Mobile Learning: Book Review

Recently, I was sent a copy of Gary Woodill’s latest book, The Mobile Learning Edge.

Here is a short review:

Gary Woodill, describes how mobile devices can provide effective learning in a variety of formats including location-based information, just-in-time training and the ability to provide on-demand documentation such as standard operating procedures (SOPs) when and where the employee needs the information. He also provides seven principles for effective mobile learning. The Principles are;

1. Employees are adults who learn differently from children.
2. Employees learn from solving problems that matter to them.
3. Employees learn by collaborating as members of a cohesive social groups.
4. Employees learn through conversing with, and listening to, each other.
5. Employees learn by integrating information with what they already know.
6. Employees learn through active experiences that involve their senses and their bodies.
7. Employees learn best in concrete situations where the context matters to them.

Woodill not only discusses how mobile devices can be used to retrieve information, as is commonly used, but also how they can be used to gather information. For instance a person doing a survey can use a mobile device to input data and receive real-time feedback based on others inputing data as well.

One interesting discussion in the book revolves around the combination of the use of a mobile device and the use of Tags. Tags are a way to attach information to a place or an object. When a mobile device senses or “sees” a tag, information is revealed to the employee or person with the mobile device. Two of the most popular tags for mobile devices are RFID (radio frequency identification) tags and QR (quick response) tags. Today RFID tags can transmit up to 64 kilobytes of information to a mobile device and the amount of information transmitted is increasing all the time. QR tags are gaining popularity as more and more companies are using them for tracking information. A tag on an item can provide just-in-time information to learners.

This book provides a nice overview of the field of mobile learning and contains many resources and lists to help you discover the vendors who are creating innovative products in the area of mobile learning. This is not a “how-to” book. Instead, Woodill provides a “state of the industry” report and provides information on why mobile learning might be right for your organization. If you are looking to gain insight into the possibilities of mobile learning, this book will help and provide you with the information needed to make an informed mobile learning solution.

I read the book and then asked Gary a few questions about mobile learning and the state of the mobile learning industry. Here is our question and answer session:

Kapp: Mobile learning has been talked about for years but hasn’t really taken off as much as people thought it would; do you think the time is right now? If so, why now? And what will make this effort different?

Woodill:Mobile learning is an obvious example of both network effects, and the needs for having a critical mass of a technology before the tipping point is reached where its growth becomes self-sustaining.

Many of us saw the possibilities of mobile learning in the 1990s, as the use of mobile phones exploded. For example, I co-founded a company called SmallDocs in 1999 to deliver instructional documents to a mobile phone using WAP. We showed it to the Canadian military; they were intrigued but didn’t buy. It didn’t take off then because a) the technology was too new – few people want to be early adopters, 2) the processing was too slow – especially when compared with the Internet, 3) WAP was cumbersome to program and slow to respond, 4) screens were too small and the page by page experience was dreadful, 4) there were no apps, just expensive custom development possibilities, and 5) there was no compelling market – people just didn’t see it as a need.

Ten years later, this has mostly changed – the idea of mobile learning is not new, smartphones are much more capable than ten years ago and are becoming ubiquitous, the app revolution has happened, programming has become easier, and we now have a few case studies of successful use of mobile learning in corporate settings.

But, as I document in the book, many challenges and barriers remain. These are being worked on and solutions are appearing so that the vision of using mobile learning for training is now becoming something that is at least plausible for many people. However, like most technologies, the first thoughts are for traditional methods and content to be put on mobile devices. What will really make mobile learning take off is when new uses are proposed and developed that allow ways of learning that could never be contemplated before. In keeping with the other work I do on emerging learning technologies, the book is forward looking and tries to forecast uses of mobile learning that will become common over the next 10 years. We are not there yet for some of the technologies, but will be soon.

Kapp: What are the three biggest obstacles to the adoption of mobile in corporate settings?

Woodill:
a. Confusion in the marketplace because of too many choices – there are too many operating systems, which is normal for this stage of the technology innovation curve. Once there is a dominant OS, it will settle down to 2 or 3, with one dominating. At this stage, people don’t want to bet on the wrong technology. If corporate training departments decide to let employees use their own phones, there is still an issue of standardization – currently being framed as choice between custom apps for each type of phone or using HTML5.

b. Lack of mobile learning business cases and implementation strategies – there is a lack of awareness of the full scope of costs, benefits and risks of deploying mobile learning at the enterprise level. In the last chapter of the book, Sheryl Herle writes: “I have yet to encounter an organization that is planning to halt all classroom training in favour of transitioning to mobile learning or an organization where mobile content deployment is replacing all e-learning. The Catch-22 is that until mobile learning capability is fully deployed throughout the enterprise, in order to maintain learner reach we cannot begin to retire currently used means of learning delivery and drive out their associated costs. Like print delivery in the early days of web adoption, we couldn’t divest of all print distribution until the full enterprise was able to access the material through the corporate portal.”

c. Security and control issues – companies worry about this a lot, and have a fear of losing intellectual property because a company mobile phone gets stolen or lost. Until companies are comfortable with solutions to this problem, then they are reluctant to roll out mobile phones to employees.

Kapp: How will the book help companies who want to implement mobile learning?

Woodill: There is no question that there is pressure on corporate executives to adopt some version of mobile computing, if not mobile learning per se. In order to make good decisions, it is necessary to have a big picture of the field, its challenges and its future possibilities. This book is written for corporate decision makers, especially those in charge of training, in order to bring them up to speed. It is not very technical or academic (for a really academic book on mobile learning, see Pachler et al. 2010), making it appealing to the business market.

The book covers all the topics that a learning manager needs to understand this growing field. It provides background to mobile learning, maps the entire system of elements involved, gives some learning principles and theory to show why this approach is different, supplies over 50 uses of mobile learning with examples, discusses business strategies as well as implementation and governance issues, and outlines the development processes involved in producing mobile learning content. My aim in the book is to inform managers about mobile learning so that they can make good decisions.