Is Mobile Learning about to become, well, simply just Learning

Over the last few years, everyone and his dog has been writing, researching and presenting their ideas on how everyone should incorporate a mobile learning strategy into their curriculum.

Obviously we are all sold on the need to move to HTML5, but the argument starts after that. The current hard sell doing the circuits is that we place our faith in a responsive style of design and development (Responsive Elearning Design) whereby we use an authoring tool that allows us to develop content that downgrades itself to match the device you are using. The key drivers for the philosophy has been that mobile students:

• don’t have the bandwidth to download desktop based learning
• don’t have the screen real estate to view desktop based learning
• don’t want to view a huge 2 hour desktop course, only small chunks at convenient times
• can’t view desktop courses on a small smartphone screen.

The problem with this approach is that everyone of the above factors has already been overcome. Yes, not in full circulation, but they have been overcome:

• people are starting the slow adoption of 4G that will make their mobile phone access quicker than my current village broadband!
• there are now a trickle of HD smartphones on the market. These phones have a higher screen resolution than the Logica laptop you are using to view this blog right now!
• open source learning management systems such as Moodle are now organised in a way that they promote the creation of courses by using a series of small modular chunks of learning.
• Screens on upmarket smartphones are slowly getting larger.

True, the above factors could still take 18 months to fully come mainstream – but in my view it won’t be long before our teenagers are all surfing the web on HD smartphones using 4G.

Simply, now, with a Moodle server and a copy of the latest Adobe Captivate, one can create multi-device learning without the need for any huge change in development.