Shijina's Blog

Mobile Learning

shijina — Thu, 08 Jan 2009 20:16:57 +0000

Mobile Phones:

An Effective Distance Learning tool

Shijina Jayaprasad

San Jose State University

Abstract

The head of the UN’s agency for information and communication technologies predicts that there will be 4 billion mobile phone users or more than half of the planet’s estimated 6.7 billion inhabitants will have mobile phones by the end of the year 2008. Mobile learning or m-learning is touted as being the next big thing in e-learning. More the mobile phone users, bigger the e-learning market. Millennials learn differently, working adults can’t find time to learn, getting geographically dispersed employees in a classroom is a difficult task − mobile learning could be the answer to these barriers in learning. This paper discusses the happenings in the field of mobile learning and discusses the future of ‘m-learning’.

Mobile Phones:

An Effective Distance Learning tool

The world is converging and education or training is diverging to reach out to people; this diversification is in the form of distance learning, e-learning, and now mobile learning. The term ‘Distance Learning’ is a thing of the past where students and teachers were separated by distance and relied on technology for a common point of communication. In comes mobile learning – distance learning reloaded; here students and teachers are on the move, the former could be a high school student listening to her chemistry class podcast or a sales executive learning the mantra to sell the new product launched by his company; the latter is catering to his tech savvy student or empowering employees of his company to learn while they are travelling. With a market share of half of the world’s population, e-learning companies are looking to capitalize this market as more and more revenue is being invested into e-learning. According to a report by Global Industry Analysts Inc., “eLearning: A Global Strategic Business Report,” e-learning is on the rise, and the demand for it is expected to exceed $52.6 billion by 2010 worldwide.

This paper is divided into five sections and explores different aspects of m-learning.

What is m-learning?

The use of wireless mobile technology such as PDAs, cellular phones, ipods or ultra notebook computers in education and training is making learning more flexible where students can learn from anywhere and at anytime. Mobile learning (mLearning) is novel in that it facilitates delivery of learning to the right person, at the right time, in the right place using portable electronic devices.( Ally, Schafer, Cheung, McGreal, Tin, 2007).

The 360 report by the E-learning Guild on mobile learning states that:

“Any activity that allows individuals to be more productive when consuming, interacting with, or creating information, mediated through a compact digital portable device that the individual carries on a regular basis, has reliable connectivity, and fits in a pocket or purse.”

What types of mobile phones can be used for mobile learning?

The arrival of mobile phones with larger screens and touch-screen and multi-touch technology has opened several doors for having robust e-learning courses on mobile phones. There are millions of phones available in the market, not all of them can be used for e-learning. The factors that should be considered while choosing a mobile phone device for e-learning are operating system (Symbian, Linux, Windows Mobile, Apple, Android, RIM Blackberry, Palm), internet accessibility, screen-size, user interface, keyboard, memory, PC synchronization and security.

According to a survey conducted by the E-learning Guild, Blackberry is the platform of choice for developing mobile learning followed by Windows Mobile and iPhone.

The Assessment and learning in Practice Settings (ALPS) is running a project to use mobile technology to improve higher education assessment and student skills. Nine Hundred Health and Social Care students from the north of England are taking part in this project. The students will be given a T-Mobile MDA vario mobile to use during placement work for assessments and learning.

The assessors will be able to log into a secure area, which will be connected to the university’s virtual learning environment teaching and business systems, to record and store the student’s assessments and results. This is an excellent way to incorporate mobile phones into e-learning.

Designing m-learning

Courses currently available in the html format can be easily viewed in smart phones that have internet access. However, when viewing content on mobile phone factors like text limit, scrolling and audio/video limitations should be considered.

In his blog Al Moser talks about how course content behaves differently when the display window shrinks. Graphic artists and many course creators like to design eLearning courses so that all aspects of the visual layout are tightly controlled. They like to precisely specify the position of each character. This is called absolute positioning. Absolutely positioned pages work well for printed brochures, but don’t work well for environments where the learners have different screen/display sizes.

Mobile devices have different size and capability limitations. Some browsers will resize the fonts, some support zooming, some don’t respect style sheets; some have a portrait layout, etc.

The Apple iPhone does not support flash files and according to a survey conducted by the E-learning Guild 69.2% of the content that is designed is deployed in flash.

There are tools available in the market that can used for creating courses for smartphones some of them are: 5 Minute Outliner, Atlantic Link Content Point, Cram 1.0, iWriter, Learning Mobile Author, Mobile Study, MyLearning Author for Pocket PC, mscape authoring toolkit, Podquiz Maker, Toolbook 9.5, Zirada.

