Mobile Learning 6: Effective Learning on Portable Devices

Before I investigate developing learning content for mobile devices I think it will be useful to conclude my current “list-mania” by describing m-learning in education generally. So, today’s post outlines some of the ways m-learning is being used.

Low-cost mass learning. The mobile phone is the only information device available to citizens in many parts of the world. This has prompted experiments using basic phone facilities, such as voice and Short Message Service (SMS), to support educational initiatives.

Low-cost education as a service. According to Gartner’s Nick Jones, companies such as Nokia are piloting low-cost educational services in emerging markets, such as India. These services exploit a simple interface on the phone, which delivers information and lessons using lowest common- denominator data contracts — for example, avoiding even the need for general packet radio service.

"Edutainment." Combining education and entertainment using games and simulations is a powerful learning technique. This can also leverage the substantial mobile application development experience of the gaming industry. Examples include a mobile augmented reality simulation game that tracks environmental pollution, and a mobile phone game to reduce the impact of culture shock when students arrive in a new country that's very different from their home countries.

Surveys, exams, questionnaires, data gathering and feedback. Mobile devices can provide an excellent platform for simple surveys, examinations, questionnaires and real-time feedback. Examples include lecture feedback, real-time surveys and simple multi-choice tests (for example, teaching vocabulary when learning a new language). At their simplest, these can be delivered as SMS messages asking the user to choose and option and respond, possibly with a deadline.

Performance support through instant information. Generally reference material (not learning) including simple media such as text, as well as richer media taking advantage of 3G connectivity. An example of performance support via a mobile phone is the wide range of dictionaries available for PDAs, covering a wide range of languages, law, medicine and other professional topics.

Creating learning material. Mobile phones are the most numerous audio, imaging and video capture devices available, and will play an important role in the creation of learning material as the facility to edit content and distribute material to YouTube-like nodes increases in sophistication. iPhone users can already author blog posts via the WordPress app.

Task/role-specific tools. Some organizations in have created specialized tools to allow access to specific learning and simulation material using a mobile device. SalesForce have build an iPhone app that enables customers access information through the iPhone's touch screen.

Learning support and administration. Many organizations experimenting with m -learning have explored mobile support for learning management and administration. Examples include reminders that assignments are due; flash-card applications to aid learning; and organizer applications to assist new students with their lecture timetables and finding the locations of lectures.

More…

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References:

Jones, N. (2008) M-Learning Opportunities and Applications. ID Number: G00163293 Gartner Research [Internet] Available from: http://www.gartner.com (Subscription or purchase required) Accessed 17 February 2009

Kineo and UFI/Learndirect (2009) Mobile Learning Reviewed. [Internet] Available from: http://www.kineo.com/documents/Mobile_learning_reviewed_final.pdf Accessed 17th February 2009

M-Learning via the iPhone 5 – more opportunities than before

In my last post about mobile learning, I looked at the theories and pedagogical strategies that could support m-learning. In today’s post, I will start to catalog the types of learning that mobile technologies and devices can potentially support. This will provide the foundation to discuss using m-learning as one of a number of learning channels (what used to be called “blended learning”).

As I progress through this series of articles on mobile learning, I will continue by looking at design and development approaches that are appropriate for m-learning. If I can find any research on the topic I will conclude this short series by investigating the benefits of m-learning on learners. I will also be learning Spanish, cataloging last year’s vacation snaps, doing the garden for Spring, and training for a 10K run in April. But that’s not important right now.

Now read on…

According to Gartner’s Nick Jones:

The opportunities of m-learning are driven by the ubiquity and familiarity of mobile devices, and because they allow just-in-time access to learning material whenever and wherever the user wants it. The low cost of entry-level mobile devices and basic services, such as SMS, is also attractive when delivering educational material to low-income learners.

(M-Learning Opportunities and Applications , p.5)

We can say that m-learning can be used to provide a range of different types of learning including:

Media delivery: Converged Media Devices (CMDs) play audio and video. They are excellent platforms for delivering simple multimedia learning material. For example, podcasting is an easy technology to work with and can be consumed on a wide range of devices. Many CMDs can display information formats, such as web pages and interactive content which support immersive learning experiences. Many mobile devices can also access media resources such as YouTube.

Contextual and exploratory learning: Some of the most innovative m-learning applications are contextual or exploratory, involving information related to particular tasks or locations. Museums and galleries have deployed a number of educational systems of this sort. Recent examples include tagging exhibits in art galleries

Storage and delivery of reference documents: CMDs and e-books from vendors such as Amazon and Sony can display a variety of document formats. Most e-book readers support PDF. CMDs typically support PDF and a non-editable productivity document formats, such as Microsoft Word, PowerPoint and Excel. Such devices can be used as a pocket archive of reference documents. For example, some organizations deliver parts of their disaster recovery plan onto employees' mobile phones so that, in the event of an emergency, each employee has access to a quick and up-to-date reference of what individuals need to do. E-book readers are less pocketable, but can provide a convenient way to store and deliver large numbers of documents in a small volume. In the consumer domain, there are many instances of mobile devices used as a delivery channel for documents that previous generations would have consumed on paper. Popular examples include city guides and maps.

Time-sensitive learning. Industries such as financial services and healthcare have a business requirement to ensure that employees read specific documents, such as new regulations, immediately after they are published. Mobile devices are good delivery platforms for small but urgent documents. They provide a number of ways, such as mobile e-mail, for employees to receive documentation and confirm that they have read it.

Information feeds and fragments. Many learning activities deliver small amounts of information regularly — for example, health education. SMS works well on all mobile devices; a high-end Web-friendly mobile phone and MIDs can display feeds using formats such as Really Simple Syndication (RSS). A variation on this theme is using the mobile device to support learning by providing a quick way to look up information fragments — for example, on-device dictionaries for language translation.

Web and portal content. The Web is a delivery tool for many types of learning and reference material. Although most of this is in formats that are not well-adapted to small screens, MIDs and high-end smartphones, such as the iPhone, with larger screens and full HTML browsers can display Web content tolerably; and it's possible to develop or adapt content for smaller screens (see Note 2). Some mobile devices and platforms have the capability to access material in corporate document management systems, such as SharePoint.

More…

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References:

Jones, N. (2008) M-Learning Opportunities and Applications. ID Number: G00163293 Gartner Research [Internet] Available from: http://www.gartner.com (Subscription or purchase required) Accessed 17 February 2009

Kineo and UFI/Learndirect (2009) Mobile Learning Reviewed. [Internet] Available from: http://www.kineo.com/documents/Mobile_learning_reviewed_final.pdf Accessed 17th February 2009

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Macintosh Rapid E-Learning Authoring Software

Is there a rapid elearning or screencasting production tool for the Mac? A contributor to my post Capture that E-Learning Demo: Update, asked me:

We have been looking at both Camtasia and Captivate for our online development. My question is if you have knowledge of ANY Apple compatible capturing software with the same capabilities of Camtasia and Captivate? Or if either Adobe or Techsmith ever plan on making this available to the Apple community?

Two great questions centered around the notion that there is no screencasting killer app for the Mac. Now, I have a Intel-chip MacBook (it also runs Windows using Boot Camp), but I use Windows PCs for learning content development and production – it’s a work / life balance thing. As a result, I have never really considered the options for e-learning authoring on the Mac before now. But since I was asked, here’s my two cents worth…

There are a number of choices. First, you could run the programs you're evaluating (TechSmith Camtasia or Adobe Captivate) on a Mac with Windows / Boot Camp, but my view would be given the processing resources needed to generate content in a native Windows environment, running them via a virtual machine would be to enter a world of pain I’m not prepared to contemplate: there are too many links in the chain; it’s too risky. Murphy’s Law says that on a death march project with a deadline looming, the the authoring environment would not be up to the task, regardless of how well it behaved prior to to that.

