glad you brought that up. So there’s two pieces that I wanna talk about there. The first is that a lot of students may not necessarily realize that their phones are devices for learning. Part of the work that I’ve been doing, I’ve been running various grants, I’m wrapping up an NSF grant right now. And we’ve been talking with students, interviewing students, doing focus groups, just getting a better sense of how students are actually using phones for learning. And in many cases, students have kind of internalized this persistent K-12 ban on phones in classrooms. They don’t see phones as a tool for learning. That’s not necessarily what they use it for. Or if they do, they feel like they shouldn’t, it’s not the tool that they should be using, but they have to. So just kind of normalizing that for students, helping them see how they can use that tool for learning, how it’s okay that they’re using that tool can be really helpful. There’s also the consideration for returning students. So I was interviewing a student last spring, and she had first attended college in 2016 and was a returning student just this year, this past year, and for her, when she was going in 2016, the phone wasn’t as big of a deal. Faculty didn’t put everything on the app and there wasn’t so much reliance on the phone for learning. And it wasn’t until a student in her class said, “Hey, did you know you could use your phone to do this to help you stay on track, to see what’s coming up, to get notifications if you enable your notifications so you know when your professor gives you comments or announcements?” So she didn’t really even consider it as a tool until another student told her. So that’s one side of things, and then the other side is a lot of students are consumers of multimodal content. They look at Instagram or TikTok, they see videos, but they don’t really have as much experience necessarily creating content, especially within the classroom, and so it can be a really great opportunity for us to create really engaging assessments, but we also wanna make sure that we kind of scaffold that because it can be a heavy tech lift, both for the students and for the instructor.

– So in relation to AI and the intersection of mobile devices and the LLMs, you mentioned maybe making discussions more engaging and kind of weaving in mobile-friendly LLMs. Could you talk a little bit about that?

– Yeah, so one of my favorite ways to think about using technologies in the classroom to help students learn, to increase that creative thinking, that critical thinking that we really want students to be doing is to have students think critically about the outputs that they’re seeing from LLMs. And so whether you’re in a face-to-face class or you’re in an online class, specifically for the mobile devices, I’m imagining a group of students kind of huddled around somebody’s phone and they’re having a discussion with an LLM, maybe they have the Gemini app and they’re using that to prompt questions, and then they’re critiquing that as a group. They’re thinking, “Here’s the output, here’s areas that I think was really strong, or here’s areas that they didn’t get quite right based on the readings,” and so I imagine that as just being almost a third person or a third party that everybody’s a little bit removed from, it’s okay to be critical of it, and it can really help kind of pull the group together to have that to kind of critique and think about critically.

– Yeah, I really appreciate what you’re saying, kind of like a thread, not so much underpinning, it’s pretty explicit is that there’s technological literacies and tool literacies in the same way that we teach critical thinking and careful consideration. In a modern educational environment, there kind of is a responsibility to at least acknowledge and discuss and think critically about these tools and technologies too.

– Yes, yes, and I’ve been teaching AI literacy courses for the last year, year and a half, and one of the biggest things that I’ve been doing is just trying to reiterate, “This is what the tool is, this is what a large language model is, this is what it’s designed to do, this is not what it’s designed to do,” and just to help us think critically so that we’re not… It kind of feels like we’ve been handed a chainsaw and we’re trying to use it like it’s a hammer. We have to really understand what this tool is to be able to effectively use it.

– Yeah, well, we always love to leave the last word to our expert, and today, that’s you. Is there anything you’d like to share with the community, be it a resource, a final thought on this topic, anything that might inspire them to continue learning?

– Yeah, I think, and I said this a little bit earlier, but the biggest thing that I emphasize when helping faculty design mobile courses is to just test it out, to play, to see what it looks like to get a little bit of firsthand experience. What does it look like to see this page, my course, on a phone? And that can help us develop an intuitive understanding that will help us as we’re creating accessible courses, and that can help us as we’re thinking about ways that we can creatively leverage AI in our classes as well.

– I love that, and that’s part of pedagogy, right? You get to play a little bit and experiment a little bit.

– Exactly. Yeah, it’s time to play.

– Time to play. Well, Alex, thank you so much for being with us here today. I know our community is gonna find this really interesting and insightful, and just so glad to have had this chat with you.

– Thank you so much. I really enjoyed it.