Mobile Learning for the Working World

Mobile learning makes sense on the campus where students are focused on learning and are in a state of constant motion between classroom, living, and comman areas on campus. Additionally, a mobile device that will get thousands of hours of use over four years seems cost justified. But what about the world of work?

Can we build a case for a tranistion to more mobile forms of learning in the business world? I think the answer is "yes", but the strength of the business case for mobile learning depends upon two key factors. First, how mobile is the worker? Second, how high is the worker's demands for learning?

The business case for the highly mobile worker who has high demands for structured learning seems fairly obvious.  Earlier in my career I worked for a global management consulting firm.  The consultants of the firm--and firms like them--are the poster children of a mobile, learn-on-demand workforce.  Each progressive consulting assignment brought on the need to develop new skills.  Each step up the career ladder came with significant learning requirements. Many consulting firms have already proven the value of elearning, online learning, and blended learning to their organizations.  Pushing content to mobile platforms should be the logical next step for them.  As an added benefit, the mobile device is well-suited to the 24x7 communication, social networking, and knowledge management demands of these firms.

Not so obvious is the value of mobile learning to the highly mobile, but who doesn't have the need for significant amounts of structure learning that can be accomplished outside of the classroom.  Take for example a flight attendant on a passenger jet.  They are highly mobile, but do they have substantial, ongoing learning needs that would be satisfied with a mobile learning device?  I doesn't appear to me that they do.  Their first job is safety.  They have to know the proper safety procedures for each type of aircraft that the fly in.  And, they have to know this before they get on the plane.  Procedures do change somewhat over time, but generally, the leaning content is very stable once the aircraft goes into service.  So, it would pretty tough to make a business case for mobile learning for this worker and workers like them.

Finally, there is the worker who isn't mobile at all.  The worker that spends their entire day in a single location. The bank teller, for example, spends the majority of their day at their teller window. Their work responsibilities rarely takes them far from their window and their work is done entirely inside of a branch. However, tellers often have a high demand for ongoing learning.  They may be working to move up the career ladder in their bank or they may be simply trying to keep up the ongoing changes with the banks services.  Banks have typically met this need with a combination of classroom and technology-delivered learning events.  Mobile learning may offer a way to break free of some of the constraints of the learning infrastructure that has been built for these workers.

King for a Day on the Mobile Campus

In my Mobile Campus post I said that I would say more about a future campus ebook that I am hopeful will appear on the campus and how forward thinking professors, department heads, and deans will take advantage of the technology to enable learning.

First, the device. It will be a blend of the current PDA, tablet PC, and ebook reader devices. It will have a display that is big enough to get about a paperback's worth of information on the screen with plenty of space left over for media-rich extensions. Full audio and video capability with a video camera facing the user. A combination of touch-screen and hardware button interfaces that facilitates one handed use to hold, read, and turn pages. Full 3G and WiFi, plus Bluetooth for device-to-device or peripheral communication. Storage that can hold over 100 books and 300 hours of video.

The software will be a blend of ebook, elearning, and web technologies. The foundation is a an ebook reader. The reader needs to be fully interactive and media rich. Everything that a student can do with today's LMS course packs that accompany text books will be accomplished on the mobile device. Resources that a student will need for a course will be in the course pack and on the reader. Texts and supplemental reading, lectures, quizzes, and study aids will all reside on the ebook. Reference materials in the library or on the internet and access to a social networks of students and professors will be in the wireless computing cloud surrounding the ebook. The reader software will accommodate the way that a student, rather than a casual reader, uses a book. The ebook will have sophisticated highlighting and annotation capabilities that can be used for both study and for scholarly writhing. Part of this sophisticated software will be the ability to send text from the ebook to another PC and into a paper they are writing. Of course the quote comes fully attributed and formatted. And, since the professor has a master version of the course pack software running on his PC, any attempts at plagiarism of course pack materials is immediately spotted.

With this device the student will be able to do all course work except write long papers or create complex spreadsheets or presentations. Those tasks will still require the use of a more capable PC.

So what wll the colleges do differently? The early adopters will be graduate cohort programs in which the overall curriculum is under the supervision of a director or department head. Full-time and xecutive MBA programs are two examples. Cohort programs are able to compell a student to purchase an ebook or provide it to them as part of the program tuition cost. They are also able to provide professors with elearning resources, such as developers and technicians, and can ensure that curriculm take advantage of the ebook capabilities.

