Learner research and systems trials | Project team login | Deliverables

The learners aka research assistants

Research assistants?

We feel that is important that the young people involved don’t perceive m-learning activities as just another lesson or themselves as simply “guinea pigs”. We emphasise that by taking part they are helping us to try out the mobile devices, find out how good they are, discover any problems and find out if they might be useful to help other young people to learn. For this reason we refer to the young people as Research Assistants rather than learners or users.

Who are they?

The RAs are a mixed bunch. They are aged between 16 and 24, some of them are unemployed, some are working – including some modern apprentices – some are homeless or travellers, some are young mothers or fathers, some are ex-offenders, some are school pupils or students. There are male and female RAs from a variety of cultural and ethnic backgrounds and, in some cases, English is not their first language. The RAs live in England, Scotland, Wales, Italy or Sweden - some live in towns, some in the country and some in inner city areas. However all these young people are either not in full time education, or training, or in danger of dropping out and most of them need to develop their literacy, numeracy or life skills.

Taking responsibility

As part of this project we are lending collaborating organisations expensive portable devices which they in turn will lend to young people who, in most cases will be allowed to take these away with them for a period of time. Therefore in introducing the project to the Research Assistants we ask the mentors to emphasise the importance of:

Treating the devices with respect – they are quite tough but should not be deliberately thrown around
Taking care regarding storage and use in public places – although our research assistants themselves may be trustworthy other people unfortunately may not be
Responsible and appropriate use of the camera, messaging and Internet –we ask mentors to warn that we are able to track what happens on-line and that recipients devices will store the evidence of any nasty or offensive pictures and messages
Not excessively using the devices for phone calls and texting which do not relate to the project – we monitor the use of each device via an on-line service and block any used excessively in order to control project costs
Returning the devices in full working order at the end of the research.

So far our RAs have behaved very responsibly, only one of nearly 100 devices has been accidentally damaged and none have been lost.