Mobile Learning: what’s it all about?

I’m tackling at least one new learning trend, tool or idea each month this year. It’s all part of my efforts to grow my own skills and bring more to our clients. Mostly though, I need to start being a “lifelong learner” again – something I haven’t been very good at in the past year. This month, I want to learn more about mobile learning.

We all know mobile learning or mLearning about learning on mobile devices like smartphones and tablets. I know that my favourite authoring tool (Articulate Storyline) publishes to mobile-friendly formats like HTML5 but what’s really involved in developing successfully for a mobile learner?

So, this month, I’m going to dive a little bit and answer a few questions for myself and hopefully for you too. Sure, I’m not the first one to discover this… it’s been a trend for a while. I’m allowed to catch up, right?

My questions

Here’s a few questions I want to answer:

1. What exactly is mobile learning? I’m going to explore more examples and see how “traditional” learning is converting to mobile.
2. Why are learners looking for mobile solutions? Do they need on-demand learning or is it just convenience of having their phone wherever they are?
3. What should we do differently if we know some of our audience is mobile?
4. How do we design (and develop) for both mobile and non-mobile learners?
5. When and how do we consider learners using multiple devices?

How am I going to answer them? Google is my friend but I also have bookmarks from TD.org and Allen Interactions to take a look at. Of course, I’m also going to visit the eLearning Guild to see what they have in their archives too.

So there you have it. Five questions I’m going to research. Can you answer them? Watch for my next post. I’ll (hopefully) have some answers.