M-learning: What's the big deal?

Just released is the eLearning Guild’s new report, Mobile Learning: The Time Is Now, put together by Clark Quinn, who really knows his stuff on this topic. If Clark says the time is now, it probably is. In fact it probably has been since the first iPhone was launched and certainly once we got the iPad. Before that, the very idea of mobile learning was a bit bizarre.

In some respects m-learning is no big deal, because mobile devices are already ubiquitous and essential performance aids. They can do most things you can do on any desktop or laptop computer, except perhaps for more complex forms of media creation. While they can do some location-sensitive things you wouldn’t do on a desktop computer, particularly with the aid of GPS, much of the time (and there are important exceptions) that’s of little relevance to learning and performance support. So, computers you have with you everywhere you go, is that a big deal? I don’t know, perhaps it is.

Smart phones and tablets with crystal-clear, high-resolution screens (my iPad’s resolution matches that of my 27” iMac) are great devices for media consumption and more than adequate for many forms of collaboration. People love their phones and tablets because they don’t look or feel like computers and basically they do what you want, wherever you want, just about instantly. They are intimate and personal devices with which to interact, particularly when they’re yours. It’s hard to feel the same way about a corporate Dell running Windows XP.

And for many of us, the situations in which you’re likely to most use a mobile device - particularly on trains, on planes and generally when you’re waiting around - are much better suited to a productive learning experience than when you’re at your desk and very much in lean-forward mode. And for me, it's much easier to concentrate on learning content when it fills the whole screen, rather than appearing in a small window alongside your emails, the report you’re writing and a web browser that’s running your LMS.

Another consideration is that more than half the working population do not sit at a desk looking at a computer for most of the day. Their jobs are inherently mobile. Up until now it has been very hard to provide performance support to these people. Now you can.

So, now I think about it, this is a pretty big deal.

I was also interested to read the mLearning Whitepaper just released by eNyota Learning, a developer based in India, which looks specifically at the issues associated with taking SCORM courses onto mobile devices. They identify several barriers, basically because most authoring tools export to Flash and Flash is not supported on most mobile devices, but also because of the difficulties of linking to an LMS through an app. These are not trivial issues but they are being solved very rapidly. I’ve purchased Articulate Storyline because it provides the facility to export to HTML 5/IOS (although I’d probably have bought it anyway because it’s a very flexible tool) and plenty of other tools, including Captivate and Lectora, are mobile friendly. In the meantime, if all you’re interested in is the delivery of trackable SCORM courses then we still do have PCs last time I looked.

But before we home in on mobile devices as just another delivery channel for the same old, same old, we should look at what they can already do without any effort at all, not least play videos and podcasts, display web pages and documents, provide means for collaboration, provide access to databases and decision aids, and run games and simulations (OK these two do require some effort). The end result of all this won’t always be learning, but it will be enhanced performance and surely that’s what really matters.

As Clark says in the summary of the eLearning Guild report: "Mobile learning isn’t about courses, but about using personal digital devices to assist us in performing knowledge work wherever and whenever.”

And that’s a very big deal indeed.