Cohort programs, especially those for mid-carer professionals, are also able to take advantage of blended learning techniques and build blended learning into their curricula. From my perspective there is a synergy with blended and mobile learning. Mobile learning frees the learner from the classroom. Blended learning provides learning opporunities outside the classroom. Professors will be able to create media-based lectures or use those provided by course pack publishers to better prepare students for in-class participation. Students will be able to prepare with flexible learning options and a resource that brings all of the materials they need to them in any place or at any time.

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.

No war, but plenty of skirmishes

OK, I know this is off-topic from what I said this blog was going to be about. I've had a strong interest in the talent management and workforce planning that dates back to my first reading of the Hudson Institute's Workforce 2000 in the 1980s.

A recent article in ASTD's Learning Executives briefing puts forward the idea that the predicted war for talent isn't going to occur. More specifically, that a broad talent shortage as defined by the total U.S. labor force isn't going take place. OK, so there isn't going to be an outright war, but are you going to be involved in a local skirmish for talent?

If you have a role in talent management--attracting, developing, or retaining employees--then you my find yourself in the midst of a local skirmish. An article in the March 2009 BLS newsletter indicates that only health care, mining, and government industries added jobs in 2008. If you are in the health care industry I doubt if anyone will be able to convince you that you are not in the midst of a war, excuse me, skirmish for talent. The unemployed from the 3 million jobs lost in manufacturing, manufacturing, retail, etc. aren't of much help to the recruiter looking for skilled health care workers.

Getting back to mobile and social learning

The technological world of smart phones, ebook readers, and thin-client laptops that access wireless 3G and WiFi networks are ready to take us back to mobile and social learning. Back? But I thought all of this was new?

When I entered college in the late 1970s I soon learned about mobile learning within social networks. I took my books and class notes to the library or student union where I studied with other students from my classes. At first, all we had in common was the university and the classes we were taking together. Generally, we only knew one another from our mutual classes. But we soon introduced one another to other friends, be they from our dorm, a fellow fraternity or sorority pledge, or someone we knew from home. Our networks let us learn from on another and to share our particular strengths. Even though we learned outside the classroom and with other students, our mobile range and social reach was very limited. There was no easy way for us to reach everyone on campus let alone study with students at a different university. A few years later when I joined the world of work I realized that corporate learning was not significantly different from the academic world. Classes were still held in formal classroom settings, but they also were held anywhere they were needed. A lunch table, office, or a conference room could become an instant classroom. Learning took place where and when needed.

But then, something started to change in the early 1980s. A few companies started to provide training over mainframe computer networks. Some started to produce video classes for playback on a VCR. Others created courses to be broadcast on private satellite networks. Colleges and universities implemented these new technologies as well. Soon, the personal computer was added to this mix of educational delivery media. Eventually, what this led to was a place were learning had become less mobile and less social. To learn, learners had to be at a very specific location, such as a desk-top office computer. And, because they was taking a self-paced, PC-based class, they didn't have any classmates nor did they know who else in the company was taking the same class at the same time.

In he past few years the shift has started back from isolation towards socialization. Educators, both corporate and academic, are creating environments where learners can come together via distance technology. Part of this shift is simply the ability of the WiFi-capable laptop to free the learner from their desk and let them move about the college campus or company office building. Some is the growing use of distance technology that provides audio and video over the internet. The student may still be required to take an online course module, but they can do it in the physical or virtual company of other students. Another, and I think more important part, is that educators are starting to build social interaction back into their courses. For too long learning has been about the learner, now, it is becoming more about the learners. Many courses are including discussion forums and chat sessions. Educators are using social networking tools to connect with students and to allow students to connect with one another.

So what does this mean for learning in the coming decade? Well, that gives me something for my next blog.

First Post

Welcome to my blog. Social media and mobile computing are poised to have a dramatic effect upon adult learning in both higher education and corporate learning and development in the coming decade. Just as early efforts in the 1970's and 1980's to create computer-based learning led to the now widespread use of elearning and online learning, the social media and mobile computing advances during the past few years are building a foundation for a new vision of adult learning.

This blog will provide a forum for my thoughs on this new vision. It will serve as an electronic repository of links to other blogs, wikis, and websites the contain information related to this vision. And it will be a place for experimentation and the testing of new ideas and technologies. Even though blogging itself isn't new, it is new to me.

Like many new bloggers I have written countless memos, position papers, emails, and newsletter articles for internal corporate consumption; a seemingly endless stream of academic papers while in graduace school; and dozens of course modules for use in corporate learning and in higher education. I have developed presentations for professional conferences and even produced scripts for corporate TV . But what I have don't done is written for a blog. So, here I go.