If you’ve been paying attention to mobile learning, hopefully you’ve heard about my recent book, Designing mLearning. I’m proud of it, as I feel I did a pretty good job of addressing the important issue: helping you get your mind thinking different which is an important component of taking advantage of mobile. I also covered examples (thoughtfully provided by a number of my colleagues in the space), design processes, strategy and more.
However, as the subtitle suggests (Tapping into the Mobile Revolution for Organizational Performance), it’s focused on helping businesses and other organizations take advantage of mobile technologies to largely meet internal learning and performance needs. Unfortunately, the term mlearning tends to get people to immediately think of ‘courses on a phone’, which is not the value proposition mobile largely provides. So the book is relatively sparse on the side of formal learning.
So I was asked to write a book on mobile learning for higher education, which means focusing on using mobile to support the student experience (otherwise, it’s back to the first book). And I’m pleased to announce that this book is now out: The Mobile Academy: mLearning for Higher Education. And it’s a very different book, with a very different cut through mlearning.
This book is more completely about how do you use mobile devices to augment formal learning. While there is a chapter on meeting student administrative needs, the rest is focused on looking at the different elements of instruction and how mlearning can be used to broaden and deepen the experience. Consequently, three of the main chapters are on content roles in learning, developing interactivity for practice, and adding in the social component. While it’s specifically focused on higher education for practical reasons, there are no fundamental reasons why a large portion of it is relevant at least in secondary schools as well (with no discussion of developmental levels nor child-appropriate form-factors, it’s less applicable to K-6).
So now there are two different books, for two different audiences. If you’re focused on formal learning, that is in delivering courses as a business, this new one is for you. If, instead, your role is supporting performance in the organization (including but not limited to augmenting courses), the original one is for you. (And, please, do not assume you want the new one if you’re part of the learning or training unit in an organization, unless there’s another unit responsible for performance support and social learning.)
I hope that one or the other of these will help you ‘get going’ with mlearning.
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