With that option rejected let’s look at the other choices available for the MacOS. To answer my correspondent’s second question first, it seems that TechSmith are looking at a mid-2009 release for the Mac version of Camtasia. Click here to view a screencast about the latest developments in this product.

Camtasia for the Macintosh is soon to be a reality

Not so good, I’m sad to say for Adobe fans. According to The Apple Blog there are currently no plans to bring it to the Mac. When questioned, the Adobe development team responded:

Captivate is built from a program that ties deeply into the core Windows. To bring it to the Mac would require a total rewrite, something that we’re not sure we can justify at this point. If we had significant interest from Mac users, it’d be a different story.

If you want to register your interest in a Mac version of Captivate, click here to let Adobe know via their feature request form.

Next, the third of the "Big Three" rapid e-learning development authoring tools, Articulate similarly does not support MacOS natively. However, in a very comprehensive post here, guest blogger Jim Gritton (co-founder of GB Learning Consultancy) discusses

Parallels Desktop for Mac, followed by CrossOver Mac and now VMware Fusion. Both Parallels and Fusion are Windows emulators: they use virtualization technology to allow you to run Windows as a virtual machine alongside the Mac operating system, as you can see from the screenshot below:

WinXP login screen on Parallels

While it may seem contradictory that I discuss an emulator here, Articulate is a little different, in that it can interact with Mac-native KeyNote-created presentations and even integrates with the Mac Dock (via Parallels).

Obviously more optimistic than me (see Death March above) Jim asserts that:

If you’re wondering about my set-up, I’m currently running Parallels Desktop with Windows XP on a 20-inch, all-in-one iMac, sporting a 2.16 GHz Intel Core Duo Processor, 1 GB memory and a 240 GB hard disk. This isn’t the fastest or most powerful Mac on the block, but it isn’t the slowest, either. I’m not going to pretend that running Windows applications using Parallels is as fast as running Mac applications natively on my iMac, but it’s no slouch. Nor has it let me down.

One approach that seems to me to have some potential is CrossOver Mac, which builds on the open-source implementation of the Windows API, Wine. This enables Unix-based operating systems (like Mac OS X and Linux) to run Windows applications “natively.” Hmmm... might look in to this myself, but it breaks my "Macs are for fun" work / life balance rule, in a thin-end-of-the-wedge kind of way...

What are we left with? Quite a lot, as it turns out.

In terms of native MacOS screencasting Mac, the evidence of my research suggests that Telestream’s ScreenFlow is the most popular application.

ScreenFlow Export wizard screenshot

According to their website ScreenFlow includes:

Feature	Description
Video Capture	Using a custom multithreaded SSE & Altivec accelerated, 64-bit enabled compression system, ScreenFlow can handle everything from capturing DVD video & audio to fast moving Keynote presentations.
Record Everything	You don't need to pick an area of the screen for capture, ScreenFlow has advanced algorithms that only encode areas of change on your screen. The application is powerful enough to simultaneously record from your iSight or DV camera at the same time as your screen (and your microphone and computer's audio!).
Highlight	During your screen capture, ScreenFlow tracks where your mouse cursor is, when you click and when you press a key. This allows you to add mouse click effects (both visual and audible), an overlay showing your key strokes and even lets you zoom the mouse pointer up & down.
Edit	Once your screen capture is complete, you're transported to the ScreenFlow editor. Using a familiar timeline interface, ScreenFlow lets you easily add zoom & pan effects, trim clips, add drop shadow & reflection, adjust audio levels etc. You can even combine existing media into your screencast.
Callout	Callouts let you highlight & focus in on the mouse or front-most window. Want to circle the area around the mouse? What took an experienced user minutes or hours in Final Cut Pro or After Effects is now a couple of clicks away.
Motion	ScreenFlow introduces actions to the editing interface. These make it very quick & easy to modify parameters of your screencast over time. For example, adding a video action lets you put zoom & pan effects on your clips, while the audio action lets you adjust volume at different points in your screencast.
Export Quality	When resizing high resolution screen content into a QuickTime movie, ScreenFlow uses custom GPU algorithms to give your finished movie the best possible quality. You'll find even small text suddenly becomes legible for your viewers.
Leopard Only	ScreenFlow was built for Mac OS X Leopard. It makes extensive use of the best of Mac OS X technologies: Core Animation, QuickLook, Spotlight, QTKit, Quartz Composer, OpenGL, Core Image, Automator, Core Data and many others.

In the multiplatform world, Qarbon’s offering ViewletBuilder seems to have potential. This product seems to have some powerful e-learning features including LMS integration.

Qarbon’s ViewletBuilder

According to Qarbon, the product’s highlights are:

• Create and publish Flash tutorials and simulations in minutes
• Expand the reach of your online marketing with interactive slideshows and presentations
• Develop and deliver powerful, dynamic courseware without programming
• Capture detailed viewer responses with quizzes, tests, surveys and polls
• Seamlessly share Projects amongst Authors
• Integrate your content with your organization’s learning management system (LMS)
• Benefit from its multi-platform solutions Windows, Linux & Mac

From the open source world SWF Tools is also available for the Mac. SWF Tools is a collection of SWF manipulation and creation utilities written by Rainer Böhme and Matthias Kramm. It is released under the GPL.
Features included are:

• PDF2SWF A PDF to SWF Converter. Generates one frame per page. Enables you to have fully formatted text, including tables, formulas etc. inside your Flash Movie. It's based on the xpdf PDF parser from Derek B. Noonburg.
• SWFCombine A tool for inserting SWFs into Wrapper SWFs. (Templates) E.g. for including the pdf2swf SWFs in some sort of Browsing-SWF.
• SWFStrings Scans SWFs for text data.
• SWFDump Prints out various informations about SWFs.
• JPEG2SWF Takes one or more JPEG pictures and generates a SWF slideshow.
• PNG2SWF Like JPEG2SWF, only for PNGs.
• GIF2SWF Converts GIFs to SWF. Also able to handle animated gifs.
• WAV2SWF Converts WAV audio files to SWFs, using the L.A.M.E. MP3 encoder library.
• AVI2SWF Converts AVI animation files to SWF. It supports Flash MX H.263 compression. Some examples can be found at examples.html.
  Font2SWF Converts font files (TTF, Type1) to SWF.
• SWFBBox Allows to readjust SWF bounding boxes.
• SWFC A tool for creating SWF files from simple script files.
• SWFExtract Allows to extract Movieclips, Sounds, Images etc. from SWF files.
• RFXSWF Library A fully featured library which can be used for standalone SWF generation. Includes support for Bitmaps, Buttons, Shapes, Text, Fonts, Sound etc. It also has support for ActionScript using the Ming ActionCompiler.

SWFTools has been reported to work on Solaris, Linux, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, HP-UX, MacOS X and Windows 98/ME/2000/XP/Vista.

If you want to experiment with a ‘lite’ authoring environment for the Macintosh, try free-to-use Jing (by TechSmith).

