The use of mobiles and other related digital media as an alternative source of information is increasingly gaining ground in the learning environment. This is compounded by the fact that a large number of organizations and institutions are opting for new modes of learning as part of training and development. I have always believed that mLearning will be the future of eLearning and have also written about it here.

This is in line with the recently released Ambient Insight Report which forecasts US market for mobile learning products and services to be growing at a five-year compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 21.7%. The Horizon Report 2010 on Mobile Computing also points out some interesting trends that will alter the way we live and learn. You can read more about it here.And, if I go by the enthusiasm seen at the mLearnCon, mlearning surely is buzzing in corporate circles at the moment.

At Upside Learning, we constantly strive to develop new solutions in tune with the technology and market demand, which helps us deliver the best and the latest to our clients. Hence, in response to the rising requirements, our innovation team has been taping onto the latest trends and developing new applications across various platforms such as Android, iPhone, Blackberry, Symbian etc. Our mobile audio-video podcasts, mobile quiz games, and m-learning nuggets, both as web and native apps, are being used successfully by clients across the globe.

Pune Layar - The first crowd-sourced Layar for an Indian city – was developed by us. We have also developed a mobile version of UpsideLMS and are working on more complex, richer and diverse mobile learning applications that run across platforms and devices. These include content creation and applications for tablet computers like the Apple iPad, learning games etc.

We see exciting times for mlearning ahead. Anything interesting that you have come across? Or maybe something you would like to see? Leave your comments below.

In a tablet form-factor and using an unspecified variant of Linux (that some have said might be Android), the cost should remain low while offering a wide range of functionality. The device is said to be support video conferencing, viewing a wide selection of video and image files, word processing, de/compressing files, printing with CUPS, full Internet browsing with Javascript and Flash, wireless communications, and remote device management. That’s a lot of features for a device that’s intended to sell for as low as 35 USD.

The technical specification is still not clearly known at this time, but from looking at the pictures and the video (embedded below) it seems it’ll have a 7” color touch screen, 2 gigs of storage, WiFi, Ethernet, and very minimal power consumption (meaning a long battery life, something very necessary in India).

This is just a prototype and there’s a long way to go before the product is available to students. The Indian government wants to put the tablet into production by 2011, but hasn’t yet found partners to build it. I’ll be watching and would love to get my hands on one of these devices when they’re out in the market.

While going through the session list, I noticed one session on SCORM Implementation Strategies for Mobile. Being a hard-core techie and a follower of mobile SCORM, it caught my interest.

Covering some interesting use cases, common technical challenges and the best practices, it is a great resource for anyone who wants to implement SCORM for mobile devices.

You can view the slideshare presentation below:

The session mainly covers:

• Notable Use Cases where SCORM has been implemented for mobile devices
  You will find information on -
  1. Number of devices supported. You can get more information about how to implement SCORM for blackberry here.
  2. Some technical details regarding development
  3. Support available for SCORM 1.2 and/or SCORM 2004
  4. Current active clients
  5. Features available in each implementation
• Common Technical Challenges
  It provides information on technical challenges like small screen, multiple OS support etc.
• General Best Practices
  You will learn about the best practices like creating prototype, identifying target devices support, deciding native or web app, SCORM considerations etc. For additional information, you may also like to read IPhone human interface guidelines and things to consider before implementing SCORM.

The presentation sure is a great help and I would highly recommend you run through this before attempting SCORM implementation for mobile devices.

The App Inventor comes loaded with many blocks for creating UI elements, programming blocks, storage blocks, social blocks, media blocks etc, these blocks can be arranged in to logical sequence by drag and drop to develop an application.

The video below shows how easy it is to built an Android app using this tool –

Some organizations/universities have had the opportunity to use it as a part of the private beta program and here’s a video of a professor and student from The University of San Francisco sharing their experience of using App–

You can fill up this form to get access to App Inventor in the coming weeks.

The App Inventor has some basic and advanced tutorials that will help users start creating Android apps. The tutorials list have “Quiz Me”,“MakeQuiz, and TakeQuiz” tutorials which show how to develop the quiz apps. App Inventor can be used for developing mLearning, quiz apps, mini learning games etc. It also has social media blocks for connecting to services like Twitter .

I think allowing just about anyone to built Android app without programming knowledge will boost the number of apps available for Android.. This would help the domain as now SMEs would be able to develop the Android apps themselves without the help of a developer/programmer. With the cost of experimenting with new designs and timelines to develop an app being reduced we should see some significant progress on mlearning apps development.

To begin with the App Inventor is available only for the Android platform (understandable). It would be interesting to see if it supports other mobile platforms to in future – that potentially can be a big help to development of cross platform apps.And it would be interesting to see if Apple releases a similar tool to ease out the development for iOS devices. I doubt.

Planning Framework
After viewing some examples of m-learning, we got into the planning phase discussing Accenture’s award winning mobile learning initiative as a case study.  After the workshop I did some more research about this project and some of what I present below is from a couple of .pdfs about the same project found at Brandon Hall and Masie Learning sites.

