The Future of Education

The Ace Yourself mobile-learning application aims enhance students’ personal, social, and study skills, and, thus, help them with transition to higher education. The Ace Yourself consists of several learning lines — the combination of modules aimed to develop a group of related skills within personal, social, or study domain. For example, the learning line “Peer learning” aimed to enhance three skills — peer-to-peer feedback / interaction, organising social interaction, and commitment to collaboration. This learning line consists of six modules, which contain theory and exercises for developing these three skills. Students’ learning starts with the choice of the personal, social, or study domain. Then, within each domain, students choose the learning line. Finally, students are expected to commence their learning journey by successfully completing the modules within the chosen learning line. This study aims to investigate the effectiveness of the Ace Yourself by using a mixed-method experimental-control research design, which includes questionnaires and concept map assessment. Higher education students who learn with Ace Yourself will be compared with those who will not in changes in their basic psychological needs and learning outcomes. Additionally, we plan to investigate what helps students to learn with Ace Yourself and what hinders them from learning by asking them to reflect on their experience through the survey with open questions. This study is based on the Activity theory (Engeström, 2021; Leont’ev, 1978). This theory provides us with the opportunity to take a broader perspective on Ace Yourself, viewing it as an m-learning system rather than confining it to just the app. By considering Ace Yourself as an m-learning system, we can uncover various strengths and weaknesses, opening up new avenues for improvement, not only for the Ace Yourself app itself but for the entire Ace Yourself m-learning system. The data collection will be started in February 2024, so we cannot describe the results yet.