• Screenshot still image capture
• Record onscreen video
• Share instantly over the Web (FTP), IM, e-mail
• Audio Narration

Jing lacks many features that proprietary screencasting software has, including local saves, multiple output types, and delivery formats, but it’s free to use, so a restricted function set should be expected. Once content is captured and saved, a URL for the file is automatically created and can be shared with others to view or access.

So there you have it. A whistle-stop tour of content capture and rapid e-learning authoring tools for the Mac. I would be very interested to hear how Mac users fare with these applications, or can suggest any others that are used in this context on the MacOS platform. What really surprises me is that there aren’t more tools already, after all, the Mac is the doyen of the digital media development industry and I would have thought that the tools available for e-learning development would reflect this preference for the platform. But that’s another story.

NOTE WELL:

Given the number of positive comments I have made about TechSmith recently, I want to emphasize that I am in no way associated with them, and that the purpose of this blog is not to showcase or cheerlead any commercial interest. It just happens at the moment they seem to make the most effective tools in this market space. I would suggest to their competitors that they step up to the mark and compete with applications that really meet the needs of learning and development practitioners and I will certainly be pleased to discuss their solutions in positive terms. Equally, should anyone fall short of the mark (MPEG4 or FLV, anyone?) I will highlight it on the E-Learning Curve Blog with no prejudice.

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TechSmith turns to USERS to help enhance Camtasia

This post is a little off-topic considering that I’m deeply involved in writing a series of articles on the subject of m-learning right now. Nevertheless, I think that it demonstrates the value and power of the read/write web so I’ll plow on.

As you’ll know if you’re a regular reader of the E-Learning Curve Blog, I use a range of content authoring tools to create elearning courseware. Primus inter pares is Camtasia by TechSmith. About two weeks ago, I downloaded and installed the trial version of Camtasia 6, which is a little unusual for me; in the past I have just bought the upgrade as soon as it was released.

This time it was a different: I heard discomfiting rumors over the Net that the functionality profile had changed, specifically that FLV had been replaced with MPEG4 as the asynchronous video streaming format in v6 of the product. As someone who relies on Adobe Connect to deliver much of my content to learners this was not good news, as Connect’s support for MPEG4 isn’t great. With this bit of news in mind, I decided to download the Cam6 trial to evaluate the latest version of the product.

As part of the evaluation experience, TechSmith’s Adam Stevenson contacted me (and a lot of other users no doubt) to ask me to contribute my experiences using the trial version of the product. Info is collected on a daily basis using a simple Google Docs form, and it enables TechSmith to capture users’ experiences with the trial including rants, raves and anything else you want to tell them. I think that this is a very positive (and obvious and sensible) way for software development companies to be connected to their current and potential customer base. In my view, their approach enables the development of a virtuous cycle between user and software provider which has the potential to benefit both parties – and ultimately learners, who should be the focus of our activities.

In the past, my experience has led me to be cynical of “we care a lot” exercises by organizations – sometimes I get the feeling that my well-considered comments end up filed in the circular filing cabinet – you know, the one marked Trash, or worse in electronic limbo at the bottom of someone’s To Do list, never To Be Done.

So what’s different this time?

Check out this post by TechSmith’s Betsy Weber on the removal of FLV:

We've been listening to your feedback on our Forums, through our product feedback form, Twitter, Facebook, and via email. And, one of the things we heard after releasing Camtasia Studio v6 was that you wanted us to put back in support for the FLV video file format.

Well, I'm happy to report that we plan to release an update to Camtasia Studio as soon as possible and we will put back the FLV option. Our goal is to have Camtasia Studio v6.0.2 available to you by March. There will still be support for MPEG-4 in Camtasia Studio as well.

I think that, my friends is what we call a win-win situation.

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M-Learning via the iPhone 4 – some approaches and technologies

Last time, I investigated mobile learning (m-learning) in the context of its parent domain e-learning and I outlined some types and characteristics of devices that enable the delivery of m-learning to users. In this post, I will look at the some of the learning theories that support learning distributed via mobile devices.

Now read on…

In their 2004 paper Literature Review in Mobile Technologies and Learning (Naismith, Lonsdale, Sharples & Vavoula), consider the importance of taking an approach to m-learning that

moves away from the dominant view of mobile learning as an isolated activity to explore mobile learning as a rich, collaborative and conversational experience, whether in classrooms, homes or the streets of a city. …how we might draw on existing theories of learning to help us evaluate the most relevant applications of mobile technologies.

(p.1)

Table 1. Applying Learning Theories to M-Learning (after Naismith et al, 2004)

Learning Theory	Activity Type	Description
Behaviorist	Activities that promote learning as a change in learners’ observable actions	In the behaviorist paradigm, learning is thought to be best facilitated through the reinforcement of an association between a particular stimulus and a response. Applying this to educational technology, computer-aided learning is the presentation of a problem (stimulus) followed by the contribution on the part of the learner of the solution (response). Feedback from the system then provides reinforcement.
Constructivist	Activities in which learners actively construct new ideas or concepts based on both their previous and current knowledge	In the constructivist approach, learning is an active process in which learners construct new ideas or concepts based on both their current and past knowledge. Learners are encouraged to be active constructors of knowledge, with mobile devices now embedding them in a realistic context at the same time as offering access to supporting tools. The most compelling examples of the implementation of constructivist principles with mobile technologies come from a brand of learning experience termed ‘participatory simulations’, where the learners themselves act out key parts in an immersive recreation of a dynamic system.
Situated	Activities that promote learning within an authentic context and culture	Situated learning posits that learning can be enhanced by ensuring that it takes place in an authentic context. Mobile devices are especially well suited to context-aware applications simply because they are available in different contexts, and so can draw on those contexts to enhance the learning activity. The museum and gallery sector has been on the forefront of context-aware mobile computing by providing additional information about exhibits and displays based on the visitor’s location within them.
Collaborative	Activities that promote learning through social interaction	Collaborative learning has sprung out from research on Computer-Supported Collaborative Work and Learning (CSCW/L) and is based on the role of social interactions in the process of learning. Many new approaches to thinking about learning developed in the 1990s, most of which are rooted in Vygotsky’s socio-cultural psychology (Vygotsky 1978), including activity theory. Though not traditionally linked with collaborative learning, another theory that is particularly relevant to our consideration of collaboration using mobile devices is conversation theory (Pask 1976), which describes learning in terms of conversations between different systems of knowledge. Mobile devices can support Mobile Computer Supported Collaborative Learning (MCSCL) by providing another means of coordination without attempting to replace any human-human interactions, as compared to say, online discussion boards which substitute for face-to-face discussions (Zurita et al 2003; Cortez et al 2004; Zurita and Nussbaum 2004).
Informal and non-formal	Activities that support learning outside a dedicated learning environment and formal curriculum	Research on informal and lifelong learning recognizes that learning happens all of the time and is influenced both by our environment and the particular situations we are faced with. Informal learning may be intentional, for example, through intensive, significant and deliberate learning ‘projects’ (Tough 1971), or it may be accidental, by acquiring information through conversations, TV and newspapers, observing the world or even experiencing an accident or embarrassing situation. Such a broad view of learning takes it outside the classroom and, by default, embeds learning in everyday life, thus emphasizing the value of mobile technologies in supporting it.
Learning and teaching support	Activities that assist in the coordination of learners and resources for learning activities	Education as a process relies on a great deal of coordination of learners and resources. Mobile devices can be used by teachers for attendance reporting, reviewing student marks, general access of central school data, and managing their schedules more effectively. In higher education, mobile devices can provide course material to students, including due dates for assignments and information about timetable and room changes.

