Below is an excerpt from Wireless, Inc. by Craig Settles c2002. A decade ago Craig was documenting what we were doing in the mLearning space. What is interesting to me is that while the technology has changed the principles, for the most part, have not.
Note the mention of the “iPaq” and things like “dynamic syndication server” – archaic right?
Also note the applications of mobile learning as appropriate for "sales" and other field services. Also as part of “continuing education" and mobile learners accessing the “collective experience of others.”
Some of the technology references and context may be a decade old, but the problem space remains today much as it was characterized a decade ago.
“Internal Education Tactics
Education of the troops is an ongoing process that happens at many levels. When a person begins employment, they have to learn about the organization’s policies, procedures, key people in the organizational chart, employee benefits, and so on. Then they have to learn procedures and other information specific to their respective departments. This may include learning how to use office equipment, plant machinery, etc.
Once employees complete their “entry-level” learning, they require ongoing education to keep abreast of new developments within their industry, market, and profession, as well as new projects and activities within their organizations. Also a part of continuing education is the type of learning that comes from tapping into the collective experience of others within the department or organization.
There is often general information that people only access occasionally, such as policies and procedures manuals, directions for completing travel and medical expense reimbursement forms, or lists of the retailers carrying your products. Since mobile workers don’t need to get to these materials all the time, it may be all right to just provide simple access to an intranet with the materials via their wireless devices.
For information and skills that are critical for employees to do their jobs, such as customer support procedures, or product assembly processes, spend time with your mobile workers to carefully plan both what content to make accessible and how to deliver it. If you provide extensive conventional training of mobile workers or inter-facility roamers before they are sent into the field, then your wireless content might include refresher materials that serve to reinforce what workers learn. But, if you hire people one day and put them on the road or into plant vehicles the next day, you might want to consider creating a full-featured training program that you can deliver wirelessly.
Of course, you may have decided when you were evaluating the fourth strategic dimension that you want to use wireless to reduce the cost of training. In that case, you should do a review of all of your training programs to determine the particular tactics you will use.
David Koehn, AvantGo’s director of educational services, helps customers develop extensive wireless-enabled training courses. He also managed the development of a course that AvantGo staff use to train third-party developers who write applications using the company’s technology. (It’s always reassuring to know that vendors use their own technology).
Koehn made several good recommendations that can contribute to the success of your efforts, whether you plan to create traditional training courses, or you are developing content to facilitate the distribution of policies, procedures, and general information.
Effective Design and Deployment Mean a Lot
Here are some of Koehn’s recommendations:
· Mobile learning is a blend of a product (a knowledge application) and a service (knowledge transfer). Because of this blend, m-learning needs conception, graphic and/or layout design, application development, and deployment planning. Whenever possible, use those with mobile expertise to manage your mobile learning implementation.
· Use whatever you can from existing courses or materials. Don’t forget the m-learning mode is an extension of existing learning systems, whether online courses accessed on PCs or instructor-led classes, and not a separate pool of information. Use whatever you can from existing web materials such as page design, navigation, and search features, but modify these for the mobile user. The search feature is especially useful for reference materials like a Peterson Guide, though your material may not be that extensive.
· Make your mobile courseware cross-platform so it works on all types of devices. Students may want courseware on their iPAQ one day and on their RIM BlackBerry the next.
· Give a lot of thought to the design choices that you make. For example, decide if you are going to provide images for high-end mobile devices that you hope will work on low-end devices, or if you are going to use images that work well on low-end devices, but don’t use all of the capacity of the high-end device. Because the people receiving training may be using devices with different graphics capabilities, there will always be trade-offs on what looks good, what is needed, and what is practical. You have to find the right balance without sacrificing the main objective, which is to deliver effective training.
· Stick to HTML and JavaScript for creating your courseware. This will make it easy to develop, easy to deploy, and easier all around for the people who have to use it. Your courseware should be interactive on mobile devices, even when the users aren’t wirelessly connected.
· Publish the lessons from a dynamic syndication server rather than manually writing all of the pages. This is a publishing tool that allows you to create training modules in a SCORM-compliant (standardized) format and publish them to the Web in an automated way that does not require hours and hours of hand-coding.
