The Mobile Campus

Now is the time of year when a little more than 18 million US college students are starting their fall semesters. Many are arriving on campus with mobile devices such as smart phone, PDAs, iPods, and laptops. Some are even showing-up with ebook readers, such as the Kindle. However, most are arriving at schools that are, at best, deploying classroom media strategies from the 1990s.

Lets look at a typical class at a typical community college or university. First, the class has a comprehensive and up-to-date textbook. This text has a companion CD/DVD or website that provides supplement materials, such as study aids and links to additional resources. The text may also have a companion online course package that runs on the school's LMS. A fully deployed course package is an online syllabus that provides all of the companion information mentioned above and can also be used for assignment/homework management, testing, and other course management tasks. The LMS offers capabilites such as discussion forums and online chats that can be built into the course curriculum. All of this technology is accessed via a PC. And, to the extent to which the student has a mobile PC, the course is mobile.

But a laptop isn't as mobile as a PDA, iPod, iPhone, or Kindle. So the next stop in moving towards mobile has to be the migration or repurposing of content to the mobile device and the incorporation of mobile strateges into higher education focused LMSs. Some of the content migration will be relatively simple. Moving an audio or video lecture from PC to iPod formats is not at all difficult. Accessing a chat or discussion forum is also simple to do with today's mobile technology. But there are some roadblocks that will take some work and investment to make mobile happen.

First, we're just starting to see a movement towards college texts being available as ebooks. And by ebook I mean fully optimized for view in an ebook format, not just a PDF file of the text that allows for online reading. So the first roadblock is getting texts into ebook format. The second, is that as much as I enjoy my iPhone, it isn't a great ebook reader. Simply pushing text out to relatively small devices isn't the answer. Instead, I think the answer is a new kind of ebook format that is a combination of audio, video, graphics, and text that delivers a media-rich mobile lecture experience. Instead of just reading the book, I expereince it. More about this in a future blog.

Second, the LMSs will have to become mobile smart. They will need custom applications that fully integrate the capabilites of the mobile devise with the data on the LMS server. Today, I can use Safari on my iPhone to view a campus LMS. But it isn't optimized for it. I have to constantly manage text sizes and orientation for optimal viewing. This optimizatin also means integrating the personal management capabililties of the PDA (such as the calendar) with the LMS. If a class is having an online chat this afternoon, the student's calendar should know it and remind them. Or, if a student needs to speak with their professor, a Skype-like application could connect them.

The college classroom has come a very long way in the past 20 years. Forward thinking rofessors have taken advantage of what the the PC and the LMS have enable and reshaped the delivery of much of our undergraduate education. Mobile will do even more in the next 20.