As yet there is no comprehensive ‘grand theory of mobile learning’ - nor do I expect that there will be any time soon. As I move forward through this series of posts, one of the areas I will consider is integrating pedagogy for the use of mobile devices that in a number of areas. In much the same way as we have many categories of devices, we will discover that there are many ways to integrate learning on mobile devices using a number of instructional designs, developmental approaches and delivery models. I support the view that one of the great strengths of m-learning (and indeed e-learning) is it's facility to transcend traditional learning environments like the classroom or training center, and to combine different elements in ways that are appropriate to the learning activities to be supported.

More…

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References:

Cortez, C., Nussbaum, M., Santelices, R,. Rodríguez, P., Zurita, G., Correa, M. and Cautivo, R. (2004) Teaching science with mobile computer supported collaborative learning (MCSCL). Proceedings of the 2nd International Workshop on Wireless and Mobile Technologies in Education. JungLi, Taiwan: IEEE Computer Society, 67-74

Naismith, L., Lonsdale, P., Vavoula, G. and Sharples, M. (2004) Literature Review in Mobile Technologies and Learning. NESTA Futurelab Series, Report 11. [Internet] Available from: http://www.futurelab.org.uk/research/lit_reviews.htm Accessed 15 February 2009.

Pask, AGS (1976) Conversation Theory: Applications in Education and Epistemology. Amsterdam and New York: Elsevier

Vygotsky, L. S. (1978) Mind in society. Edited by Cole, M. John-Steiner, V. Scribner, Souberman, E. Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press

Zurita, G, Nussbaum, M and Sharples, M. (2003) Encouraging face-to-face collaborative learning through the use of hand-held computers in the classroom. Proceedings of Mobile HCI 2003, Udine, Italy: Springer-Verlag, 193-208

Zurita, G., Nussbaum, M (2004) Computer supported collaborative learning using wirelessly interconnected hand-held computers. Computers & Education, 42(3): 289-314

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M-Learning via the iPhone 3 – some approaches and technologies

After yesterday’s excursion into sci-fi to show that the concept, if not the reality of mobile learning (m-learning) has been around for a good part of the last century, today’s post returns to the altogether more prosaic task of identifying the characteristics of m-learning. I think that the best way to approach this is to characterize m-learning’s parent domain, e-learning.

So, let me remind you of my favorite definition of the characteristics of e-learning and consider if they also apply to m-learning. In his influential 2001 text E-Learning: Strategies for Delivering Knowledge in the Digital Age, Marc J Rosenberg argues that e-learning is based on three fundamental criteria (pp.8-29):

1. E-learning is networked making it capable of updating, storage and retrieval, distribution and sharing of instruction or information. So important is this criteria that Rosenberg describes it as fast becoming an “absolute requirement” [his italics] of e-learning.
2. It is delivered to the end-user via a computer using standard internet technology so that even though the definition of what a standard technology is may evolve as the internet matures, e-learning will be deliverable on that channel
3. It focuses on the broadest view of learning: learning that goes beyond “e-training” (Beyond E-Learning, 2006, p.11). E-learning is at the core of the “smart enterprise – a high-performing organization that allows knowledge and capabilities, enabled by technology, to grow and flow freely across departmental geographical or hierarchical boundaries, where it is shared and made actionable for the use and benefit of all” (2006, p.39).

A discussion on m-learning then, must in part be dedicated to the technologies underpinning the broader e-learning domain. In this context, ‘mobile’ generally means portable and personal, like a mobile phone or media player. While ‘mobile device’ typically means PDAs and digital mobile phones, it might more generally be taken to mean any device that is

small, autonomous and unobtrusive enough to accompany people in every moment in their every-day life, and that can be used for some form of learning, for example an MP3 player.

(Kineo and UFI/Learndirect Mobile Learning Reviewed. p.5)

Many examples of learning with mobile technologies fit in to this description, and broadly speaking they all align to the “absolute requirement” to receive and transmit digital voice and data communication over a network – though not necessarily wirelessly, as we shall see).

According to a number of sources including Gartner (M-Learning Opportunities and Applications) and Kineo & UFI/Learndirect (Mobile Learning Reviewed) mobile handsets are, and will be the “dominant m-learning devices for some time: there were more than 1.2 billion shipped in 2008” (Gartner, p.6). There are five basic categories of devices:

1. ‘Smartphones’ or Converged Media Devices (CMDs) have an identifiable operating system, are Web-capable and support installable applications, such as PDF and content readers. They are able to render a wide range of digital data types so they can act as sophisticated m-learning platforms.
2. Enhanced phones don't have an open operating system but have some audio, video and Web capability, and typically support simpler installable applications using programming tools such as Java Platform, Micro Edition (Java ME).
3. Basic phones are low-cost devices that can support voice and text messaging
4. Non-telephony mobile devices are audio/MP3 players and video-enabled media players, the dominant product in both markets belonging to the Apple iPod family of players.
5. Hand-held games consoles are lightweight, portable devices include in-built screens, games controls and speakers. The dominant manufacturers include Nintendo (DS) Sony (PSP) and Nokia (N-Gage).
   
   

In 2008, CMDs were a growing minority, comprising approximately 15% of all devices shipped globally; enhanced phones made up a little more than 60%, and the remainder were basic phones. Of the potential mobile learning devices, mobile phones are clearly the most commonplace. According to a recent report by Strategy Analytics (cited in Mobile Learning Reviewed, p.4), there are 1.5 billion mobile phones on earth, with 10% year-over-year adoption expected through 2008. In 2005 the Financial Times reported that UK mobile phone penetration was about 86% of the adult population. By 2006, the penetration rate for Western Europe was reported as 100%, which means there was a mobile phone for every person in the population.

The media player market is one of the biggest IT success stories in recent years. The market leader is Apple’s iPod. Since 2001, Apple has sold over 100 million iPods worldwide. Many other players compete in the personal media player marketplace including Archos, Sony, iRiver, Creative, and Microsoft. While functionality varies according to manufacturer and brand, we can say that a media player is a portable mass storage device that allows content to be downloaded and used offline. Music storage is obviously their primary use, but their mobility and storage capacity makes them ideal mobile learning devices. A significant increase in the audio- and video podcast download market demonstrates that consumers have extended the potential of these devices beyond their intended capacity as über Walkmans.

Kineo (p.6) assert that:

The commercial market for MP3 downloads is highly developed, though monetizing non-music formats (e.g. podcasts and vodcasts) has proved more challenging. In effect the ‘book on tape’ market has jumped formats to become the commercial podcast market via iTunes and Audible.
The ease of providing podcasts and vodcasts for download has a potential cost advantage, as they can be downloaded for free (assuming the user is on a fixed price broadband line), unlike download or access to learning content via a mobile phone or CMD. Thus, mobile devices used for learning do not require continuous connection. Also, once on the iPod, learning content does not require internet connection for it to be accessed, so there need be no ongoing costs of access after initial download.

Given the almost ubiquitous nature of these devices, it’s not surprising that educators and organizations with an interest in distributing electronic learning content are now considering the potential for these devices to support a previously unavailable channel to communicate and transfer knowledge to learners.