· As users input data into a particular course or interact with a trainer, be sure they can reconcile the data between their desktops and mobile devices using the devices’ sync feature, web surfing, or having it pushed from your servers. Students do not want the progress of training on the handheld version of their course to differ from that of their desktop course.
· Make certain your m-learning course creates value. And, in turn, make certain you look to charge an employee’s department for an m-learning product, even thought the application is for internal use. People will take these more seriously if there is a price tag attached, even if the money is primarily a paper transaction between departments.
· Always be aware of the context in which people will use your courseware. Mobile learning is a “point of activity” application, meaning people likely will be doing whatever the course material is trying to teach them while they are taking the course. If users will be outside when learning or reviewing materials on horse breeding, it may not be a good idea to use fonts and font sizes that are hard to read on PDA screens in outdoor lighting. You also want to use a lot of diagrams because users won’t have a lot of time for reading when they’re working with a couple of frisky equines.
· The situation and conditions under which people will use the courseware should also determine your hardware selection. Brad, a friend of mine who drives heavy construction equipment, is shopping for a PDA. He’s very conscious of the hardware design because the sand, dirt, and moisture in the areas where he works can ruin the internal components if the outer casing is flimsy or allows particles to slip in.
· Don’t use fill-in-the-blank text fields. Use select lists and drop-down answer menus or buttons so a pen tap or a click can make the lesson interactive. Someone who’s brushing up on a couple of product features while sitting in the customer’s lobby before a repair visit doesn’t have a lot of time to etch long essays.
· Your courseware should have occasional “e-mail for help” and “phone for help” features. This is especially valuable if people will be in locations where access to online help may not be available.
· Create pages that require as little up and down scrolling as possible. Never expect students to scroll left and right.
When you finish developing your courseware, make sure that everyone who will use it gets hands-on experience guided by an instructor during the class or at some time before they go into the field. This is to ensure people use the application. If you just hand people a PDA and send them on their way, or let them download the application on their own, it’s likely that people won’t use the courseware.
Remember that m-learning, the same as in many other uses of mobile devices, often changes the behavior of the people using it in the organization and thus affects the behavior of the organization itself. If employees are learning on mobile devices, try to determine how this will impact instructors and managers, since the technology can increase the pace at which people learn, the type of questions that they ask, or even the way they perform their duties. These may all be positive changes, but to maximize the value of this new way of doing business you can’t have these people caught off guard.
When Does It Make Sense to Use m-Learning?
You can use these guidelines to develop mobile courseware that teach people to do all sorts of things including teaching people how to assemble, use, maintain, and/or repair equipment, depending on the person’s actual job. You may have employees hired to specifically do these things, but your mobile workers might be able to fix some things that break faster than it will take for support staff to arrive.
You may also need to train people how to use software applications, complete complex business operations that occur in the field (i.e., processing customer’s loan or insurance forms), or promote key features and benefits of your products. Mobile learning can be effective if your organization markets services or products from several companies and it’s hard to remember all the details about each one, or for your resellers and sales reps who also carry your competitors’ products.
Wireless training programs also make sense for mobile workers who have to keep track of a broad range of procedures and processes, such as doctors, lawyers, and financial services professionals. It’s not so much that you want these people to be learning on the job, but there are times when someone needs a quick refresher course for procedures they haven’t done in a while.
Some organizations have six-figure (or more) budgets to create “knowledge bases” on servers to store details on best practices, selling tactics for large accounts, documents that are designed for certain proposals, or negotiations. Your mobile workers may not need training programs for these, but they probably can benefit by having wireless access to this intellectual capital.
As a closing thought, I recommend that you explore ways to use your training and other employee education tactics for your external audiences as well. The design and implementation expertise you learn from these applications for your employees can be applied to training for customers, possibly without a lot of modifications. Subsequently your investment will produce greater returns. And conversely, some of your tactics for educating external audiences will work for employees as well. In fact, self-help and professional development may produce more immediate financial returns among employees than customers and prospects."
--finis--
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