[Effectiveness of mobile learning in medical education: a systematic review]

To design systematic review to summarize high quality evidence for the effectiveness of mobile learning on medical and nursing education.

PubMed, Embase, ERIC, SCI and SSCI and Cochrane Library were searched since 2000 to December 2014 to identify articles that discussed the effectiveness of mobile learning on medical and nursing education for medical or nursing students or healthcare professionals. After assessed quality using the Cochrane Risk of Bias tool, the heterogeneity allowed for only narrative synthesis.

A total of 208 articles were searched and 11randomized controlled trials were included for final analysis. In the 11 studies, 7 studies show that when applying mobile devices for learning, their clinical knowledge and performance improved effectively. While 4 studies were not significantly different with who used traditional teaching method or no intervention group.

With the rapid advances in technology, it suggests that mlearning can play a very important role on medical and nursing education for improving clinical knowledge and performance, providing a new learning method, encouraging 'anywhere, anytime' learning and promote the popularization and fairness of medical education. Though it enables a personalized learning experience for the learners, some studies argue that mobile learning is still equivalent to traditional didactic lectures.