Apps and Mobile Learning

There is a lot to consider when embarking upon an e-learning project and Mobile Learning is becoming more and more interesting with Learning APPs attracting huge interest and learners wishing to be allowed to Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) into the workplace.

These developments are causing a huge amount of excitement and concern in many companies, and not just in the L&D department, see our blog piece on Bring Your Own Device

Learning Apps, and Apps in general continue to gain a huge amount of interest and attention in the learning and development market.

The Apps revolution is a function of the rise to prominence of the tablet devices and smartphones principally driven by the success of Apple and now being reproduced by Google with its Android operating system and Microsoft-Nokia who have some interesting devices and propositions emerging. The mobile phone network operators and Blackberry have been somewhat left behind, and other operators such as Samsung are seeking to enter the APPs market.

There is no doubt a mutual desire of the e-learning industry and learning professionals to leverage these devices to deliver learning, this is the long awaited arrival of Mobile Learning – mlearning!

Apps are hugely attractive to the learner, the L&D department and predicted widely to grow in usage and popularity for delivering mlearning. Many thought leaders now argue to develop for mobile first, we advise you get some good advice, and to do that get in touch with the team here, and we can give you our best advice.

There are however a number of strategic choices to be made:

Converting existing e-learning for delivery to mobile devices is an area of great interest, as many organisations have large libraries of e-learning content they wish to use, and this video clip we discuss some of the issues around doing this:

[youtube]http://youtu.be/T751MvqIsAU[/youtube]

The e-learning and mlearning architecture and integration into the LMS for learner tracking, and in this short video we discuss how best to track learners, and the difference between web Apps and native Apps.

[youtube]http://youtu.be/GW6okxnpV58[/youtube]

A web App is a piece of learning that is delivered to the tablet or i-phone using an internet connection, effectively bypassing the App Stores. A native App is delivered and downloaded from an App store and must be written for that specific App store and devices, and here lies the problem:

Applications that are developed for a specific OS perform very well with that operating system, but when developers write an app for iOS (Apple), there’s little code they can reuse for the same app on Android.

In addition many tablets and smartphones do not support Flash. Flash is (or has been the development tool of choice for e-learning to date).

Instead we are seeing a move to using HTML5 as the development tool of choice for e-learning to be delivered onto tablets and smartphones, and in this short video we look at  this approach:

[youtube]http://youtu.be/D7bZVrBlgjQ[/youtube]

You can see more about authoring e-learning authoring on our pages devoted to creating e-learning.

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