This is an abbreviated mobile version of the more complete ADL Mobile Learning Handbook (available at http://mlhandbook.adlnet.gov). This mobile version is for demonstration purposes only and to showcase cross-platform interoperability using mobile web standards.
The purpose of the Mobile Learning Handbook is to provide a universal mobile resource on all topics pertinent to mobile learning. ADL will be adding additional content using various mobile authoring tools and welcomes the opportunity to work with all mobile vendors. ADL cannot endorse specific tools, but would like to work with all who are interested in enhancing this mobile resource. Please contact ADL about collaborating or to provide feedback or ask questions at adlmobile@adlnet.gov.
ADL mLearning Guide is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.
Based on a work mlearn.adlnet.mobi.
To provide access to the highest quality education and training that can be tailored to individual needs and delivered cost effectively, anywhere and anytime.
The Advanced Distributed Learning (ADL) Initiative is a collaborative effort to harness the power of information technologies to deliver high quality, easily accessible, adaptable, and cost-effective education and training. ADL uses structured and collaborative methods to convene multi-national groups from industry, academia, and government who help to define the specifications and standards for the learning industry and then develop tools and content to those standards.
ADL is sponsored by the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Personnel and Readiness (OUSD P&R). This is an official app of the U.S. Government Advanced Distributed Learning (ADL) Initiative.
Note: ADL does not endorse any products mentioned in this guide. Specific devices and applications are provided for informational purposes only to help introduce the concepts related to mobile development for learning or human performance support.
Note that not all of the linked external sites are mobile friendly and may open in a new browser window.
W3C Mobile Web Application Best Practices
TIME's 50 Best Websites: The Mobile Edition
8 Tools For Easily Creating a Mobile Version of Your Website
Note there are many additional examples of apps in app stores or that need to be installed, but the following should work in most all devices.
Trafficking in Persons Awareness (TIP)
Electrical Fundamentals AETC Demo
Mobile Learning Design for Training Professionals
Trafficking in Persons Module 1 (Trivantis)
10 Steps to Good Customer Service
The Dangers of Distracted Driving
This ADL mLearning Guide is a condensed version (for demo use on a mobile device) of an expanded ADL Mobile Learning Handbook, available through a desktop browser at http://mlhandbook.adlnet.gov.
Basics - What mobile learning (or mLearning) means, its capabilities and use opportunities, potential benefits and common concerns.
Planning - List of choices to consider for appropriate use of mobile devices in learning, including questions to assist in planning.
Learning Content - Tips and best practices for mobile learning.
Development Options - Authoring tools, native applications and mobile web apps; pros and cons of both types.
Design Considerations - Information on hardware models, features, operating systems, displays, accessibility, connectivity and other advanced mobile capabilities.
Glossary definitions and links to additional Resources are available via the buttons on the main menu.
Note: ADL does not endorse any products mentioned in this guide. Specific devices and applications are provided for informational purposes only to help introduce the concepts related to mobile development for learning or human performance support.
There is no agreed upon denotation of mobile learning, but the following examples communicate the definition effectively:
"The exploitation of ubiquitous handheld technologies, together with wireless and mobile phone networks, to facilitate, support, enhance and extend the reach of teaching and learning."
--MoLeNET
"Mobile learning, or m-learning, can be any educational interaction delivered through mobile technology and accessed at a student's convenience from any location."
--EDUCAUSE ELI
"Any activity that allows individuals to be more productive when consuming, interacting with, or creating information, mediated through a compact digital portable device that the individual carries on a regular basis, has reliable connectivity, and fits in a pocket or purse."
--eLearning Guild
ADL defines mobile learning as "the use of handheld computing devices to provide access to learning content and information resources."
Mobile learning has been called bitesize, handy learning, ubiquitous, portable, pocketable, learning on the go, my learning, untethered, informal, opportunistic, personal, private, situational, unstructured, learning in the moment, snack-learning, courselets, a learning nugget or even a learning pill. Much of microlearning, reinforcement, and performance support are delivered on mobile devices as small chunks.
Mobile learning is definitely not just e-learning lite. Consider the following possibilities:
"Regarding the pace of change, we believe more users will likely connect to the Internet via mobile devices than desktop PCs within five years," according to Morgan Stanley's 2010 Mobile Internet Report. The same report noted that Consumer PC usage is down 20% since 2008.
This diagram from Ambient Insight, which has revised its forecasts upward in their 2010 to 2015 Forecast and Analysis Mobile Learning Report, illustrates the factors contributing to the Perpetual “Perfect Storm” Driving the Global Adoption of Mobile Learning.
The center of the triangle represents Global Mobile Learning Adoption.
The three corners of the triangle represent:
The circle of arrows represent:
From Tomi Ahonen, leading 3G strategy consultant:
From Chetan Sharma's State of the Global Mobile Industry - Half Yearly Assessment 2011:
Expected benefits of mobile learning include:
A UK Learning and Skills Network report identified "increased creativity and innovation, greater ownership of learning by learners, real world problem solving and the development of complex ideas and knowledge transfer" using mobile delivery.
