Designing for Mobile Learning: Clark and Mayer's Principles Applied

The mobile device industry is booming. As it grows, the opportunity for use of these devices to support learning also increases. Individuals are already using their cell phones and personal digital assistants (PDAs) for tasks ranging from text messaging, chatting, and talking, to paying their bills, booking air travel, and yes ... learning.

How much growth? In 2002, Claudia Steinberger was reporting forecasts that already predicted, “... by 2004 about 63 million handhelds will be sold, and ... approximately 38% of them will be smart phones, integrating PDA functionality with features for communication.” (Please see the References at the end of this article.) More recently, in July 2005, Telecom Trends International, Inc., predicted, “The mobile wireless networks revenue will grow from $60.7 billion in 2004 to $100.1 billion in 2011.” And this year, an eLearning Guild study about new e-Learning modalities found that 38% of study respondents already expect moderate to significant increases in the use of mobile learning. (See Figure 1)

Figure 1 Adoption of mobile learning © eLearningGuild, 2006

Note that “mobile devices” for the purposes of this article is a large category that includes more devices than cell phones (or “mobiles”) and wireless-enabled PDAs. Mobile devices available today range from proprietary game platforms (such as the Sony PSP, or Play Station Portable), and basic tablet PCs such as the Samsung Q1 UMPC (Ultra-Mobile PC) — both of which come with wireless capability built in — to top-of-the-line tablet PCs such as Motion Computing’s LE1600, which does not include wireless capability as a standard feature (although the purchaser can certainly add it).

Awareness of an increasing number of research projects investigating learning that uses these devices — with or without wireless connections — led me to want to find out if and how mobile devices would be suitable for publishing and accessing self-study content. In this article, I take up some basic questions related to this interest. What is mobile learning (or m-Learning, as it is known)? What are some of the advantages of m-Learning, and the pitfalls? Assuming that m-Learning is useful for presenting content, knowledge, and skill demonstrations, I also look into Ruth Clark and Richard Mayer’s principles for designing multimedia learning as they apply to a mobile environment. I will comment on two authoring tools for the mobile environment, and then I will conclude with some ideas that may help you be ready to use m-Learning in your own organization.

What is mobile learning?

Simply stated, mobile learning is e-Learning on a mobile device. It combines mobile computing and e-Learning, according to Anna Trifonova’s review of the literature. Remember that by mobile device, I mean any mobile computer-based device that one can carry around easily any time, anywhere. Trifonova concluded that mobile devices could support learners with a variety of actions, particularly by interacting with people, accessing content, and accessing services. M-Learning can therefore support both formal and informal learning through collaboration, chat services, and data transfers between learners directly on the mobile device.

For example, a student could be attending a University class. Following class, the teacher makes content available for downloading: text to read, quizzes, links to more resources, a calendar event for an assignment. The student uses her PDA or tablet PC to synchronize content with the university mail and file servers, and voilà, she is a mobile learner!

Mobile learning architecture

Mobile learning requires an architecture, or supporting infrastructure, that is identical to that required for any other form of e-Learning. The m-Learning infrastructure must provide information, learning content, and communication technologies (see Figure 2). There is an increasing demand, however, for hardware and software systems that support mobile applications and access to information and training from any location on the planet.

Figure 2 Different layers of e-Learning architecture

Finally, mobile learning research is hot, and researchers and educators crave solutions to enable m-Learning. There are an increasing number of studies that focus on the presentation layer of content and on instructional design models for m-Learning.

Context awareness

One example of research on the presentation layer and instructional design models for m-Learning comes from MOBIlearn (http://mobilearn.org). (http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://mobilearn.org) MOBIlearn, which concluded its work in 2005, was an international consortium funded by the European Union to explore new ways to use mobile environments to meet the needs of learners.

MOBIlearn performed research in the area of context awareness subsystems and developed a context awareness module “... intended to provide learners with a way to access appropriate content on their mobile devices without having to pay too much attention to searching and querying the set of all available content.” The selected content will reflect the characteristics of a specific individual, such as physical location, learning style, acquired knowledge base, and personal preferences. The final report from MOBIlearn is available on their Web site.