As noted by Ally (2005a), the use of mobile technology in distance education could provide more flexibility for learners, a view that has also been put forward by Rekkedal (2002). Ally also makes the point that mobile learning requires organizational change and careful planning: existing course materials must be converted and new ones developed for delivery on mobile technology; it is necessary to establish a telecommunication infrastructure, train staff and faculty, and so forth.

Future of m-learning

Mobile phones are easily available and reach out to more people than we could ever imagine. It is not only the fact that we could reach out to more people but the fact that a majority of the people who use mobile phones belong to developing countries that generates interest. The literacy rate among these countries is bad but with the advent of mobile learning there are signs that learning opportunities can be created.

In many markets, mobile phones have a product life cycle of 12 months or less. Some subscribers are able to put their new phones to immediate and full use. For others, the learning curve is so steep that they move on to a replacement without having learned to exploit the functionality available in the first one. (Gilbert, Sangwan, & Han Mei lan, 2005, p.1). Such factors could act as a roadblock, but continuous research and development will surely help overcome such roadblocks.

Today mobile learning makes up only about 9.3% of the overall training in an organization and the content that is specifically developed for mobile learning is about 13% (E-learning Guild report). The major barrier to mobile learning is that content developed for other media does not transfer well to mobile phones.

With technological advancements and development of new mobile handsets compatible for e-learning, it won’t be long that most of course that we take on our desktops will then be accessed on our mobile phones.

References

Ally, M. (2005a). Use of Mobile Devices in Distance Education. Paper presented at Mlearn 2005,

October 25-28. Cape Town, South Africa.

Ally, M., Schafer, S., Cheung, B., McGreal, R., Tin, T., Use of Mobile Learning Technology to Train

ESL Adults. Paper presented at Mlearn 2007, October 16-19. Melbourne, Australia.

Gilbert, A. L., Sangwan, S., & Han Mei lan, H. (2005). Beyond Usability: The OoBE dynamics of mobile

data services markets. Personal and Ubiquitous Computing, 9(4), 198-208.

Rekkedal, T. (2002). M-Learning for PDAs: Enhancing the flexibility of distance education. Powerpoint

presentation delivered to Ericsson Education, November 22. Dublin, Ireland. Retrieved February

14, 2007

Wexler, S., Brown, J., Metcalf, D., Rogers, D., Wagner, E., Mobile Learning: What it is, why it matters,

and how to incorporate it into your learning strategy , 360 Report, E-Learning Guild.

e-learning development tools

shijina — Wed, 10 Dec 2008 01:49:08 +0000

E-learning Development Tools

Shijina Jayaprasad

San Jose State University

Abstract

E-learning development is time consuming and slow. Developers use different tool sets, which cater to their requirements. With thousands of tools to choose from it has become more and more difficult to find an optimum e-learning development tool. The question that arises is, does such a tool exist at all? This paper is an attempt to find what e-learning tools are used or most preferred by professionals in the world of Instructional Technology.

There is no set criterion for choosing an e-learning tool; the choice often relies on factors like price, learning curve and results. The choice of an e-learning tool also differs from industry to industry. This paper also talks about the factors that should be considered to achieve maximum results from an e-learning tool.

The research paper will also feature the data collection results, surveys and interviews.

Introduction

Rapid e-learning is a relatively new phrase and approach in the corporate training arena. Rapid e-learning is not a marketing buzz-word, crafted to sell sophisticated authoring tools. It is a fast growing set of instructional techniques that enable faster and cheaper training development in order to meet immediate business needs ([12] Jimenez, 2005).

According to Gustafson (2006), more and more companies are embracing rapid e-learning to augment their learning strategy. With rapid e-learning, organizations can reduce the time spent on course development and can place new capabilities to develop and deliver content into the hands of those who hold the knowledge within a company–the SMEs. Today, new technologies make it possible for those without any IT background to use existing materials–such as presentations, documents and a Web browser–to create and deliver online courses quickly and easily while also being able to track course completion and learner progress. As a result, companies can enjoy the engaging delivery and extensive reach of e-learning while accelerating the distribution of information.

Data Collection

A survey was conducted to find what e-learning tools are currently being used by e-learning professionals. The survey had about 60 respondents from around the world. Data gathered from the survey was studied with the help of bar graphs.

01. What type of organization do you belong to?

Most of the respondents belong to the education industry, followed by consulting, computers and healthcare.