More…

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References:

Jones, N. (2008) M-Learning Opportunities and Applications. ID Number: G00163293 Gartner Research [Internet] Available from: http://www.gartner.com (Subscription or purchase required) Accessed 17 February 2009

Kineo and UFI/Learndirect (2009) Mobile Learning Reviewed. [Internet] Available from: http://www.kineo.com/documents/Mobile_learning_reviewed_final.pdf Accessed 17th February 2009

Rosenberg, M. J. (2001) e-Learning: Strategies for Delivering Knowledge in the Digital Age London: McGraw-Hill.

Rosenberg, M. J. (2006) Beyond e-Learning. San Francisco, CA: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

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M-Learning via the iPhone 2 – some approaches and technologies

In M-Learning via the iPhone 1, I started to investigate the characteristics of mobile learning by going back to basics, specifically looking at the technological and conceptual foundations of this domain: training, instruction, education and learning. Today, I’m going to begin in earnest by telling you a story about a book - a wholly remarkable book in fact, that was first conceived nearly forty years ago.

Are you sitting comfortably? Then I’ll begin. And Remember…

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is the most successful book every written. A handy electronic reference book, its chief selling points are the words 'Don't Panic' written in large friendly letters on the cover, and that it’s cheaper than its closest competitor, the Encyclopedia Galactica. The Guide’s reporters travel the length and breadth of the Milky Way, drinking heavily, going to lots of parties and generally having a great time. Their experiences, which include everything from how to mix the greatest cocktail in the galaxy to life on Earth (“mostly harmless”) is then passed on via the SubEtha net to every copy of the Guide, giving people the opportunity to misinterpret the inaccurate copy. Much of the guide's content is plagiarized from the back of cereal packets, and some of it is just made up. Its most useful advice concerns towels.

Now I’m not going to labor the point about blogging (without the wild parties, sad to say), Wikipedia, and the SubEtha / world wide web “net” but here’s a description of the Guide itself:

…A device that looked rather like a largish electronic calculator. This had… a screen about four inches square on which any one of a million “pages” could be summoned at a moment’s notice. It looked insanely complicated, and this was one of the reasons why the snug plastic cover it fitted into had the words DON’T PANIC printed on it in large friendly letters. …The reason why it was published in the form of a micro sub meson electronic component is that if it were printed in normal book form, an interstellar hitchhiker would require several inconveniently large buildings to carry it around in.

The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy (pp.26-27)

Sound familiar? Of course it does.

Man seeks Nokia charger for his retro cell phone

That was 30 years ago. Back in the future, we can say that the we live at a time where the socio-cultural, economic and technical foundations exist to change the way that we acquire learning and knowledge in as profound a way as the introduction of printing in Western Europe in the 15th Century. We can now potentially carry our knowledge with us without “several inconveniently large buildings” to carry it around in. The current generation of portable digital devices (including smart phones, PDAs, and media players) is that they can support a digitally-mediated, connected learning environment, providing a convenience of instant access to a range of people and resources, as well as the ability to process data in a way that wasn’t possible even five years ago.

Next time: The altogether more prosaic task of describing the characteristics of E-Learning as I understand them, and a context for M-Learning.

______________________

References:

Adams, D. (1979) The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy (pp.26-27) London: Pan Paperbacks

“Don’t Panic” image Courtesy British Broadcasting Corporation

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M-Learning via the iPhone 1 – some approaches and technologies

In my last blog post, I discussed how I had resigned myself to the fact that the Adobe Flash Player will never be deployed on the iPhone†.

However, that is not much use if you, as an e-learning professional, have an audience for knowledge- and content delivery via mobile devices including the iPhone. In this series of articles, I will discuss approaches to delivering training via PDAs like the iPhone based on applications and functionality already available on that device. Let’s see what happens after that.

Let’s set the context. There are a growing number of extensions to the well-established core term ‘E-Learning’ including this list of candidates (compiled in 2008 by CramerSweeney):

• C-Learning - learning via collaboration with co-workers and associates
• M-Learning - learning via a portable digital media device
• V-Learning - learning inside a virtual world (such as Second Life)
• G-Learning - learning via computer games

The latest term I have discovered is Ubiquitous Learning, or U-Learning, first discussed by Gary Woodill in his excellent Workplace Learning Today column, who encountered the term in the title of a Masters dissertation called The dawn of uLearning: near-future directions for 21st century educators). Can we now take this trend to its logical conclusion and define

• T-Learning - learning via reading educational books, academic and other Textual material
  
• S-Learning - learning via lecturers & teachers Speaking
• W-Learning - learning via the medium of pen, paper, and taking Written notes

[Image courtesy Flickr user tryingtimes]

‘X’ is one of the cooler letters – let’s have X-Learning. I’ll send a Mars Bar to the person who contributes the best definition of X-Learning.

Or should we stop. Now. Please.

In my view, each of these descriptors implies that the alphabetti-spaghetti of C- G- M- V-Learning activities are discrete verticals or silos, standing alone and untouched by their siblings.

Of course this is not the case: if anything, we can say that each of these terms describes a learning channel that relies on or emphasizes one modality of learning, but doesn’t - I would assert can’t – occlude other learning modalities.

So whither M-Learning among this cacophony of uppercase modifiers? Does what we commonly call ‘M-Learning’ deserve to be treated as a domain in it’s own right? Can we discover if there are any unique characteristics that differentiate learning via mobile technologies?

I think we need to take a step back. First of all, what is learning? I would assert that learning is

The acquisition of new knowledge, behaviors, skills, values, preferences or understanding, and may involve synthesizing different types of information. The progress of this acquisition over time tends to follow learning curves. Learning is a Constructivist activity.

Harold Stolovitch puts it succinctly in his 2002 text Telling Ain’t Training when he says that “learning is change, adaptation” (p.18). According to the author, we use training, instruction and education as strategies to enable people to learn.

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†Probably.

Apple has a habit of denying that they are developing a range of devices and technologies. Right up to the moment that Apple announce their newest gizmo / solution / partnership. Until 2009 this typically occurred at an Apple Expo event with Steve Jobs uttering the famous phrase “One more thing…” as the latest object of geeky desire walks up the aisle of the technological Chapel O’ Love.

Next time: What is E-Learning (Slight Return)

Coming up: What is M-Learning?

_________________________

References:

Publish Post

Nalder, J. (2008). The dawn of uLearning: near-future directions for 21st century educators. Unpublished Master’s thesis, Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane. [Internet] Available from: http://www.scribd.com/doc/12398804/The-dawn-of-uLearning-Jonathan-Nalder-Masters-thesis Accessed 18th February 2009

Stolovitch, H. (2002) Telling Ain't Training. ASTD Press.

Sweeney, J. (2008) Let's Talk Terminology CramerSweeney Training Blog [Internet] Available from: http://www.cramersweeney.com/cs_id/trainingblog/ Accessed 17th February 2009

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No Flash on the iPhone? I’m cool with that.

Everyone wants Flash on the iPhone.

Today I had a moment of clarity. I realized there will never be the facility to view Flash-based content on my iPhone. Probably. And you know what? I’m cool with that.

I have been an Apple 3G iPhone owner and user since the model was released here in Ireland in mid-2008. Since I have had the device, I’ve come to rely on it to manage my e-mail accounts, utilize my time, play music, video, take notes (text and audio), and generally be more productive .

I’ve Twittered, Quittered, Facebooked, YouTubed and blogged.

But for me, the inability to deliver Flash-based interactive e-learning applications on the device has been a significant source of frustration for me for all the time I have used my iPhone.

