Anytime, Anywhere Learning for Improved Education Results in Russia: Case Study by the UNESCO-Fazheng Project on Best Practices in Mobile Learning

The Harmony School in Izhevsk is a regular municipal school located in one of the city districts of the capital city of the Udmurt Republic in Russia. Students come to Harmony school from different cultural and social environments, with various physical and mental abilities, and the school is eager to create the best conditions for learning and developing for each of them. In 2012, Harmony School took a part in the School of Digital Age project supported by the federal Skolkovo project and the Russian branch of Microsoft. The mobile technologies in the school are implemented as a tool for anytime and anywhere learning to differentiate and individualize learning to improve education results.

According to the school vision, mobile learning technologies should provide all students and teachers anytime and anywhere access to a variety of teaching and learning materials and digital instruments and students who are unable to attend classes should be able to continue their systematic studies. The mobile learning model should enable every student to experience independent learning activities in the digital educational environment and improve their educational results with new methods and organizational forms of teaching and learning. To implement this vision, the new school-wide teaching and learning practices including online/blended learning, mobile learning in the classroom and outside-classroom learning have been developed and used actively. The new in-school teachers’ professional development model has become a crucially important element for the project’s success.