How Widespread is Mobile Learning?

The other day at a presentation, a participant asked me how many companies have adopted mobile learning…was it widespread and if they where behind because they didn’t have a full blown mobile learning roll out yet?

The answer is that mobile learning is just now starting to get a foothold but it is not widespread by any means.

In fact, two separate surveys indicate that m-learning is just now starting to become of interest to organizations. Although there are a number of contributing factors to m­learning only recently becoming of interest to organizations, the three biggest seem to be the recent proliferation of multi-functional “smart phones” with multimedia and broadband capabilities, the increasing availability of Wi-Fi connectivity, and the increase in screen size on many of the mobile devices.

Two external reports point to only a few organizations actually implementing m-learning.

One is by the Masie Group and that study revealed that only 3%, or six of the 204 organizations surveyed were deploying mobile learning widely throughout the organization (although 21% did indicate that they have implemented it in some areas of their organization.)

Another study by the eLearning Guild of survey of 940 of its members indicated that only 9% or 84 organizations had actually implemented m-learning.

Of the 9% who had implemented m-learning, 65% use it for less than 10% of their learning initiatives. These organizations are not developing content specifically for mobile devices; 70% of them indicated they create 10% or less of their learning content specifically for mobile devices.

Additionally:

The Masie Study revealed that 38% of its 204 member organizations indicated that they were not planning any Mobile Learning initiatives.

The eLearning Guild found 33% of its members had no plans to implement m­learning.

So now is the time to implement to seize a competitive advantage but the road will not be easy since there are not a huge number of case studies or examples to guide the way.

Here are a couple of books that could help:

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