02. What is your designation/position?

The respondents were mostly instructional designers, e-learning specialists and Sr. Instructional designers in their organization.

03. Name the e-learning tool used by you for training and course creation.

Articulate (13.79%) topped the survey, followed by Adobe Captivate (12.07%) and Flash (5.17%).

04. Which category does the tool belong to?

05. Do you use an LMS (Learning Management System)?

Most of the respondents did not use a LMS, however, Moodle LMS and Saba were among the ones that are mostly being used.

06. Do you incorporate audio/video in your courses?

Most of courses developed by the respondents had an element of audio and video.

07. What is your organization’s e-learning budget?

Most of the companies work with an e-learning budget of less than 500k, very few organizations’s spent more than $2million dollars.

08. What is the average time for project completion?

It takes less than six months to complete one e-learning project, very few e-learning projects took more than six months, organization size and project requirement mattered.

09. What is the size of the education/e-learning development team in your organization?

The e-learning teams mostly consisted of just three to four people in one organization; very few organizations had more than 500 people in their organization.

The survey reports clearly point to the fact that developers prefer using rapid e-learning tool to create courses and training materials. In an interview conducted with Cindy Stargiotti, an instructional designer at Synaptics, a touchpad equipment manufacturing company, revealed that they used Articulate Presenter, Engage and Quizmaker to develop their courses.

Telecommunications equipment manufacturer Alcatel (Piano, Texas) also enjoys the highly customizable approach that rapid e-learning allows and has made major strides in moving away from traditional instructor-led programs to more virtual classrooms over the past five years, according to Jo-Ann Killinger, director of customer product training for Alcatel. The company’s channel partners currently create Power Point-based training courses with rapid e-learning

technologies from Articulate (New York), such as its Quizmaker 2.0 tool for making highly customizable Flash-based quizzes, assessments and surveys.

Gillian Duncan, Senior Education Manager at Intuitive Surgical, spoke about her team’s efforts in developing courses for their sales team embedded with video and audio, they preferred Captivate, because of the ease of use and results that Captivate provided. She also spoke about accessibility as one of the concerns and the file downloading issues with Captivate.

Jules Kurtz, also from Intuitive Surgical used Adobe Connect to deliver their courses successfully. Adobe Presenter and Captivate is used at Cisco Systems, Inc. to develop training for new hires, Daisy Tam, Education Specialist at Cisco shared this piece of information.

Issues faced

Experts say to avoid dumping all of your content into the software. Instead, you have to do careful, ongoing assessments to determine which courses are a good fit for rapid tools, and which are not. “It’s in everyone’s best interest to apply the tools as frequently as possible,” says Bryan Chapman, an e-learning analyst with brandon-hall.com in Sunnyvale, California “But you have to watch out that you’re not sacrificing the quality of your courses by using them, and that you’re not applying them to situations for which they aren’t a good fit” (Boehle, 2005).

While struggling with the necessity to train employees quickly, corporations are also facing decreasing budget and human resources that were once available to develop and deliver training, according to systematic, well-thought out approaches. In many instances, even if instructors were available, there would not be enough time to develop a formal course and to bring an instructor up-to-date so that training in the traditional sense could be implemented. It should be noted that this situation may not hold true in the academia, where instructors are the subject matter experts (SMEs) and therefore there are less concerns with the increased time for content development and delivery and with use of sophisticated technology (Taran, 2006).

According to a survey conducted by the E-learning Guild, an authoritative entity in the area of research within the instructional design field, out of 600 companies that were investigated, 82 percent develop content in-house. Based on a Bersin and Associates research, out of 4,500 surveys, 46 percent of respondents admitted that their request for training is time critical (four weeks or less). According to the same survey, the two most prevalent problems reported within a corporate training setting are that it takes too long to build training and that it is often too difficult to work with SMEs (Bersin and Associates, 2005).

Conclusion

The choice of an e-learning tool varies from organization to organization and person to person. Most of the tools present in the market provide rapid e-learning development options. But it is the requirement not the tool that dictates what should be used for course creation. The requirement could be of converting static PowerPoints to interactive courses, in this case you use PowerPoint add-in tools like Articulate Presenter or Adobe Presenter. Screen-Capturing tools like Captivate, Snag-It or Camtasia helps in designing demonstrations, but tools like Captivate go a step further and you can create an entire e-learning package from scratch. Rapid e-learning development tools like Apple Keynote, Trivantis Lectora, Respondus StudyMate, KnowledgePlanet Firefly, Raptivity, etc. are also popular.

