How the iPad is Changing the Way We Learn

by Rhiannon Williams

“What’s wrong with education cannot be fixed with technology. No amount of technology will make a dent.” So said Steve Jobs in 1996 - during an interview in which the Apple co-founder claimed the bureaucratic, political and sociopolitical problems facing the education sector were beyond technology’s capacity to fix.

In the 19 years since Jobs uttered those words, the issues weighing heavily on the shoulders of educators, schools, universities and other educational facilities have undoubtedly multiplied. But so too have the ways in which technology can be harnessed to address some of the tensions within teaching and learning.

VoksenUddannelsesCenter Syd, or VUC for short, is one of 29 adult education programmes across Denmark, situated across the four towns of Haderslev, Aabenraa, Tonder and Sonderborg. The state-funded centres use legislative frameworks issued by the Ministry of Education, and are run by principals who answer to the centre board. The programmes originally issued students with MacBooks before plumping for iPads to replace traditional textbooks and paper-based essays two years ago, in a bid to help educate those who may struggle with more conventional means of teaching.
The Haderslev branch is a beautiful glass and bleached wood Scandi-cool building overlooking a calm body of water built 18 months ago at a cost of around 200m Danish krone (£20m). It caters for around 2,200 full-time students (around 8,000 in total, including distance learners as far afield as China and Kenya), aged between 16 and 60 over two years.

VUC centres aim to help those who may have struggled to learn within more traditional, rigid teaching systems, alongside adults wishing to gain new skills later in life, with an aim to equipped them with the qualifications necessary for attending university.
"Many of our students are dropouts from other education systems and they don't believe in themselves,” managing director Hans Jørgen Hansen tells me. “They think they are stupid or not able to learn. A really important job for our teachers is to recreate their curiosity, so they remember it is good to be curious. They need to feel like they are able to learn, and that they’re succeeding at learning.”
Rebuilding the students’ self-confidence in their own abilities and encouraging a different form of learning is at the heart of the centres’ ethos. Haderslev is divided into four kinds of new-age classrooms; quiet, presentation, dialogue and group rooms, designed for individual or mass-studies. Students quietly troop between the tasteful, open spaces equipped with flatscreen displays on walls and tables, glass-walled units and communal pod areas known affectionately as pumpkins, where groups sit in a circular formation around a multi-screened central unit.

The 'pumpkin' units encourage pupils to sit in a circular formation
Beyond lockers for their coats against the bitter Danish wind, the building bears closer resemblance to a successful start-up’s achingly hip headquarters than even the most switched-on school. The building has been designed to act as a local community hub, where members of the public are welcome to eat at the canteen among the students, and local groups are encouraged to book out the halls and other facilities. The day I visit, a local running club has booked to use an auditorium for a meeting that evening. And as all coursework, assignments and communication is conducted via the Cloud and internet, the only bit of kit students are required to carry is their issued iPad, which they can choose to buy outright after six months for a low sum.
This deconstruction of traditional learning environments which are not necessarily working for all involved is essential, Mr Hansen maintains. “We believe in our teachers’ ability to cope with the fact we don’t have normal classrooms; we didn’t feel a need for them.”

Mr Hansen pulls up an image of a 21st century classroom for me to look at on his iPad; an indifferent-looking boy leaning back on his plastic chair in a row of similarly apathetic pupils, the teacher out of shot. The picture disappears, replaced by a Victorian era Danish school hall. The children still sit in rows, their blank faces turned towards the front of the room where the teacher is presumably standing.

"The two are almost the same - we're really not seeing a lot of changes in education,” he says. “We speak about it and have visions about it, but we're not doing it. In reality you will see the same picture in many schools. The students are not learning a lot in that way. You can't just tell teachers to teach in another way, you have to change the structure of the spaces where the learning is going on.”

A key investment in alternative learning is the centre’s commitment to training its staff to become iPad-savvy. Of the 200 teachers, 16 are now part-time iBook authors, creating interactive textbooks and guides using Apple’s iBooks Author software for use in lessons and aiding the students making their own. They work with a talented team of copywriters, proofreaders, translators, video-producers and multi-media designers to create the most professional-looking content possible, and whom are aiming to publish some 400 downloadable iBooks by January 2017.
Completing interactive tasks within iBooks, teacher and part time author Klaus Vejlgaard Just says, helps shape the students from passive observers into active participants and producers.

“I want to have active students, not ones who passively receive education,” he says. “They create their own content from our fieldwork, including films and ebooks. It sharpens the focus, and forces them to reflect on what they have learned.”
Mr Hansen agrees. “You can be a very, very good teacher, but if I give Klaus a traditional classroom with no ICT, he would teach in a traditional way - the space and structure decides that.”

Jobs wasn’t wrong when he poked holes in the education system, or even when he condemned the majority of what is studied in school as “completely useless.” “But,” he continued, “Some incredibly valuable things you don’t learn until you’re older — yet you could learn them when you’re younger.” Perhaps the sooner we all start thinking differently, the more we stand to learn.