Oh, the potential that’s there, I said. What a waste, I lamented. Learning “on-the-go” – real just-in-time information-transfer just-out-of-reach, I railed, much like Lear on the heath. All that content, ready to be refactored into a dinky miniaturized format for all my learners: not to be, alas and alack.

More than anything else, my frustration was based upon a positive reading of a very ambiguous statement by Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen, who, when discussing the difficulties in bringing Adobe's most well distributed product to the iPhone said:

It's a hard technical challenge, and that's part of the reason Apple and Adobe are collaborating… The ball is in our court. The onus is on us to deliver.*

The implication of this - and other - public utterances by the Adobe Powers That Be is that Apple and Adobe are “collaborating” on developing a Flash player for the iPhone. Logical conclusion: it’s just a matter of time before Flash appears in the iTunes App Store, ready to go.

Not on the jPhone as a Flash movie anytime soon

However, if you believe Apple CEO Steve Jobs' comments on the popular platform, it won’t be on the iPhone any time soon.

According to Wired, Steve Jobs considers that Flash is “too slow” for the iPhone, and Flash Lite is too limited. Don’t forget that the iPhone OS is a tightly-curated closed platform: Apple call the shots. As Nullriver found out in August 2008 for example, the proprietors have no qualms about pulling iPhone Apps that they deem to extend the functionality of their hardware and software beyond what they (Apple) can control.

Wired again:

Flash does have a reputation for slow performance compared to the other popular web-embeddable language, Java. Traditionally, the best flash presentations are those coded by experts with a keen awareness of its limits—Apple wisely fears iPhones being hammered by the Internet's inexhaustible supply of badly-constructed Flash garbage.

There is a convergence of historical, cultural and practical considerations to be accounted for:

1. After many years closely working with Apple (when the Mac was the graphics & DTP creatives’ / digital media producers’ computer of choice), Adobe Systems grew initially on Apple’s support of Postscript, and later of programs like PhotoShop, Illustrator and Premiere. It can be said that Adobe is taking that relationship for granted. Adobe did not update its Mac software for more than a year after Apple switched to Intel processors in 2007. This must have hit Apple’s revenue pretty hard, as potential users stuck to their PowerPC Macs until they could acquire the compatible Adobe software
2. Traditionally, Flash has performed badly on Macs. Add to that the aforementioned “badly-constructed Flash garbage.”
3. The iPhone is not a powerful computer: it is a Web-enabled Portable Digital Assistant (PDA). I would suggest that in many consumers’ minds that to be able to surf the internet in a full-featured Safari browser on the iPhone means that it’s a “real” computer. Apple surely want to manage users’ expectations.
4. Apple is very aware of these issues. The company went as far as to include a clause in their iPhone developers' Terms of Service agreement (.PDF) that prohibits Flash from appearing on the iPhone:

   No interpreted code may be downloaded and used in an Application except for code that is interpreted and run by Apple's Published APIs and built-in interpreter(s).

The outcome of these (and other) factors is that Safari for iPhone is unable to display a significant portion of the content on the internet. Flash games aren't supported, videos can't be streamed from popular television and movie sites like Hulu and the BBC iPlayer, and websites that use Flash to render content or navigation won't work on the iPhone.

Next time: Implications for m-learning. Will mobile e-learning suffer as a result of this scenario?

______________

References:

*Source: Bloomberg Television at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.

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From E-Learning Planet - Blog Post of the Week

My recent post ‘The Impact of the Current Economic Crisis on E-Learning: February ‘09 LCBBQ‘ has been chosen as E-Learning Planet’s Pick of the Week, which is nice.

According to elearningplanet.com:

Millions of e-learning Web sites are available in Cyberspace. There are Web sites that include only e-learning blogs; some include e-learning forums, information on e-learning jobs, reviews on e-learning products, and so on. But, very few Web sites post information that covers all aspects of e-learning.

We select the ‘Blog Post of the Week’ when a post meets one or more of the following parameters:

• Includes useful information on developing an e-learning course with trenchant instructional design strategies
• Provides information on the latest technology, news, and events in the e-learning industry
• Includes information that is useful and neutral to all e-learning professionals

Well done too, to Donald ‘Plan B’ Clark for getting the Blogger of the Week gong.

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Capture that E-Learning Demo: Update

I’ve been getting some very positive feedback about my recent series of blog posts reviewing TechSmith Camtasia and Adobe Captivate. Some contributors have also been kind enough to point out some deficiencies regarding the usability of the review - you may recall it was written over four days and four posts. One great suggestion was to create a TOC in each post so that readers could easily navigate to each section of the review.

Given the number of responses to the E-Learning Demo comparison articles, I have decided to combine them and make them available to all as a downloadable whitepaper (PDF format) so that the review can be read in one easily-accessible document.

Click here read the review in a new browser window, or right-click and Save As… to download a copy of the paper to your PC or Mac. You will need Adobe Reader to view the file. Click here to download Adobe Reader 9.

My final thought for today: I put a lot of time and effort into writing (hopefully) useful, informative and stimulating material for this e-learning blog. Being a learning and development professional, the posts I find most satisfying to write concern the reasons people want to learn, the theories and approaches that support learning, and how best to enable learners to acquire knowledge. I guess I have to admit that sometimes I forget that maybe the practical ‘just-in-time’ material is as important as the more esoteric material. In future, I’ll certainly add more posts concerning the practical elements of e-learning development, deployment and delivery into the mix.

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Moodle 1.9 – Potential Vulnerability

I recently wrote a small article for CMS Report about Moodle 1.9. One of the site’s contributors has let me know that there is a cross-site request forgery (CSRF) vulnerability that hackers have used on older builds of Moodle. According to The Register:

Twenty schools' sites have fallen victim to the spoofed or defaced web page porn assault, the Times Educational Supplement reports. Many of the sites use Moodle, an open source content management system that is used to create online learning sites, sparking the theory that flaws in older versions of the package have been used to mount the attacks.

The Register article continues:

If vulnerabilities in Moodle are indeed the cause of the attack then … a Moodle script insertion and cross-site request forgery flaw (here) as the likely candidate. Another Moodle bug (here) is another possibility.

Moodle.org are taking this very seriously. According to their Security page, this is a Sev Critical issue, and they recommend that all Moodle users install the latest Moodle package from http://moodle.org/mod/data/view.php?d=13&rid=448.

Be warned…

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A Virtual Learning Environment gets grounded

Strange to tell, Microsoft has been at the forefront of producing popular, immersive learning environments for over 25 years. Sadly, it looks as though their involvement in this domain is about to end.

Is this goodbye, Microsoft Flight Simulator?

Microsoft has decided to close its ACES Studio, which developed the simulator series. The ACES Studio was shut and its 150 staff laid off as part of 5,000 planned layoffs to control costs. Since 1982, Microsoft Flight Simulator (FS) has been one of the most popular serious games available. However, in my view, it is less a game and more an immersive virtual environment; it provides the user with a highly sophisticated and realistic human-computer interface (HCI) that enables "players" to learn according to a non-linear constructivist model.

For those who would assert that FS has little or nothing to do with learning and development, remember that early e-learning specifications emerged from the aerospace world: in the late 1980's the Aviation Industry Computer-Based Training Committee (AICC) developed guidelines for the development, delivery, and evaluation of CBT, WBT, and related training technologies. The AICC specifications were designed to be general purpose (not necessarily aviation-specific) so that learning technology vendors could spread their costs across multiple markets and provide products needed by the aviation industry at a lower cost. This has resulted in AICC specifications gaining broad acceptance and relevance to non-aviation and aviation users alike long before IMS, SCORM, and QTI.

