No more lugging textbooks for students at Ukrida University in Jakarta, Indonesia. Instead, they’ll carry sleek Motorola XOOM tablets to all their classes. Running on Google’s powerful Android 3.2 Honeycomb, the award-winning tablet is now the only device required to access all course materials at the university. With this E-Learning initiative, UKRIDA University is now becoming one of the first tertiary institutions in Indonesia to embark on the paperless route.
This progressive attitude led the University to take the initiative to use handheld tablets instead of traditional textbooks. In addition, the intention is to use the Motorola XOOM as the primary interface between academic staff and students, prioritizing it over personal computers. Students and teachers will use the Motorola XOOM for tasks usually associated with personal computers such as emailing, surfing the Web, developing and editing documents, spreadsheets and presentations, and also as an interface for test evaluations. In time tablets will be used throughout all the studying and teaching process.
Motorola XOOM delivers exceptionally fast performance with its 1 GHz dual-core processor and 1GB of RAM. The tablet showcases the innovations of the Android Honeycomb user experience – including widgets, true multi-tasking, tabbed browsing, notifications and customization – on a 10.1-inch widescreen HD display with 1280X800 resolution enabling video content that’s richer and clearer than ever before. Support for HDMI enables viewing of videos and movies on larger screens, such as HD televisions. A 5 MP rear-facing camera captures HD video, and a 2 MP front-facing camera enables clear video chats using Google Talk.
Motorola XOOM supports access to more than 300,000 apps from Android Market. The tablet also features a built-in gyroscope, barometer, e-compass, accelerometer and adaptive lighting. It supports up to 10 hours of video playback, and charges in half the time of competitive tablets.
The university intends to make the Motorola XOOM available to all students and teachers at a special subsidized price, starting with an initial 600 units under the E-Learning Program. The plan is to extend this program to the entire undergraduate student population of 5,000 and their teachers.
Whether tablets will be the norm for imparting education worldwide and in India, will be evident in the coming days. Whether, brick and mortar educational institutions will have much significance in the coming years? We will cover this subject in separate blog, sometime soon 🙂