Concerns to be addressed include:
Variables include:
Note: Suggestions for many of these concerns are being addressed in the full ADL Mobile Learning Handbook.
Which moments are most appropriate for delivery on a mobile device for your learners? What materials would be most appropriate at their moments of need?
Mobile should be an integral part of your learning and information infrastructure / architecture. It should not be viewed as a replacement for other learning options, but a supplement or reinforcement for learning and performance support.
Depending upon the following choices - such as native app versus browser delivery, and connectivity concerns - options may be limited. Think about the users and their goals before making these decisions.
A review of the Five Moments of Learning Need should help to determine where mobile learning may be appropriate. A survey of your users and their needs and interests should also be one of the first steps. Then determine:
Topics and associated questions to start the planning process:
Much of the knowledge that instructional designers use for e-learning will transfer to mobile learning, but not all. Think outside the course. The power of mobile learning is definitely not a shrunken e-learning course. The most successful mobile designers are able to think differently.
In Howard Rheingold’s “Smart Mobs” he states, “The mobile internet . . . will not be just a way to do old things while moving. It will be a way to do things that couldn't be done before.” We now have the mobile tools to make a difference.
Perhaps the most significant potential of mobile learning is the ability to achieve what many performance support advocates believe has long been the learning profession's Mount Everest. As MIT professor and artificial intelligence pioneer Seymour Papert said, "You can't teach people everything they need to know. The best you can do is position them where they can find what they need to know when they need to know it."
Sophisticated users know it is now possible to deliver media rich, interactive learning content to almost any smartphone. However, at the moment of need, the user may only need a checklist or reminder.
Design is the biggest differentiator between mobile learning success and failure. It is the link between learning and performance support, the tie between formal and informal learning.
Remember...
Research over the past one hundred years has proven that learning retention can be improved by spacing out the learning and providing repetition and an opportunity for reflection.
Value of Repetition
Mobile devices provide inexpensive capabilities to deploy reminders and refresher materials.
Spaced learning can provide information to the user at the time of need. One of the most interesting current projects is Text4Baby at text4baby.org, which delivers appropriate SMS messages to pregnant women depending upon where they are in their term, and continues the service for the first year of their baby’s life.
Consider how spaced or timed, relevant learning could be beneficial to your learners.
Methods and strategies you already know from instructional design and from web or e-learning development may also apply to mobile. However, additional attention should be paid to:
Many authoring tools can deliver content to mobile devices. The tools provide this capability by using a mobile device screen template and output files that work with the mobile device operating system.
However, tools are emerging that are specifically designed for mobile learning; for instance, providing authoring capability for audio learning content (e.g., spoken word, podcasts) along with associated interactive assessments and surveys. Other tools are optimized to provide e-learning content through the phone's web browsing capability.
There are several e-learning content authoring tools on the market that offer a mobile-friendly output version of your content. However, some of them are designed to run within their own platform and stand-alone portability isn't always possible. Some of these support SCORM output. Some of the tools that we've seen only target one screen size. This is not a definitive list of authoring tools.
The biggest difference between mobile web apps and native apps today from a development perspective is that native apps can require many platforms to support whereas mobile web apps can require many browsers to support. The bottom line is that native apps vs. web apps is not really a debate. There is no winner and there is no loser. The choice of which type to develop is an engineering and a design decision that should be based on a solid set of requirements. Mobile is bigger than just apps!
What are native apps? A native mobile application is specifically designed to run on a device's operating system and machine firmware. It typically needs to be adapted/adjusted for different devices. Deloitte estimates the cost of developing for two OSs is 160 percent of the cost of developing for one.
A native app is a lot more than just the look and the feel. Many things matter, like the way in which data is stored on the mobile. In a native app, most of the data is stored on the device. In a web app, most data is stored on the cloud.
With HTML5 you can use the cache manifest and local storage to store data. Google mail (Gmail) for mobile on the iPhone is the best example of using local storage. It even launches faster than the native app. This is because the iPhone's web browser is always kept in memory so it launches right away. On Gmail, not only is the data stored in the cloud, so is the state.
Below is a list of the most widely used Application Platforms (aka Operating Systems). Sometimes the term "platform" has been used rather loosely in the mobile world and this causes confusion because there are such things as "development platforms." For the sake of consistency, when ADL refers to platforms, it means the operating system. Currently, in the desktop world, developers primarily have to deal with different variants of Windows, Mac, and Linux. In the mobile world, they have to target many platforms to develop a native application.
In terms of developing for native applications, there are many Software Development Kits (SDKs) to choose from. The list above is not all-inclusive, but will give you an idea of how complicated it would be to try to develop for multiple platforms using multiple SDKs. While some SDKs do support limited cross-platform deployment, there is no single SDK that supports every native platform, but there are a few that come close.
DIY Toolkits provide a convenient way to create native apps without having to use an SDK or have a strong technical background. Some key points to remember about DIY Toolkits:
Examples of current DIY Toolkits (in alphabetical order)
Pros:
Cons:
Mobile Web Apps are also referred to as Mobile Rich Internet Applications (RIA). The difference between mobile web app and native apps is anticipated to be less obvious to users in the near future. Modern mobile browsers can now gain direct access to the hardware capabilities of mobile devices (including accelerometers and geo-location data).
