Mobile Learning

MXit: How to Encourage and Facilitate Communication Among Students

Dr Mpine Elizabeth Makoe,
University of South Africa

How can distance learning become more student-centred? Dr Mpine Elizabeth Makoe, University of South Africa (UNISA), has been preoccupied with this question for several years. In a long-term study she conducted, she found that isolated students have a need for informal support that is often neglected in distance education. This has led her to investigate on how MXit, a popular South African instant messaging system, can help to fill the gap and drive collaborative eLearning in an attractive, age-appropriate manner.

eLA: Dr Makoe, could you depict in more detail the purposes for which MXit is used by South Africans?

Mpine Elizabeth Makoe: I looked at MXit as a possibility because most young people use it to socialise and connect with their friends. Because of its affordability, it is extremely popular among young people. MXit has a registered user base of over 7 million people all over the world and the great majority of them are in South Africa. It has about 11 million log-ons per day and over 210 million messages sent / received per day. The number of MXit users is greater than the total number of landlines installed in the entire country.

University of South Africa (UNISA)

UNISA’s roots go back over 130 years, which makes it the oldest university in South Africa. The University of the Cape of Good Hope, which changed its name to the University of South Africa in 1916, was initially an examining body. In other words, it offered examinations but not tuition, and it had the power to confer degrees on successful candidates. The renaming of the institution in 1916 ushered in a number of important changes. UNISA moved its headquarters from Cape Town to Pretoria in 1918, and although it continued to be an examining body, it also incorporated a number of university colleges that later became fully autonomous teaching universities. In January 2004, the former UNISA merged with Technikon Southern Africa and incorporated the distance education component of Vista University (VUDEC) to form the new UNISA. The merger brought together vast resources and infrastructure, while consolidating the knowledge-bases built up over the years by the three former institutions. The Interim Council approved the structure of the academic units within the new UNISA, resulting in the creation of five new Colleges on January 5th, 2004. The new UNISA was officially launched on January 28th, 2004.

eLA: Why MXit?

Mpine Elizabeth Makoe: MXit is a mobile synchronous communication tool that can be used to facilitate the process of real-time text chat between individuals and groups through text messages. This facility provides a platform where people can communicate with each other or in groups. MXit gives people an opportunity to meet, share and develop knowledge and understanding of their own social world. One advantage of MXit is that it is far cheaper to send a text message via this platform than with an SMS – it costs 2 cents, compared to 70 cents for an SMS message.

eLA: What kind of learning content fits best for distribution via instant messaging?

Mpine Elizabeth Makoe: MXit should be used to encourage and facilitate communication among a group of students. Ideally it is better suited in peer collaborative groups. Most students at the University of South Africa (UNISA) study in groups and this facility will enable them to communicate with each other without meeting at a specific place. Even those students who may feel uncomfortable in groups, or embarrassed or shy to ask for help can engage freely in conversations because of the anonymous nature of MXit. The aim is to provide social networks that will enable students to communicate their problems and issues that require support to deal with them.

eLA: What do students think about the opportunity to learn with MXit?

Mpine Elizabeth Makoe: Students are extremely excited and also surprised because they see it as their virtual environment that older people are not even interested in, let alone lecturers who are often viewed as conservative. Through MXit, young people have claimed their space where they get together, speak their language, exchange ideas and belong to a community that is exclusively theirs. One needs to be cool to belong to these networks. Most parents of teenagers cannot stand it because almost every other child is hooked on it.

eLA: What about teachers' capabilities?

Mpine Elizabeth Makoe: Some teachers do accept these solutions but others still believe that you can't teach without using a pen and paper. Part of the reason is that they are uncomfortable with using something that they have never used before. The biggest problem is that digital natives are taught by digital immigrants who have very little knowledge or understanding of the way digital natives operate. It is therefore necessary for the digital immigrants to recognise and acknowledge this in order to improve their practice. Digital natives have hypertext minds, they type with their thumbs and they have short attention spans. Their idea of learning is collaboration with others through technology. Do they see the benefits, too?

eLA: Many thanks for your time.

Dr Mpine Elizabeth Makoe will speak in the session “Mobile Learning in Health and Education”, Thursday, May 28th, 2009, 14:00 – 15:30.

May 6, 2009

Newsportal: Mobile Learning