Developing and evaluating ‘PlymTour’ a new mobile online educational resource for students on Plymouth’s people and places

The aim of the project was to develop and evaluate a new mobile digital resource for place-based learning in Geography and wider disciplines. The objectives were: • To work with ASTI to develop ‘PlymTour’, a digital walking tour of central Plymouth accessed through the Mobile with Plymouth University (MwPU) app and hosting multi-media resources on a dedicated Plymouth University Digital Learning Environment (DLE) page. • To research how Geography students engage with PlymTour in order to evaluate its use as a pedagogic tool for deepening knowledge of the socio-economic geographies of Plymouth and supporting learning in existing modules. • To create wider social benefit through connecting students with their term-time location and creating a resource with the potential for facilitating learning about Plymouth’s geographies for wider university and public users. Background/context to project: Recent pedagogic research highlights a need to incorporate mobile learning technologies (MLT) into teaching practice to assist and enhance the learning experience. MLT encourage active, place-based learning by encouraging students to interface with their environment, potentially increasing their agency within the learning process (Brown et al., 2015; Hoff, 2015; Li, 2007). This project responds to this call by developing and evaluating ‘PlymTour’ – a digital walking tour of central Plymouth for use on mobile devices, which aids disciplinary-based learning in situ and outdoors and encourages students to explore and learn about their term-time location. This develops previous knowledge of MLT by exploring how engagement can extend place-based learning beyond simply learning about place (Israel, 2012).