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By Eva Kaplan-Leiserson
The term has been bandied about for years now.
Chris von Koschembahr
Chris von Koschembahr is IBM’s Worldwide Mobile Learning Executive. He was responsible for many of the company’s early e-learning successes and, more recently, created IBM’s first m-learning solutions.
Koschembahr is adamant that those who define m-learning solely as courses delivered on devices with tiny screens have a too-narrow view. In his definition, mobile learning is “the new possibilities that are available to people given the mass deployment of devices that everyone now has in their hands and the new connectivities that are coming.”
Often, those new possibilities are much simpler than what people imagine as mobile learning. They can include, for instance, simple Web lectures consisting of PowerPoint presentations and audio narration—IBM learners have “consumed” more than 1.5 million of these since 1997—or even just what IBM calls profiled notification.
With this solution, learners outline their interests and needs and then relevant information is pushed to them via text messages on their cell phones. They can receive, for example, a notice about a new course added to the curriculum they’ve been working on or a reminder that the online Webinar they’re signed up for is about to begin.
The point is, Koschembahr says, that mobile learning is easier than you think, and you can get started immediately.
For those looking for fuller-featured solutions, IBM offers them as well. But full-featured doesn’t have to mean complex. IBM coined a phrase that’s starting to gain traction in the m-learning arena: “develop once, deliver many.” In other words, don’t develop content specifically for mobile learning. Code your content in such a way that you can create it once and consume it in a variety of ways (for example, online, offline, via CD-ROM, on PocketPC, and so forth).
The power of m-learning, according to Koschembahr, is its immediacy and ability to fill learners’ dead time. For example, via IBM’s offerings, a pharmaceutical salesperson waiting at the airport can be notified that the FDA just approved a competitor’s drug and then receive a link to a Web lecture on how to sell against it.
In another example, a sales associate on the floor at an electronics store who has a few minutes of downtime can scan the barcode of a product and learn more about it. He or she can even scan several similar products and access a comparison matrix to learn about their differences.
Q+A
EKL: Obviously IBM is really putting m-learning into practice. But where do you think the view that it’s been over-hyped has come from?
CK: I think what happened, and thank goodness we fixed things, was that everyone in the marketplace was spinning out this term m-learning. And it’s cool, but people don’t buy m-learning. You can take advantage of its capabilities for a business application deployment for a sales force, field force, and so forth, but people don’t buy m-learning. It’s a capability.
We gave it almost too much focus and drew attention to it, but pretty quickly we learned to back off and weave it through our existing offerings as a differentiator for us and a competitive advantage for the customers. We found that we need to get in the middle of these discussions with an important triad—the line of business (LOB) executive, the CIO, and then the CLO—and be the catalyst.
The LOB exec is the person who is going to drive an m-learning deployment. Clearly no one would ever deploy a device just for learning. But the LOB executives certainly would because they’re trying to give a competitive advantage or be more efficient. I use the term enablement. The CLO can say, if you have connectivity out to our endpoints, think about what you can distribute in a profiled fashion.
EKL: Is there anything that differentiates content that can be delivered via m-learning and content that can’t?
CK: Oh, anyone who tells you that anything can be delivered is not telling the truth. It’s garbage in, garbage out. You’ve seen some presentations even in a boardroom where there are some flowcharts that are inappropriate even in that context. If it’s bad up on screen, it’s going to look really bad on a mobile device. Screen resolution is lagging. But, if you saw this simple Web lecture, this PowerPoint with the audio, it looks really good on a PocketPC.
You’ve got to start thinking outside of the box of these current devices and make some assumptions and let’s get on with it. [New devices are coming along all the time.] So then, yes, just about all content will be much more appropriate on these type of devices. Right now we’re in this in-between state where it’s getting very doable but not everything is deliverable.
EKL: Is the reason m-learning has been slow to come to reality because the technology just wasn’t there yet?
CK: I think too quickly people thought m-learning was learning on the little screen. They said there’s no way. Because everyone I spoke to, when I quickly said, let’s just look at the lowest common denominator of SMS, they all got it.
Secondly, I was presenting at learning conferences but not to the people who had to make the decision. It‘s the LOB guy. So it was almost like we were preaching to the wrong people. So what we’ve done differently is, while we still approach the CLO, we pretty quickly ask if there are any LOB initiatives that he needs to support, and whether we can broaden the discussion.
The last ten years have been about companies redefining themselves and engineering themselves. We called it e-business. The next wave now is to go the final mile out to the front line. So the line of business folks are deploying the next wave of ERP. We just need to get in there and say, hey, we could be enhancing what you’re already trying to do.
EKL: How long before m-learning is widespread in any incarnation?
CK: I’m going to say five years. There’s still so much device stuff. It’s not moving quite as fast as I’d like it to be. But everything’s getting smaller and more fully functional. There are still some human issues. For example [if we put PC displays in eyeglasses], do I always want to see my PC screen while I’m walking down the street? Am I going to bump into people?