Advantages of m-Learning

The advantages of mobile learning are numerous. By the simple fact of being based on mobile devices, m-Learning provides access to information and learning content any hour of the day, any day of the week, in any location. Mobile learning will allow learners to fill those long hours waiting for a flight to depart, or during that flight. Could m-Learning provide access to learning to a greater audience? I believe so.

For example, in the UK m-Learning helps teenagers who dropped out of school. By publishing (pushing) content to the teens’ smart phones, educators hope to help them rebuild an interest for learning math and science.

As another example, physicians in the medical field, and industry sales representatives in the pharmaceutical field, use mobile devices to maintain the currency of their skills and knowledge.

Here’s a (perhaps) hypothetical personal example. Picture yourself on a business trip. You are traveling from Los Angeles, California to Montreal, Canada. While waiting at the L.A. airport, you review your emails and find out that your boss has asked you to review your financial spreadsheet: there seems to be an error in your profit calculation for a project with your Montreal client. The error needs to be fixed now, so that your boss can approve the budget. Using your PDA, you verify your spreadsheet and can’t see why the numbers are not exact. You connect to the corporate intranet and link to the e-Learning server where you can review the short 15-minute lesson on the formula to calculate profit. Bingo! By going through that course, you find the error in the formula, fix the spreadsheet, and get it approved by your boss.

Learning on a mobile device also offers the possibility of collaborating with peers or colleagues during or after formal learning, synchronously or asynchronously. Today’s mobile devices can allow for powerful interactivity and interaction. Mobile devices are integrative; they can integrate m-Learning, communication, workflow, agenda, and many other functions. To illustrate, let’s go back to your hypothetical trip.

Arriving in Montreal, you have at least an hour available to contact colleagues. You need to communicate the error in the formula to them and to your staff so that all are aware of the change. You open your browser to connect to the corporate server and open the mobile chat service, connecting with colleagues already online. You chat with them about this error in the spreadsheet so that they are all aware of it. You tell them that you will upload a corrected version of the spreadsheet on the corporate server.

To summarize, during this trip to Montreal, you found out about an error via email, re-learned the proper way to calculate profit via your mobile device connected to the corporate server, chatted with colleagues to communicate the fix (informal learning) and uploaded the corrected spreadsheet to the server. Now, that’s efficiency!

Learning isn’t only about classroom and online courses. It’s about being able to gain access to information, learning content, and collaboration tools all in one integrated system. M-Learning is only one part of the full blended-learning equation.

Some m-Learning pitfalls

What are the pitfalls of mobile technology in general? First, mobile technology is fairly new and only recently has it offered “acceptable” visual and audio capabilities. Second, most mobile device displays are too small. Display real-estate is limited on most PDAs and is even smaller on smart phones. (See Table 1) Finally, audio downloads are still a bit on the slow side or, if compressed too much, audio quality may suffer.

There is hope! Newer devices come with larger displays, better audio compression, and faster networks. The number of devices compatible with Flash Lite 1.1 or 2.0 — a version of the de-facto standard Flash player for mobile phones, PDAs, and consumer electronics devices — is increasing, although distribution is currently somewhat limited geographically. (Editor’s note: See the list of supported devices at http://www.adobe.com/mobile/supported_devices.) It’s only a matter of time until mobile learning will be very palatable for many learners.

M-Learning may create headaches for your IT department. “It’s another gadget to support and who’s going to set the standards for these devices?” they will say. IT will have to consider this new medium, add power to their servers, possibly add functionalities to the LMS that was finally running nicely, and provide even more stringent security for wireless access. As with any other new gadget, from diskette to DVDs to networks and wireless networks, IT will find a way to cope with it. The IT side of things is a challenge, but one that can be addressed. It’s important to consider that this device diversity also brings a challenge to the instructional designers and to developers of learning products, as you will see in the next section of this article.

What about the costs? Will companies invest in the latest mobile devices for all their staff? I don’t think so, and like e-Learning or classroom-based training or even email on the PDA, it is not meant for everyone. The need has to be there. There has to be some kind of link to the business function the mobile user is performing.

There are ways to design m-Learning “courselets” to provide additional support for learning and collaboration. In the next section, I will review six basic principles for designing multimedia learning applied to m-Learning.

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