In FS, the user "flies" accurately-modeled aircraft in an open microworld. The flying area encompasses the whole of the real world (in varying levels of detail) and even (in FSX) low-earth orbit, including over 24,000 airports. Individually-detailed scenery can be found representing an ever-growing number of towns and cities, and geographical major landmarks. The latest versions of FS include complex weather simulation, as well as the ability to download real-time weather data. There is also a air traffic environment with interactive Air Traffic Control, player-flyable aircraft ranging from the WWI aircraft to the modern Boeing 777. In addition, the two latest versions of Microsoft Flight Simulator have a “kiosk mode”, which allows the application to be run in kiosks. It is the wide availability of upgrades and add-ons, both free and commercial, which give the simulator its great flexibility and scope.

As is the case in good e-learning design, introductory orientation ("flying lessons") provides the player with a virtual instructor who, through a modular series of tasks and activities that are understood and responded to by learners within in the game context. This combines the elements of content and display to present the instructional content in a way that promotes learning through organized instructional resources, and a user interface that is not confusing, dissatisfying, or cognitively taxing. As well as interactive lessons, the simulator also provides missions, airport maps, navigation aids / GPS, and even aircraft checklists to enable the advanced user (and this can even include learner pilots with a very reasonable facsimile of the piloting experience.

To create this immersive world that meets the needs of players as learners, several interface attributes are be integrated into the HCI design. Generalizing from usability evaluations of eleven applications and about 250 usability problems Nielsen (1994, pp. 25-62), described these ten heuristics for usable design:

1. Visibility of system status
2. Match between system and the real world
3. User control and freedom
4. Consistency and standards
5. Error prevention
6. Recognition rather than recall
7. Flexibility and efficiency of use
8. Aesthetic and minimalist design
9. Help users recognize, diagnose, and recover from errors
10. Help and documentation

When considering the pedagogic value of microworlds I would agree with Roe, Pratt & Jones (2005) when they assert

We believe that this paradigm has much to teach developers of e-learning platforms and that reflection on the design of our microworlds can help to crystallize what those lessons are.

(Putting the learning back into e-learning, p.3)

The authors of the paper "distil" the characteristics of microworlds as a means of providing context and motivation for engaging with learning content:

Characteristic	Description
Quasi-Concrete Objects	Turkle and Papert (1991) have referred to the way that the computer offers access to formal ideas in a concrete way, since abstract mathematical ideas, represented in iconic form on the screen, can be manipulated directly by the user.
Using Before Knowing	In our everyday lives, we typically use artefacts for particular purposes. Through that use, we learn about the effectiveness of the tool, its limitations, how well it serves that purpose and sometimes we may gain some understanding of how it works. In schools, mathematics is a subject where you learn how to generate the object before you use it. In practice, more often than not, the former task proves too difficult, especially when disconnected from purpose. The computer offers the possibility of turning the learning of mathematics round so that use precedes generation (see the Power Principle, Papert, 1996).
Integrating the Informal and the Formal	diSessa has suggested that we incorporate versions of the formal representations of the mathematical objects in such a way that the child may be able to make connections between the various formalisations and their informal use (diSessa, 1988).
Dynamic Expression	When Papert proposed the turtle as a tool for constructing a dynamic notion of angle (and of course much else), he acknowledged that the computer offers a medium which unlike paper and pencil can incorporate dynamic representations of the world. He suggests that the use of systems which are expressive of dynamic and interactive aspects of the world are more engaging to learn than static and abstract formalisms.
Building	Constructionists base their approach on a tenet that encouraging the building of artefacts is a particularly felicitous way of teaching mathematics. Pratt (2000) has demonstrated how this approach can be modified into related approaches such as mending.
Purpose and Utility	In so doing, emergent knowledge is imbued with utility (Ainley, Pratt & Hansen, in press), in which the abstractions are seen as useful and the limitations of those abstractions are gradually discriminated.

So powerful is the FS platform that Microsoft turned in into a commercial off-the-shelf simulation platform called ESP. As they say themselves:

Microsoft ESP is a visual simulation platform that brings powerful, high-fidelity simulations to widely available, low-cost Microsoft Windows®-based PCs. Organizations that rely on Microsoft ESP can improve their workforce readiness more efficiently and cost-effectively than with traditional computer-based animation or simulation tools. Combined with its developer-friendly Software Development Kit (SDK), Microsoft ESP provides government and commercial entities and modeling and simulation specialists with an affordable, portable, and highly extensible platform for training and learning, decision support, and research and development modeling.

According to industry analyst James Governor the implications of this are "stunning:"

...once you know what the world actually looks like and behaves, you can begin to model changes to the system. What if we deforested this area? What if we removed all the natural predators from a particular marine ecology? What if we banned all car traffic from a city? What might the alternatives look like?

At the end of the 2006 movie Snakes on a Plane, a passenger whose only aviation training was playing video games successfully lands a jumbo jet. While this is of course a cinematic fantasy, you can be sure in the wake of the recent Hudson Miracle simulations like FS are being used to replicate the situation that the plane, crew, and passengers encountered to provide training that will maximize others' chances of survival in such a scenario.

I might just fire up my copy of FS9 and take a trip from Newark myself...

Postscript:

One of the best things about writing an e-elearning blog is its flexibility of the medium to mould itself to accommodate new events.

These days, I'm regularly interrupting one series of posts to discuss new developments in another e-learning related topic: this is a consequence of the ongoing financial crisis. So, dear reader, I'll return to Josh Bersin and the emergence of informal learning presently.
___________

References:

Governor, J. (2008) Living In De-material World: On Microsoft, Train SIM and the Virtual Everything. [Internet] Available from: http://www.redmonk.com/jgovernor/2008/09/25/living-in-de-material-world-on-microsoft-train-sim-and-the-virtual-everything/ Accessed 2 February 2009

Nielsen, J. (1994). Heuristic evaluation. In J. Nielsen & R. L. Mack (Eds.), Usability inspection methods. New York: John Wiley & Sons.

Roe, C.P., Pratt, D., Jones, I. (2005) Putting the learning back into e-learning. In Proceedings of CERME4, Sant Felix de Guixols, Spain [Internet] Available from: http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/wie/courses/degrees/docs/who/students/edrfae/publications/roe-pratt-jones_puttingthelearningbackintoelearning.pdf Accessed 2 February 2009

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The Impact of the Current Economic Crisis on E-Learning: February ‘09 LCBBQ

This month’s Learning Circuits Blog Big Question asks

What is the impact of the economy on you and your organization? What are you doing as a result?

In response, I returned to a post I wrote about a year ago. While reflecting on the LCBBQ I formed the view that the argument I outlined then bears repeating now. Where appropriate I have updated the article to reflect recent developments as the Recession turned into Depression.

The dialectic I am presenting here can be summarized in the following manner: will the positive economic, organizational, and social value of e-learning outweigh traditional human responses an economic crisis? What strategies can we use to ensure the survival of and even the growth of e-learning as an industry in these changing times?

