Wednesday, July 17, 2019

Delivering education through text messages: a more effective way to teach - MICHAEL IOFFE, Newsweek

As a teaching medium, I came across studies from Stanford and Penn State that showed texts are amongst the most effective ways to learn and retain information. If you're wondering why, it's because texts meet users where they're at (on their phones) and break down concepts into bite-size chunks. To test the idea, I worked with a few friends and professors at Babson to develop the first text message course, which focused on entrepreneurship, and then ran a study with over two hundred students. The response was overwhelmingly positive, with the vast majority of students liking text message learning more than any other form of digital learning. You might be wondering how a "text message course" actually works. Every morning, students were texted about two screen-lengths worth of content (around 1,000 characters) explaining a certain concept or case study in depth, typically ending with an assessment. (You can try out a course here: lrn.st/trial).
https://www.newsweek.com/delivering-education-through-text-messages-more-effective-way-teach-opinion-1447227