Abstract
Mobile learning has seen a large uptake in use in low- and middleincome
countries. This is driven by rhetorics of easy scaling, reaching
the hard-to-reach and the potential for generating analytics from
the applications used by learners. Healthcare training has seen a
proliferation of apps aimed at improving accountability through
tracking and measuring workplace learning. A view of the mobile
phone as an agent of change is thus linked with a technocentric
approach to measurement. Metrics, initially created as proxies for
what gets done by health workers, are now shaping the practices
they were intended to describe. In this paper, we show how,
despite some valiant efforts, ‘measuring better’ remains difficult to
achieve due to entrenched views of what measurement consists
of. We analyse a mobile health (mHealth) classification framework,
drawing out some implications of how it has been used in
training health workers. These lead us to recommend moving
away from a view of mobile learning linked tightly to
accountability and numbers. We suggest a focus on an alternative
future, where ‘measuring better’ is promoted as part of sociocultural
views of learning and linked with a social justice
conceptualisation of development.