The performance of browser-based mobile web applications continues to improve. Persistent storage and access to user interface functions (such as the address book) may further reduce the demand for platform-specific native apps. As far as today's mobile web apps are concerned, most of the data is stored in the cloud.
The new concept of mobile widgets offers a great multi-device application platform, including local applications that don't require an always-connected Web with URLs and browsers. A widget is a local HTML / CSS / JavaScript web application. A mobile phone user downloads a widget once, and then the web application is stored locally on their mobile phone.
Pros:
Cons:
Mobile web app frameworks are easing the development process for those interested in the mobile web app approach. These frameworks allow mobile web apps to look and feel and function like native apps. They are typically available as configurable open source frameworks that you can download and begin working with by using pre-existing templates and themes. They provide anyone the ability to edit the existing files and are developed using web standards (HTML, CSS, JavaScript); the more recent ones support HTML5.
Some of these frameworks include APIs and some offer additional commercial tools or publishing capabilities for packaging the content as a native app. If you only care about targeting the newer smartphone touch devices or mobile devices that support HTML5, then this is a cost-effective alternative to native app development.
Too often we start with the device, rather than the learning or the support requirements. The learning outcome should always be the main focus, but familiarity with the capabilities of the handheld devices that learners carry may open new doors, or require taking a step back.
When thinking about mobile device categories, remember that the mobile device is more than just a phone. Basic mobile phones are limited for mLearning. The following list identified in "Programming the Mobile Web" by Maximiliano Firtman provides a logical way to categorize mobile devices.
Call and SMS support
No touch support, poor web / browser support, limited memory, and may include basic camera and/or music player
Medium-sized screen, basic HTML-browser support, sometimes 3G, a decent camera, a music player, games, and application support
Usually non-multitouch, but have advanced features (accelerometer, high MP camera, and Bluetooth) and good web support
System-On-Chip (SoC), full browser / HTML support, Wi-Fi, 3G/4G, music player, GPS, video-capable, Bluetooth, touch support, accelerometer, 3D video acceleration, etc.
Wi-Fi support, browser, other features, etc. iPod, iPad, e-Book readers, etc. This could also include PDAs (personal digital assistants), handheld game consoles or portable media players.
There is a new category called "Superphones", which was introduced by Google identified as "optimized from a silicon perspective, a hardware perspective and a software perspective."
Mobile device categories will continue to evolve both from a function and feature perspective and from vendor marketing messages. The main concern for mobile learning developers is what devices and/or features are supported for the intended learners.
Devices are equipped with various features that could be used to enhance learning. Which features do your learners have?
When defining mobile devices, we generally refer to devices which:
Tablets are not normally carried at all times, but their use is growing rapidly in education and training.
Other than differences in screen sizes, learning content for tablets require development very similar to mobile phone development. EPUB formats are growing in popularity for easily creating digital texts for viewing on tablets and other devices.
A mobile device has a small screen when compared to a desktop screen. In the desktop world, the sizes range 13, 15, 17, 19, and 21-inch screen sizes (diagonally). In mobile development the screen size range is usually 1.5 to 3 inches.
Display comparison between desktop computer, laptop computer, and mobile device
In the desktop world the most common screen resolution is 1024x768 pixels. In mobile development, the resolution is typically a quarter or half of that. How many pixels (width x height) are available on your target audience's device(s)? This is important to consider when creating graphics for mobile screens.
The most widely available screen resolution is 240x320 pixels. Some devices might have a resolution of 128x128 pixels, and some 800x600. However, since 2007 most mobile devices fall into four basic groups:
This is the ratio between the longer and shorter dimensions of a display.
Mobile content should be developed with an awareness of the rotation capability provided by accelerometers and should offer a good experience in any orientation.
Image of different screen shapes from "Programming for the Mobile Web"
A mobile device may support only one input method or it can support many options. Possibilities include:
Handwriting Recognition (Gesture Search)
There are several different approaches to opening more than one browser window at the same time. Here are some examples of the different behaviors on mobile browsers:
iPhone Browsing (multiple windows)
For most users, bandwidth is becoming less and less of an issue with the availability of 3G and 4G. However, connectivity will always be an important consideration for mobile development strategy. Issues to consider when addressing device connectivity and bandwidth:
Here are some of the top considerations when thinking in terms of performance. These can vary significantly from one device to another.
Smartphone competition has increased the number of sensors and other advanced capabilities made available to consumers. The iPhone 4 was the first to offer a built-in, 3-axis gyroscope. Advanced capabilities such as this can offer an enhanced experience if it is supported on the device of your target audience.
All mobile devices are not created equal. Consider the following issues when deciding on a mobile development and design strategy:
Examples of the preferred formats supported on some mobile device platforms are identified below. Using video will likely require some form of device detection for delivering mobile web content. The most common video formats supported across most devices are MP4 and 3GP. However, video content packaged with a native mobile app may require a specific encoding type for each platform and playback may or may not be supported.
Introduction
Basics
Planning
Learning Content
Development Options
Design Considerations