So what's changed in the e-learning industry since the last recession in 2001? I've outlined some discussion points below:

1. First of all: Traditional business practice
2. Developments in Infrastructure & Hardware
3. The E-learning Hype curve
4. Refinements in Content Development Methodologies
5. The Rise if the Read/Write Web
6. The PlayStation Generation - Digital Natives in the workplace

Scroll down to find out more about each of these points.
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Traditional business practice
Historically, when a slowdown or company rationalization occurs, the first against the wall are the folks in the PR, marketing, and training departments. Typically, individuals and organizations revert to previously-learned behaviors in tough times; this usually means going through the process of carrying out tried-and-tested, though not necessarily logical responses to the problems put in front of them. The rationale is as follows:

• Profits are down
• Revenue projections aren't great for the next 12/18 months
• We need to cut our costs
• We need to keep the guys that make the widgets (we need to have product to sell)
• We need to keep the managers of these people (or productivity will go down)
• We need to keep Human Resources in place to manage everyone obviously (it's just a coincidence that I - that is the decision-maker - work in HR!)

• What about those training people? High travel costs for the ILT guys, they pull people out of work for 3 days to go on courses. Large budgets spent on implementing and maintaining an LMS/LCMS, third-party e-learning libraries, custom courseware etc, but they do seem to add value to the organization. And let's face it, they don't really improve the quality of our product, because they never convince us with their ROI metrics...
• Outcome: tea and sympathetic chat, and the Training team get their pink slips / P45s.

Sadly, I reckon that this will be strategy undertaken by a significant number of organizations over the next year or so. However....

...and it's a big however.

Let's look at the evidence for factors that have changed in the e-learning industry since 2001 and the recession following the Dot-Com Crash.

Infrastructure & Hardware
More-or-less general availability of high-speed internet access just wasn't there in 2001. To take the example of the company I worked for at the time, our high-quality courseware was developed in Authorware and Director and delivered to customers on CD-ROM for distribution via their intranet or accessed directly from the disk. Our on-line courseware was a 'lite' version of the CD material - not out of choice, but because of the limited functionality that could be provided to a user via a 56k connection.

Over-compressed images, poor animation, and very poor audio - hardly the immersive learning solution that e-learning flattered to promise at the time. Assuming the learner could access the content successfully, the chances were that the PC (for it was always a PC) that they were using to view their content was processing and displaying the date at a rate that we wouldn't find acceptable on a PDA now (screen-size excluded). Pentium or pre-Pentium processors, 8-bit sound cards, 16 colors, 800x600 pixel displays. And so on.

In short, we could see the potential, but our imaginations exceeded the available technology.

The e-learning hype curve
This brings me neatly to the e-learning hype curve (see Figure 1). Kevin Kruse described 2001 as the year that

...brought the harsh, steep slope of unfulfilled promises. Several high-profile providers shut their doors while many more announced large-scale layoffs in the face of missed revenue targets and crashing stock prices. E-learning advocates retreated to the more defensible ground of "blended learning. This year [went] down as the Trough of Despair.

Figure 1. The E-learning Hype Cycle

I would suggest through familiarization and use, learners expectations are more reasonable about what can be achieved (and perhaps more importantly how it can be achieved through digitally mediated delivery). Given this environment, organizations are now more willing to invest in e-learning as part of their overall training strategy. But is it perceived as a necessity or a luxury?

A year ago I wrote that:

I can't answer that question right now. I suspect that I will be able to answer it 12 months from now, because there will be evidence as to whether decision makers consider e-learning to be a core requirement that effectively meets organizations' training needs.

In light of recent research by Bersin & Associates among others, it seems that The Powers That Be in organizations have judged online training to be found wanting, and are responding by cutting budgets and reassessing learning & development strategies, apparently by beginning to disintermediate training by using non-formal and informal knowledge transfer methods in place of ‘e-training,’ LMSs, and VLEs.

Content development methodologies
I would assert that there is a real opportunity for e-learning here (if L&D professionals are in a to position stand their ground). Without going into the history of this too much, the development of (relatively) easy-to-use authoring tools like Captivate, Articulate (and a whole raft of others), Rapid E-Learning development methodology and the disintermediation principle means that e-learning has fewer up-front costs associated with it than at the turn of the century.

Similarly, if it's done correctly it can be argued that ongoing maintenance and support costs are lower than they ever have been. By developing content with smaller, more flexible teams, the value proposition of e-learning has been enhanced, and the total cost of ownership has been significantly reduced. Outside of e-learning, the take-up of podcasting and streamed media on sites like Blogger and YouTube demonstrates that this ease-of-use of tools and technologies has extended into the community at large.

The Read/Write Web
Who would have thought in 2000 that blogging, social networking, wikis and podcasts would be as big a part of life as they are now? At the start of the century, the Web (and e-learning) could at best be described as a half-duplex medium; it was pretty much all one-way traffic. The development of information platforms has facilitated knowledge-sharing, folksonomies, social interaction, and, key to all this, reciprocity.

We now live in a multiplex world of many voices and ideas, mediated by the internet. At the forefront in using these web technologies is the e-learning industry. By using these tools to develop content I feel we can demonstrate quite effectively that e-learning has a value now that it did not have a decade ago. I would assert that this is particularly true if you take a social-constructivist approach to learning. By the way, I'm happy to entertain debates about the role of formal as opposed to non-formal and informal learning in this environment.

The PlayStation Generation
Concomitant with the read/write web is the PlayStation generation that have grown up over the last number of years. In his seminal essay Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants (2001), Marc Prensky declares:

...students have changed radically. Today’s students are no longer the people our educational system was designed to teach.
Today’s students have not just changed incrementally from those of the past, nor simply changed their slang, clothes, body adornments, or styles, as has happened between generations previously. A really big discontinuity has taken place. One might even call it a “singularity” – an event which changes things so fundamentally that there is absolutely no going back. This so-called “singularity” is the arrival and rapid dissemination of digital technology in the last decades of the 20th century.

Today’s students – K through college – represent the first generations to grow up with this new technology. They have spent their entire lives surrounded by and using computers, videogames, digital music players, video cams, cell phones, and all the other toys and tools of the digital age. Today’s average college graduates have spent less than 5,000 hours of their lives reading, but over 10,000 hours playing video games (not to mention 20,000 hours watching TV). Computer games, email, the Internet, cell phones and instant messaging are integral parts of their lives.

Extending from this, there is a generation of workers who are comfortable with and practiced in the concepts and use of e-learning - take a look at the resources available on www.skoool.ie, an initiative for second-level students in Ireland. I was involved in the development of the first iteration of this site, and it's changed a lot (for the better) since we took those first steps creating it 8 years ago. Similarly in third-level education, there have been significant developments in on-line learning, and I think that it's fair to say that it has become quite embedded in the pedagogy employed by universities: tools like Moodle enable students to upload coursework, take tests, build their own knowledgebases and wikis, and have on-line discussions through a single point of access.

This generation is in the workplace right now. It will expect to learn new skills as their careers develop using the tools that they have always learned on in the past: that is, by using e-learning.

Conclusion
This is a blog entry, not an essay. But consider other factors including transport costs and training in the era of $100 a barrel oil and the value of virtual classrooms; the ROI of e-learning as opposed to traditional methods; even the impact of traditional ways of teaching on the environment ("e-learning" becomes "eco-learning" anyone or even ‘economical-learning’?). I think that if they are in a position to do so, learning professionals are repositioning themselves to re-use the skills they’ve acquired in different contexts – perhaps undertaking their activities from a different platform, or through working in a different domain of expertise.

Ultimately, I would say that all anyone can do at the moment is keep their powder dry and hope for the best in the short term, while preparing for what may be a completely different business environment when the green shoots of recovery finally emerge.

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