Harlequin: putting the e into e-learning

John Lawton’s e-learning blog

M-learning - nuggets of knowledge in the palm of your hand

Mobile learning becomes a reality for more and more learners as developers get smarter and devices become more connected.

I like to keep up with all the latest tech and gadgets, it's fun and it's full of exciting possibilities.  So as you might imagine, I was very excited when the Apple iPhone came to the UK.  It certainly seemed like a much more exciting piece of technology than, say, the Blackberry.

Now don't get me wrong, I like Blackberry's and I know they have revolutionised messaging on the go with their mastery of push e-mail etc, but come on, it's a dull bit of kit in comparison with the glory of the gleaming iPhone!

In my eyes a gadget, even as glorious as the iPhone, is only a toy until it has a real purpose, and then it has the potential as a tool for business.  Best of all, I can then convince my wife and the taxman that I should be able to buy one!

One of the emerging uses that these "essential business tools" are being put to is mobile learning (m-learning).  We are often asked by clients to help them find ways to fully exploit the technology that they put into the hands of their staff, and m-learning is a great way to do just this.

Staff can now access learning on the move, without needing a laptop, 3G card, wifi or modem.  The compact nature of the technology and the accessibility of the interface all help to create great little training courses or as we call them, knowledge nuggets.

Gone are the days when busy employees will willingly subject themselves to a two day training course.  Learning has become much more about instant access, just-in-time training with immediate pay-off.  People want to know how to do what they need to do; and they want to know it now, not in 6 weeks time when the next course is running.  So a technology coupled with a delivery technique that packages up small knowledge nuggets ticks all the boxes.

For some time now I've been creating very short and focussed courses lasting from between 60 seconds and 8 minutes - you'll be amazed at just how much relevant content you can deliver in such a short time - and students respond very well to the brevity.

Creating content for mobile devices is a little trickier than regular desk-based e-learning, for one thing there's the size of the screen to consider, their colour depth, availability of player technologies and the user interface.  But these are the challenges that I relish - coming up with great ways to teach that will keep the learner engaged and informed without costing the earth.

On the iPhone, for instance, delivering browser based content to the on-board Safari browser is a great way to deliver a mix of text and graphics, adding video is also pretty straightforward, just as long as you optimise it for iPhone delivery first - even over a 3G connection it's pretty good.

I've also been looking in to creating a suite of generalist knowledge nuggets that could be distributed via the iPhone App Store.  This requires that I learn how to program the iPhone and that's quite a technology leap for me!  I'm only a little way along the path to figuring out how to cut code for the iPhone.  But I'm not a quitter!

I've also just started looking into m-learning for delivery to the Blackberry.  There are some fascinating opportunities here to push information out to an entire workforce.  Maybe you have a new expense claim procedure, or a new range of products, or a new client update.  All of this could easily be managed within the corporate environment.  One exciting tool that I've been getting to grips with is Mobile Chalkboard from Canadian firm Chalk (http://www.chalk.com).  It's a really neat way of letting you create basic content using PowerPoint and then pushing this out to your fleet of Blackberrys and then tracking usage.  It's a neat solution and one I hope to be introducing to my clients very shortly.

So what's the future for m-learning?  I believe it will grow and grow, a recent survey by Ipsos Reid states that the typical (median) BlackBerry end user converts 60 minutes of downtime into productive time per day, which equates to 250 hours per year in recovered downtime.   Much of which could be employed in learning if only the content was there, and that's where we come in!

 

 

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