Moodle is a good LMS with which has grown over the years and offers a host of functionality and features that are very useful to have in an LMS. Add to it the fact that its open source which makes it free to use, has made it very popular.

Moodle has been able to sustain itself and keep evolving through its community, resulting in its emergence as a good option for anyone wanting to use an LMS. But is Moodle or any other open source LMS (there are a few good ones like the ones mentioned here) really free? Though they may be free at a tangible expense level, they do carry a cost which the organization implementing the LMS should be aware and careful of.

One of the key challenges associated with mLearning development is to manage development across varied types of devices and platforms. With new devices being launched every week and no clear cross device platform to target, procuring myriad devices for testing is very difficult or at the very least expensive. Adobe’s Device Central is an application bundled with Adobe’s Creative Suite [which includes tools like Flash Professional, Photoshop, Dreamweaver etc.] of products and attempts to provide just that – the ability to simulate a variety of devices.

The war between Adobe and Apple just got hotter. With the announcement of iPhone OS 4.0 Apple has revised the Developer Program License Agreement to ban the use of cross compiler tools like Unity3d, Appcelerator’s Titanium, Adobe’s Flash CS5 etc. for developing iPhone and iPad applications. As per the new agreement developers can use only C, C++, Objective-C, and JavaScript to develop iPad/iPhone apps. Some companies like PhoneGap, Appcelerator and Unity3d having cross compiler products [that can publish the same code for iPhone/iPad or other mobile devices] have clarified or assured that the apps developed using their tools would still be accepted by Apple but there is no official response from Adobe on this.

Adobe recently announced AIR for Mobile devices. This is an outcome of the Adobe initiated Open Screen Project, which was started a couple of years back. The Open Screen Project was started to help create a singular experience on multiple devices (using Flash) be it Computers, Mobiles, TV or Game consoles. There are several futuristic videos about how it will work available at http://www.openscreenproject.org/.

Learning Technologies 2010 was a great learning experience. Listening to some good speakers and sharing thoughts & ideas with some equally brilliant attendees was delightful. Earlier I posted my recap of the event (day 1, day 2) mentioning the strong and definite trend towards social, informal, and collaborative learning. While the event is over, the discussions and learning continues in the blogosphere.

Recently we’ve made the UpsideLMS compatible to mobile devices and also launched a new version – UpsideLMS Version 4.0. While ensuring compliance, we encountered some interesting issues in the implementation of SCORM and found very little help online about implementing SCORM for mobile devices. So we thought sharing that experience might help.

Mobile devices have limitations:

- Screen size
- Availability of required technology/software like J2ME, a compatible browser
- Availability of consistent internet connection

1. Do Serious Games Work? Results from Three Studies
Some studies help answer some of the questions now surrounding serious games-or games whose primary purpose is something other than entertainment, such as military training, education, physical therapy-and determine the relationship between the use of video games and learning as measured on standardized tests. More research is needed, but these findings provide some answers to both skeptics and supporters.

That the LMS needs to incorporate social learning elements is no longer a point of debate but both a question of survival for the LMS itself and also a test of how the LMS handles the balance of both the elements of training and the ‘networkedness’ of the social learning.  We’ve been hearing of experts commenting that LMSs today don’t come with appropriate social media technology built in.

We’d like to differ; the UpsideLMS comes with a unique social learning framework that lets users actually access such social tools from within the LMS in a robust and secure environment for connecting to and sharing with fellow users. Letting users move beyond routine training, into actual personal development.

I have great respect for Apple as an organization particularly because I use an iPhone and I think the iPhone has definitely become one of those game-changers in the smartphone world and by a large margin.

I was looking forward to the Apple iPad even more so as we have been doing good stuff on mobile learning and putting up applications and tools on iPhone as pilots and on a trial basis. The iPad was supposed to be better and bigger than the iPhone, closer to a computer and much more than just a phone.

The Horizon 2010 report has been published and is available for download. It’s definitely worth a read; lots of interesting trends that will affect the way we live and learn.

I found it interesting that the report points to mobile computing and open content as being on the near-term horizon, within the next 12 months. To follow after on the horizon are electronic books and augmented reality.

We are happy to share that Upside Learning has again won global recognition from Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu and Red Herring.

We have been included as a Winner in Deloitte’s Technology Fast 500 Asia Pacific 2009 Program for the second year running. This program ranks the top 500 public and private technology companies with the fastest annual revenue growth rates in Asia Pacific over the past three years. It includes companies based in Australia, China (Hong Kong), India, Japan, Korea, Malaysia, New Zealand, Singapore, Taiwan, and Thailand. Participating companies come from diverse industry sectors like software, electronics, biotech and pharmaceuticals, media and entertainment, and green technology.

The Big Question posed on Learning Circuits this time,as always, is thought provoking –

What did you learn about Learning in 2009?

I think my learning for 2009 was focused around three primary areas; this obviously derives from my focus on innovation in elearning and is biased, but here goes.