Mobile Learning: e-learningnext

Why Mobile Learning 

The strongest Value Proposition for mobile learning comes from connecting people with ideas, information, and each other—anytime, anywhere! 

Ten years back, Clark Quinn’s statement about mobile learning seemed wishful thinking. Today, mobile learning is no longer a buzzword. It has arrived.

Clark Quinn, a thought leader in technology-mediated learning, said in 2000:

mLearning is the intersection of mobile computing and elearning: accessible resources wherever you are, strong search capabilities, rich interaction, powerful support for effective learning, and performance-based assessment. It is elearning independent of location in time or space…

Now, 10 years after this prophetic statement, several interesting trends are converging to create a perfect melting pot for mLearning. Some of these include:

1.    Rapid and unforeseen increase of mobile device adoption from Blackberry to iPad

2.    Growth of location-based services and location-aware networks

3.    Surge in social media adoption and participation

4.    Growth in cloud computing

5.    Increase in awareness among globally spread companies that  eLearning, mLearning and online training is a way to save on training costs, provide just-in-time performance support, and improve productivity

Certain key reasons why “mobile learning” via PDAs, mobile phones, MP3 players, iPod, Kindle, E-paper eReaders, and anything besides that is amenable to being carried around, will increasingly become business necessities are:

1.    Growing complexity of the work environment

2.    Distributed workforce as a result of globalization

3.    Rapidly decreasing shelf-life of knowledge

4.    Information explosion across all spheres and domains

5.   Need for instant access to “useful” information to stay ahead of competition (The increasing importance given to speed and accessibility.)

6.    Need to collaborate and tap collective intelligence to solve complex problems

7.    Importance of being connected to networks (both the hyperlinked and the human kind) to have access to information at the point-of-need

8.    Effectiveness of the mobile device as a PPI (Personal Productivity Improvement) tool

The three key functions that emerge as the core of mobile learning then are: CONNECTION, COMMUNICATION, and COLLABORATION.

The concept map below depicts mobile affordances at three levels. The emergent ones are those that are likely to have the greatest impact on Human Performance Improvement and Personal Knowledge Management.

Source: Mobile Affordances by Clark Quinn

Industry Facts and Figures

This brings us to the business feasibility of including mobile learning as a service in our solution portfolio. 
Fast forward to 2009: The result of a research conducted by RBC Capital Market speaks for itself (Smartphone sales to beat PC sales by 2011).

A recent survey by the Pew Internet & American Life Project predicts that by 2020, most people across the world will be using a mobile device as their primary means for connecting to the Internet (http://www.pewinternet.org/PPF/r/270/report_display.asp). Mobiles are already well on the way to becoming a universal tool for communication of all kinds.

Source: 2009-Horizon-Report

This prediction is reinforced by the growth of the worldwide-converged mobile device market (commonly referred to as smartphones) that more than doubled that of the overall mobile phone market in the first quarter of 2010—a sign the segment is in high-growth mode again. According to the International Data Corporation (IDC) Worldwide Quarterly Mobile Phone Tracker, vendors shipped  54.7 million units in the first quarter of 2010 (1Q10), up 56.7% from the same quarter a year ago. In contrast, the overall mobile phone market grew 21.7%.

Source: mLearning: The Latest Trends and Why You Should Care

A study of Gartner’s 2009 Hype Cycle for emerging technologies reveals the following:

For mobile learning, it is interesting to note that e-Book Readers have reached the Peak of Inflated Expectations while Tablet PC is climbing the Slope of Enlightenment. These, in conjunction with the rise of Web2.0 and other collaboration tools like Wikis and blogging, will ensure that the need for “always-connected” mobile devices will continue to grow.

And a year has passed since this Hype Cycle was created. It can be assumed that Tablet PC (being the latest in mobile devices that offers larger screen area and better view-ability) is sealing the arrival and acceptance of mobile devices as a tool for learning and collaboration.

What will give mobile learning a further boost is that some of the mobile devices now come with Operating Systems that allow for installation and removal of applications on the device. In the past, mobile devices came with fixed features, and a user perforce had to make do with the appliances that shipped with the device. In future, all phones will have sophisticated operating systems, sensors, and connectivity.

In ten years, mobile learning moved from being a “buzz word” and “yet-another-technology-hype” to a medium of learning and performance support that is here to stay.

Institutions are now opening up to mlearning and corporate organizations are asking for it, as the examples below will illustrate.