Dana Alan Koch, learning strategist at Accenture, suggests doing a self evaluation if m-learning is right for you. Ask yourself the following:

- Business need – Do you need to increase the speed of uptake and/or ease of access of training by your target audience?
- Receptive audience – Is your target audience highly mobile and crunched for time?
- Enabling technology – Do you have sufficient number of target audience members with supported devices?
- “Knowledge” content – Is the content you need to provide primarily knowledge-based content and can it be put in small chunks?

In true consulting style they present a blueprint for defining setting your goals and how to reach them.

I found this a useful tool for organizations starting with m-learning and recommend using this for your next m-learning initiative. Answering the key question listed in this framework can help you plan for a successful m-learning project.

When to use mobile learning?


Source: From the presentation shared at the workshop available here – mLearnopedia

This diagram shows how the various types training learning formats sit around the moment of need. The upper funnel is focused on ‘teaching’ while the lower inverted funnel is focused on ‘doing’. As discussed on one of our earlier posts mobile learning is most suitable for the lower funnel. The three moments of learning need where mobile learning would work best are:

- when trying to remember
- when things change
- when something goes wrong

ADL Mobile Learning – a useful reference guide
ADL has is working on a great mobile learning reference guide.

Check it out at http://emerginged.com/adlmobile

So Native Apps vs Web Apps?
The presentation gives a good initial comparison of the 4 OSes. The question however will be which phone to target? Should you make a web app that works on all of these phones or a device specific native app?

Both types of solutions have their advantages and disadvantages. Here’s what I think they are:

Web Apps

1. Platform independent development, so can reach a wider range of audience
2. The app can be delivered instantaneously as there are no intermediate delivery platforms like app store
3. Faster development and lower maintenance
4. High end (rich) applications can be developed if HTML5/CSS3 technology is used for development, which also enable use of audio, video and animation within the application
5. Performance would be lower as compared with that of native apps and will also be dependent on the web access speed

Native Apps

1. Lets you access the device’s features like camera, accelerometer or the data like address book
2. Superior in terms of performance and user experience
3. Works only on targeted smartphones
4. Development time would be more so would be the maintenance overheads
5. The app has to go through some kind of app store / marketplace before it reaches the intended audience and the process could be time consuming and fuzzy

The choice really depends on the richness of your mLearning solution (user experience, performance and features) and the range of audience (rather smartphones) you are targeting. There is a range of third-party frameworks and tools that are getting available to develop reasonable apps which may let you use goodness of both the types.

With advent of HTML5 and the emergent web standardization across smartphone devices, I feel rather optimistic about web apps as better choice over native apps in near future.

Table Views, Text Views and Web Views:

• Table View: It displays information in single column multiple rows format.  Rows can be divided into sections or groups. Each row can contain image, text and controls. Each row or cell can be style in different ways like plain, grouped, subtitle etc.

  Table views are normally used for:

  • Selecting Options: As multiple select dropdown is not available
  • Navigating Hierarchical Information: Mainly in productive type of application
  • Viewing Conceptually Grouped Information.
  • Looking-up Indexed Information: Rows are indexed from a-z. The index key is displayed at right hand edge.

  Table view elements:

  • Disclosure Indicator: User taps anywhere in the row to see next level in the hierarchy or associated choices
  • Detail Disclosure Button: User taps this element to see meta data about list item
  • Switch Control: Presents user with two mutually exclusive choices like yes/no or on/off. At any given time only one choice is displayed.

  Some other elements are Delete button, Row insert button and Row reorder control button.

• Text Views: It displays multiple line of text and supports scrolling when text overflow occurs. It can be made editable. You have control over font, color and alignment but it applies to entire text.
• Web Views: It’s specifically used for displaying html contents.  If you want variable font, color or alignment within a view’s text then you can use web view instead of text view.

Application Controls:

• Activity Indicator: Shows progress of a task having unknown duration
• Progress View: Shows progress of a task having known duration
• Detail Disclosure Button: Gives metadata/additional information about something
• Info Button: Provides a way to show configuration information about an application
• Label: Variable sized static text
• Page Indicator: Displays a dot for each currently open view
• Picker: Single select dropdown. User spins the wheel (or wheels) of a picker to select desired value.
• Rounded rectangle button: Button to perform an action
• Segmented Control: Linear set of segments, each segment functions as a button
• Text Field: To accepts user input
• Search Bar: Accepts text input from user which can be use for search
• Slider: Allows user to make adjustments to a value or process within allowed values.

System Provided Buttons and Icons:
IPhone OS provides standard buttons for navigation bar, toolbar and icons for tab bar to promote consistent look and feel.
E.g. Buttons like done, edit, cancel, refresh, trash etc.

It decreases your development time plus it brings stability to your application in case tomorrow Apple decides to change the appearance of standard icons and buttons.

Creating Custom Icons and Images:
For all icons and images PNG (32 bits) format is recommended. Each application mainly needs an

• Application icon size: 57X57 (without alpha transparency)
• App Store icon size: 512X512

The guidelines document provides detailed information which you should check before creating graphics for your application.

