Mobile learning is in the air. It’s the buzz word these days and you can’t escape all the noise surrounding it.
In their latest post, Upside Learning presents some of their own posts in an organised, sequential fashion.
1. What is mobile learning?
2. Why mobile learning?
3. How/Where can you use mobile learning?
4. How to create a mobile learning strategy?
In his blog for Upside Learning, Simon Meager asks whether mobile learning has become a reality rather than a prediction.
There does seem to have been a shift in favour of performance support. Mobile devices have become tools for providing access to information at the point of need. For example, Ford is delivering support to front line sales teams via iPhones and iPads.
From an instructional design perspective, we still need to determine the context and apply the method that best suits the need of a project. Referring to Gottfredson’s Five Moments of Learning Need, mobiles may perform better as learning aids rather than learning for the first time, but it is clear that this is not a passing fad and mobile devices have become a valuable addition to the learning space.
Is this glass 26% empty or 26% full? A study released by Localytics shows that there are as many potential loyal mobile app customers as there are those that are fickle.
Here are the figures:
Part 1 of the study showed that 26% of the time users downloaded an app, used it once, and never used it again.
However, Part 2 showed that 26% of users became loyal, repeat customers using a new application more than 10 times (and many of those went on to use the application hundreds of times).
Encouraging user retention and getting users to return more than once (using in-app purchases, subscriptions that deliver new content, notifications, and updates) should be the top priority for developers.
Nick Shackleton-Jones’ summary of the top 10 mistakes people make in designing e-learning solutions:
It is perfectly possible to create a mediocre course and achieve 100% completion, or a fantastic course and achieve 5% completion rates. It’s all in the implementation.
Instead of courses, build a kit of flexible resources that can be recombined as required e.g. interviews, conceptual animations, scenarios, drama, best-practice case-studies. They may be used in advance of an event, as part of a comms or awareness-raising exercise, in classroom sessions, or by line managers in discussion with their teams.
Our job is not merely to summarise information, but to construct experiences which make it clear why anyone should care enough to invest their precious time in learning. Think ‘Story-Scenario-Simulation’.
Understand the particular organisational sub-culture, what calls them to learn, what challenges they face, what they like and who they respect.
It is not enough merely to try to create and control an informal learning space: most attempts at social media for learning fail through insufficient consideration of content-generation-strategies. Here, again learning professionals used to more formal roles have an invaluable part to play in creating an informal experience.
Learners want us to provide them with situations in which it is safe to fail. Learning happens as a result of failing at these challenges, and not because we say ‘FAIL!’ but because we demonstrate the consequences of decisions that the learner takes and provide additional feedback.
90% of courses open with something moderately entertaining (e.g. a video) then flat-line for the remaining 30 minutes. If you had to draw a line representing the emotional landscape of your course, what would this look like?
A well-formed online strategy is a three-tiered triangle. At the top are online resources best built by highly capable e-learning suppliers. At the bottom are resources generated by learning staff and employees and shared between peers. But the middle tier should be a healthy chunk of learning content created by the organisation itself, using rapid development tools and techniques.
The future of learning professionals should be a sound grasp of the techniques and tools that can be used in creating learning content – such as video skills, for example.
Although it can be misleading, users will get a sense of the quality of an online course from its visual design in much the same way as they get a sense of the quality of a face-to-face course from the venue.
Don’t build some inscrutable tangle of flash files that we have no way of editing when the text changes or updating when our branding moves on.
As the mobile application space continues to explode, developers are increasingly using HTML5, JavaScript and CSS3 to aid in the creation of web apps and native mobile apps. This process is especially useful when dealing with cross-platform development.
In this article, Mashable looks at how some of the best HTML5-centric, cross-platform mobile frameworks (including PhoneGap) are being used to help deliver native app experiences on a variety of devices.