Examples of mobile learning implementation:

1.    Recently, underscoring its commitment to education, AT&T made a three-year, $1.8 million contribution to Abilene Christian University to support the expansion of the university’s mobile learning initiative.

2.    Duke University made headlines when it provided all incoming freshmen with their own 20-gigabyte iPods.

3.    The Virginia Tech College of Engineering became the first public institution to require all students to purchase a tablet PC beginning with incoming freshmen in fall 2006.

I would like to specially thank the Upside Learning team for their blog posts and resource links to mobile learning. Those have been immensely helpful in the development of my understanding about mlearning.I have also shamelessly quoted from their various posts. Acknowledgment given below.

1. Five Mobile Learning Implementation Tips
2. Mobile Learning Roundup: 10 Top Posts From Our Blog 
3. General Considerations for Mobile Learning (mLearning)
4. The Advent of Mobile Learning Technology

Related articles:

1. 8 reasons to focus on informal and social learning (janeknight.typepad.com)
2. Integrate the Web with your next Elearning Course (learninggeneralist.com)
3. New Amazon CloudFront Feature: Default Root Object (aws.typepad.com)
4. Jane's E-Learning Pick of the Day: Understanding "learning" - some more thoughts (internettime.posterous.com)
5. Workplace Learning: Beyond Training (janeknight.typepad.com)
6. A unified performer-facing environment (jarche.com)
7. A Transition Path to the Future (janeknight.typepad.com)

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SkillSoft's inGenius: About adding meaningful context...

SkillSoft recently (about 3 weeks back) announced the launch of inGenius. This social learning layer will integrate with SkillSoft's Book 24X7, a vast repository of technical and IT-related literature that many organizations use as off-the-shelf content to enable their employees.

inGenius will allow users of Books 24X7 to post comments on the books, add notes, start discussions, rate content and perform other similar activities that will enable the addition of CONTEXT to make the generic Books 24X7 content organization specific. Learners/users, by rating the content in order of specificity for their organization can point other users in the right direction. All of these undoubtedly can improve the overall efficacy of the content in question.

For organizations that have already invested in licenses for access to Books 24X7, inGenius could be an added benefit that would allow users to collaborate and add context. John Ambrose in his post Social Learning Will Fill Enterprise 2.0’s Empty Drums, Part II points out the advantage of "leveraging the amplification benefits of social technology" tools like inGenius.

Tony Karrer, in his post, Social Learning Tools Should Not be Separate from Enterprise 2.0: eLearning Technology, while applauding the effort SkillSoft is making to integrate Social Learning, does criticize the fact that they are tying this to SkillSoft and to books as learning resources.

But he adds the most valuable point about social learning that drives adoption and increases the perceived ease of use manifold: Same tools as your work tools.

To summarize, what could be the advantages of inGenius for organizations already using Books 24X7?

1. It is integrated into a platform that already has content
2. Users are thus free to add context by co-creating, sharing, commenting, rating, discussing...
3. Because it is a part of SkillSoft, it will be perceived as a more secure way of collaborating and is likely to get more buy in from enterprises
4. It will also be seen as a safe and secure launching pad for organizations wishing to introduce the concepts of and explore the benefits of collaborative learning, user generated context and content, community building, etc.
5. Most importantly, it does not require familiarization with a new set of tools as users would already be accessing SkillSoft in the course of their daily work

On the downside, inGenius is very SkillSoft centric and will not give a true sense of collaboration and networking. But, it indeed is a good start...

One more point that could make organizations happy: it seems that future releases of inGenius will extend support to SkillSoft's SkillPort LMS and other e-learning modules. (Source: SkillSoft Raises the Bar for e-Learning with its inGenius Social Learning Layer)

However, there seems to be a dichotomy here. LMS' are top down management tools used for tracking and has really nothing to do with "learning." Collaborative features/informal learning features and are essentially bottom up. How the two would be integrated in spirit depends on the philosophy of trust practiced by organizations.

It should be interesting to see how inGenius gets adopted in organizations and how it evolves to be the bridge between formal and informal learning...

Note: The Books24x7 library includes more than 25,000 titles, on-demand resources comprising digitized IT and business books, book summaries and videos on a wide range of relevant information technology, business skills, computer desktop skills and compliance subjects. (Source: SkillSoft Raises the Bar for e-Learning with its inGenius Social Learning Layer)

Informal Learning Part 1 from Jay Cross

Sugata Mitra shows how kids teach themselves: Social learning at its best

A post from Guy Kawasaki on the Hole in the Wall experiment...