I hope this series helps you create various publications for your iPhone. Do remember to share your experiences too.

Happy iPhone development!!!

Application Window: Each IPhone application contains an application window. It is at the top of the application hierarchy. Every other control resides within the application window.

Views: Provides content regions. There are different types of views available like tableview, textview, webview. Each view has a distinct set of functionality. An application window contains more than one view.

Controls: These are graphics object with which a user can interact with. A view can contain multiple controls. There are some controls which belong to specific view only (e.g. disclosure indicator in table view) while some controls can be used in variety of views.

Screen: It is a logical entity whose instance you cannot create programmatically like a window, view or control. You can visualize it as a state in your application. Each screen contains combination of views and controls.

Using views and controls in application screen:

Each view and control provides some level of customization at look and behavior level. Always try to use standard views and controls with their default look and behavior as user is familiar with it, except in the case of immersive application type. In an immersive application you can create customize controls to form a unique environment and discovering that environment is a part of user experience.

Bars:
Bars are views that are placed either at the top or bottom of the screen. They have defined appearance and behavior.

• Status Bar: It appears at the top of screen. It gives device and carrier specific information to user like signal strength, carrier name, battery charge, current network connection. You can customize its appearance and to some extent its behavior. You can hide the status bar (may be in immersive application) but you should seriously consider this design decision as user expects it to be always available.
• Navigation Bar: It appears just below the status bar. It displays the title of the current view, controls to act on current view and navigational controls. Navigation bars are specifically used in productive applications as they arrange information in a hierarchy.
• Toolbar: It appears at the bottom edge of the screen. It contains buttons to manage the current context/view. It should not be used to switch between different modes or tasks of an application. It can contain five buttons with each having 44*44 hit area.
• Tab Bar: It appears at the bottom edge of the screen. It is used to mange tasks or modes in an application. Each tab bar contains tabs having image and text. In case there are more than five tabs, iPhone OS displays four of them with additional “More” tab. Tapping the more tab displays additional tabs available in a separate screen. It can contain edit button to configure tab bar to display most often used tabs. Each tab can contain a badge to give additional information to user in a nonintrusive way.

Modal Views:
They are analogous to alerts in JavaScript i.e. unless you dismiss them you cannot move forward. They are normally used to give some critical information to user which user is not expecting or additional choices or functionality to be offered. But it is important to avoid overusing them as they break the normal flow of user.

• Alert: Give important information to user which may affect their use of the application. Its timing of arrival is unexpected. It contains text and buttons. It should have maximum to buttons.
• Action Sheet: Give additional choices to user corresponding to current action. It always opens from the bottom of the screen and hovers over current view. It displays multiple buttons from which user selects appropriate one. It normally contains more than two buttons.
• Modal Views: Provide extensive functionality corresponding to current task. It always opens from the bottom of the screen and covers entire view. It displays combination of controls and accepts multiple user inputs.

I would soon be posting the concluding part of this series, so stay tuned.

I have pulled out some slides I found interesting.

The Growth rates of mobile are many times more than that of the Internet or PCs. Note that the Internet growth rate is more than that of PCs from 2005 onwards. That’s because Internet access on mobiles has been growing.

Mobile subscriptions more than toothbrushes!: More people on this earth now have access to mobile phones than have access to running water and toilets. There are an estimated 4.2 Billion people who have a toothbrush and 4.6 billion who have a mobile subscription.

SMS is much faster than email: An SMS message is read within 4 minutes while an email could take up-to 48 hours making SMS 720 times faster – perfect for speedy delivery of emergency information.

m-Tickets: Helsinki Public Transportation has been offering mobile tickets since 2001. About 55% of tickets sold are now m-tickets.

Mobile for payments and tax returns: In 2007 Estonia became first country where no other parking payments except through mobiles are accepted. In 2010 Estonia has also become the first country to allow tax returns to be filed by SMS.

The Youth today are different

For those involved in creating training solutions for workforces this is a completely new audience profile. This audience expects things to be different from what has been.

Mobile is the 7^th mass media

Mobile has 8 unique benefits

More details and some interesting uses (and some possible ones) based on these 8 benefits are listed in next few slides of the presentation. I highly recommend a look at the whole presenatation here.

The video below shows Flash content running on iPad Safari browser using Frash –

The development of Frash is still in progress. The keyboard input and video playback are yet to be supported. Also at present it’s only available for the iPad it would soon be available for iPhone 3GS and iPhone 4. This is what the developer has to say about it –

“…Frash currently only runs on the iPad, but support for other devices (3GS+ only due to technical restrictions) is planned, as well as support for iOS 4….

…Video and keyboard input are currently not supported. The former will require major reverse engineering of the video decoding frameworks on the iPhone, but the latter should be reasonably easy to implement.”

At this time it’s difficult to comment on the performance and battery life while running Frash on iOS device but from the video demo above its evident that Flash runs pretty well on them.