Dreamweaver, a popular web authoring tool, is also extensively used for course creation, Audacity is a popular audio/podcasting tool, Jott and Garageband also provide easy to create podcast interface.

Web meeting conferencing tools like Yugma, Elluminate and Adobe Connect offer an excellent platform to reach out to your target audience. There are a host of Learning Management Systems, Moodle is a popular Learning Management System. Content Management systems like Drupal and Joomla are also used to publish content online.

Web 2.0 tools are very popular amongst e-learning developers as it fosters collaborative learning among the learners. Blogging tools like wordpress, edublogs and blogger and wiki tools like PB Wiki, Wikispaces, MediaWiki are also popular.

The world of e-learning is expanding, with further improvements in the technological front, future e-learning tools will alleviate several issues like huge development costs and time.

References

Gustafson, J. (2006, July). Delivering Training at the Speed of Learning. Training, pp. 7,7.

Factiva and Alcatel Resolve Training Challenges Using Rapid E-Learning Tools. (cover story).

(2006, June 9). Corporate Training & Development Advisor.

Boehle, S. (2005, July). Rapid E-learning. Training, 42(7), 12-17.

Bersin and Associates (2005), “Rapid elearning: what works”, available at:

www.elearningresearch.com

Carmen Taran (2006). Enabling SMEs to deliver synchronous online training – practical

guidelines. Campus – Wide Information Systems, 23(3), 182-195.

Jimenez, R. (2005), “Rapid e-learning design and development”, Vignettes Training, available at:

www.vignettestraining.com

Research Paper Draft

shijina — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 07:17:24 +0000

Data Collection Procedures

Surveys: Surveyed 56 e-learning professional from across the world. Sent out online survey link via e-mail and also posted on professional e-learning groups.

Interviews: Conducted three face to face interviews and one telephonic interview of instructional designers working at various levels in their organization. Discussed about the type of e-learning development tools used by and why they chose those tools and the pros and cons of using those tools.

E-learning Guild: Referred to various studies and research conducted by the Guild those were in line with my research.

Online Journals: Referred work done by researchers.

Design of the study

The research paper will be a comparative analysis between the different e-learning tools based on usability, ability to create animations and simulations, ability to create e-learning templates, ability to screen capture, compatibility with LMS’s and so on. Based on the survey, top 15 tools will be chosen and detailed analysis of those tools will be provided, these tools will be sorted as authoring tools, video editing tools and LMS’s.

The research paper will also feature the interview summary report of various instructional designers interviewed.

Data

The data for the research report will primarily be fed through surveys. The following questions were asked in the survey:

1. What type of organization do you belong to?

2. What is your designation/position?

3. Name the e-learning tool used by you for training and course creation.

4. Which among the following categories does this tool belong to?
5. Why did you choose this e-learning tool or what are the key features of this e-learning tool?

6. Do you use a separate tool for assessment creation? If yes, please specify

7. Do you use a different tool for template creation? If yes, please

8. Do you use an LMS (Learning Management System)? If yes, please specify 9. Do you incorporate audio and video in your courses/ training materials?

10. What is your organization’s e-learning budget?

11. What is the average time for project completion?

12. What is the size of the education/e-learning development team in your organization?

Analysis of Data

The data collected from the survey will be analyzed with the help of pie charts and bar graphs. This will help in determining the tools mostly used by e-learning professionals today.

Overall the main purpose behind this research paper is to help instructional designers to choose the right tools for designing e-learning content. This paper will provide a robust list of tools available in the market and the most popular ones being currently used.

What e-learning tool is best for you?

shijina — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 20:19:40 +0000

My quest for finding e-learning tools used by professionals today is coming to end. I interviewed instructional designers, surveyed over 50 people and have got some interesting results. What I learnt from this experience is that though there are thousands of tools out there, people like to use tools based on their level of requirement, comfort, and creativity.

I am not a big promoter of using software tools, if your instructional blueprint is in place, a simple PowerPoint presentation can be used to meet your learning needs.

What I mean by an instructional blueprint is, a thorough understanding of your target audience, content design, and delivery/evaluation.

I got some interesting results from my survey, most of the respondents were Sr. Instructional Designers and worked in teams of three or four. They spent less than 500k for training and development and took less than 6 months to finish a course.

I am now putting together the information and hope it will be useful for fellow ID’s to know what tools are there in the market and which ones are the most popular.