Mobile was getting hot at the latest eLearning Guild conference (delightful as always). A number of the usual suspects were there; in addition to my session David Metcalf (University of Central Florida) and Judy Brown (University of Wisconsin) had sessions on mobile. Most interesting to me was the final panel where David Holcombe of the eLearning Guild had aggregated preliminary results of their mobile learning survey (the most recent of their ongoing research program), and had David, Judy, Ellen Wagner (Adobe) and myself reflect on the results.
It was interesting to hear how we reacted to the results for each question in the survey. The commonalities were that people have to stop thinking about mobile as eLearning Lite ™, and take a broader perspective.
The take homes included:
- your ‘charges‘, the folks you look out for, already have mobile devices, and while they may be heterogeneous there are already broad solutions possible
- not to focus on courses but think broader about what you could do for performance with dribbling information at the right time and/or place
- to not miss the ‘low-hanging fruit‘ of ensuring that the web information you already have up will work on mobile devices
- not to treat this as a pilot project, but consider the ROI of what you‘re doing (not specific to mlearning, but worth reiterating)
What wasn‘t stated really explicitly, but which was an underlying theme, is that you have to start looking at your infrastructure in a broader way; not just your LMS, but your CMS, your portals, the network, etc. Which is part and parcel of realizing you‘re not just about training, you must be about improving performance. Which is part and parcel of moving training from a cost-center in HR to a contributing component of organizational success.
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