There’s never going to be one device that everyone carries for the near term, so instead we say, why don’t you just face up to that and deal with how do we do the lowest common denominator, and then provide additional access to people with better devices. And just make it a stepped approach like that. That’s the only way to do it.
Clark Quinn
Clark Quinn has been involved with e-learning for more than 20 years, having designed his own major in computer-based education as an undergraduate. He has a doctorate in cognitive psychology, is executive director of the consultancy OtterSurf Labs, and co-founded the Meta-Learning Lab [www.meta-learninglab.com].
In 2000, he wrote an article for the Line Zine e-magazine, “mLearning:
Q+A
EKL: What’s your definition of m-learning?
CQ: E-learning through mobile computational devices, and a lot more. It’s beyond the traditional e-learning view, including performance support and emphasizing contextualized and minimalist approaches, and beyond.
EKL: In your opinion, what is the ideal type of content to be delivered via mobile learning?
Minimal! It can be any content, but it can’t be a lot. I don’t think m-learning is e-learning lite, however. I think it’s a different relationship. For one, it’s closer to performance support. What it can and should be is an adjunct to some initial concept presentation, but one that keeps the learning active over a long period of time with smaller bits, something we don’t do with e-learning.
Given what we know about learning, we should be working on small bits over time regardless. With a mobile solution, we could be doing that and using the events in our lives as the practice, not some artificial simulation.
EKL: Does anything need to be different from an instructional design standpoint for m-learning content?
CQ: Yes! Traditional instructional design has this all-encompassing model, and it doesn’t know how to cope with a minimalist, and a long-term, approach. M-learning is more a mentoring relationship than an instructional one. What is the right form of content to perform now but learn a little bit along a long trajectory of development? How often, and how do we do it in the context of real-life activities? These are questions that should drive a research agenda.
EKL: In 2000, you said we’re just on the cusp of achieving the potential of m-learning. Where are we now in 2005? To some people it may seem like not much progress had been made.
CQ: If we’re still on the cusp, that’s more due to the economic downturn over the past few years than a fundamental flaw in the logic. To be fair, there’s been a steady increase in the infrastructure (greater penetration of phones, increase in networks, and so forth), that makes it a more attractive and practical proposition now. I actually think we’re now past the cusp and on our way. After being on the stump for mobile learning for the last couple of years, we’re beginning to see some action: initial contracts, some experiments, and so forth.
EKL: What have been the biggest obstacles to m-learning deployment?
CQ: There are some platform issues: People seem to be held up thinking whether they should design for Pocket PC or Palm, whether to do a phone or a PDA solution, and so forth. [But] I think the barriers have been more organizational. People have not been in an experimental mode, the vision is still low in the organization, decision makers are not there yet.
EKL: What’s making m-learning more feasible today than when you wrote that article in 2000?
CQ: The obvious advance is in the devices: better screens, phones, networks, and so forth. But I think the more important advance is in various efforts towards standards, things like XML giving us content separated from formatting and allowing customization for the delivery medium, and for things like Web services and meta-tagging that allow us to more accurately address the information need.
EKL: Can you give a few examples of the best mobile learning implementations you’ve seen recently?
CQ: Actually, the ground-breaking implementations aren’t that new. Elliot Soloway’s GoKnow has been developing apps that let kids collect and share thoughts for a while now. The use of tablet computers in medicine is relatively old. A couple of years ago Knowledge Anywhere produced an application that taught mobile communications salesfolks how to use their PocketPC phones to stay in touch and demo to their customers.
Much of the new stuff is in research labs and isn’t hitting the workplace yet. Interestingly, one new idea, context-aware systems, is being led by museums, where proximity to a display triggers appropriate activities.
EKL: Do you think mobile learning is more hype or reality right now, or somewhere in between?
CQ: I think m-learning is more potential than reality now, but I don’t think it’s over-hyped. There really is incredible opportunity. The gold rush hasn’t happened yet. When it does, yes, there’ll be hype, but it’s still nascent yet.
EKL: What are your predictions for mobile learning?
CQ: First, as companies begin to see the advantages of supporting long-term learning as well as contextualized performance support, we’ll see an upward trend in custom content development for mobile learning. Second, as companies increasingly single-source content, moving from separate and redundant production to populating content models to meet a variety of needs, this content will be made available through mobile interfaces on demand. With the appropriate models of context and content, we’ll see workflow learning-like push models.
EKL: Anything else you’d like to add?
CQ: I want to raise a flag here in regards to self-directed learning. We can’t yet guarantee that we have such learners (to the contrary). So just providing access is not sufficient, we need to push support. I think we can do one more thing, and we should: help individuals learn to learn. Hence my involvement in the Meta-Learning Lab. That can be accomplished through a layer on top of our learning systems. Imagine, a learning system that not only meets your immediate needs, but develops you over time!
Published: April 2005
Source: http://mlearning-world-swicki.eurekster.com/Mobile+Learning/
Learning while on a trip. As mobile technologies continue to evolve, m-Learning will grow as a rich, collaborative and conversational experience, whether in classrooms, homes, waiting in line, or even while traveling.
