There is a great deal of anticipation about the coming day of mobile devices, and the effect that always having connections and online content literally at the tips of our fingers will have on our daily lives. Probably nowhere is this more anticipated than among the e-Learning community, driven by interest in the iPhone, the iPad, Android, and the Blackberry, not to mention Smartphones in general.
The interest spiked once again two weeks ago when Adobe announced the release of Connect Pro Mobile, a synchronous conferencing application for the iPhone. What makes this free app useful? Where is Adobe heading with its mobile applications? In this article, I interview Adobe’s Randah McKinnie about the app and about Adobe’s plans for the future.
Whither m-Learning?
Organizations are implementing mobile learning (m-Learning) in different ways. Some are taking their existing online learning content and porting it to mobile devices. Some are providing their users with access to content via a Web portal designed for mobile use. Others are using social media on mobile devices to supplement more traditional modes of learning, while still others are creating short videos to train users on the go.
There are many m-Learning categories. Just to name a few, there are:
- information updates
- knowledge access
- self-paced learning
- testing
- certifications
- notifications
- collaboration
- performance support
- on-the-job-training
- games
- simulations
One category that we have not heard too much about is live virtual training — using a mobile device to take part in live, instructor-led training over the Web. In other words, this is listening to an instructor present live training content that you can view on your mobile device, and being able to interact with the instructor and participants.
When I first heard companies were developing such apps for virtual meetings and presentations a few questions sprang to mind. How useful would this be given that we use mobile devices in such short time slices through the day? Would we listen to and watch a live instructor for 30 minutes to an hour on a smart phone? Is the screen size way too small for any substantial content that is being presented? Can you effectively satisfy both a desktop audience and a mobile audience with the same content and approach? Could this be a really bad idea?
Well, now you can go experiment and answer these questions yourself as two Web conferencing companies have recently released mobile versions of their virtual meeting software. Both Cisco and Adobe have released free apps that provide mobile access to online meetings and presentations. The most recent was Adobe with their Connect Pro Mobile app for the iPhone.
Interview with the Senior Product Manager for Connect Pro Mobile
Being an avid Adobe Connect user I decided to contact Adobe and get the skinny on their new iPhone app. I spoke with Randah McKinnie, the Senior Product Manager for Connect Pro Mobile and eLearning Solutions at Adobe, who filled me in on the details.
Paul Clothier: Can you give me a brief overview of the Adobe Connect Pro Mobile app?
Randah McKinnie: Sure. Adobe Acrobat Connect Pro Mobile is a mobile version of Connect Pro that runs on an iPhone or iPod Touch. (See Figure 1.) It allows you to participate in a Connect Pro meeting when you are away from your computer or laptop.
Figure 1. The splash screen for Adobe Connect Pro Mobile
The mobile app is specifically designed for the small screen. Instead of trying to fit the whole Connect experience into a single iPhone screen we divided it up into three primary modules: Screen, Chat, and Camera. (See Figure 2.) You can follow along with what’s being presented in the share pod by tapping the Screen button. When you want to participate in Chat you tap the Chat button, and then you can send messages to the group or view all the chat messages. If a presenter is using a video cam you can tap on the Camera button and see the video stream.
Figure 2: The Main Screen view of Adobe Connect Pro Mobile
PC: Why did Adobe develop the app for the iPhone?
RM: We knew that we needed a mobile app for Connect Pro because it kept coming up in our customer conversations and in our research projects. We watch the market and business user habits, and the fact that we have a highly mobile population using smart phones convinced us that we needed to offer a mobile Connect experience. One of the primary drivers was people’s need to attend team meetings and Webinars while they are on the move or not in the office. We wanted to provide a way where they would not have to miss an important presentation because they were not in front of a computer.
PC: I understand it was developed using Flash?
RM: Yes. Adobe is invested in an industry-wide Open Screen Project agenda — the goal is to have a development environment where the same original content can run on different devices and screens with minimal tweaks or optimizations. This Open Screen agenda pushed us to come up with what we call Packager for iPhone. Adobe Flash Professional CS5 will include Packager, so that you can publish ActionScript 3 projects to run as native applications for iPhone. So, instead of publishing your project to a “swiff” (swf) Flash file, you publish to an IPA (iPhone application) file. The exciting thing about this is that a Flash developer can use Flash Professional CS5, create content with ActionScript and output it to a native iPhone application file. A developer then does not have to know Objective C or Cocoa Touch to develop an iPhone app – he or she can take advantage of their existing Flash and ActionScript skills and create native apps from their Flash projects.
We used a prerelease version of the Packager for iPhone and were able to start prototyping. One of the first apps we built was a mobile version of Connect Pro. This was the very first Adobe-branded application that uses the Packager for iPhone technology. We will also be able to use the same code to deliver this application on other mobile devices when AIR (Adobe Integrated Runtime) for mobile devices becomes available later this year and into 2011. We are currently working on a prototype for Droid, and plan to eventually have an offering for the Blackberry.
RM: Well, we designed the app for attending virtual meetings and presentations. You would use it when you have a team meeting or important presentation to attend and you happen to be at an airport, sitting on a train, or in a coffee shop without a laptop. It was designed to be a quick and convenient way to participate in a meeting when you are out of the office. Rather than missing a meeting you can attend a portion of it wherever you happen to be.PC: Do you think the size of the screen diminishes the experience of a Connect presentation?
RM: Well, I think the key thing to remember is that this is not a desktop experience. You shouldn’t expect the same experience that you would have if you were in front of a desktop or laptop screen. In fact, we would hope that learners, for example, would make every effort to be in front of a computer screen to get high-value training. We imagine that people who are in a pinch would use this app to catch parts of their virtual classes or presentations rather than miss them altogether.
The small screen is a limitation, and we can’t make tiny things look bigger. We have published some best practices [see link at end of this interview] for those hosts who are expecting a remote audience. Those guidelines include not having tiny text on a slide. I think people understand that the experience needs to be different on mobile because of the issue of reduced space. And the differentiated experience – in terms of reading Chat, switching to Screen in order to watch a presentation or share an application, then switching to Camera – did not seem to be an issue in our usability testing or for our beta audience.
PC: Can the app use both a phone connection and Voice-over-IP (VoIP)?
RM: Yes, both. So whether the meeting is using VoIP or a standard conference call, you’ll hear it through the phone’s speaker. Either way you will be able to watch the presentation and hear it through the phone at the same time. If you wanted to participate verbally in the meeting you would need to have a conference phone connection. At this time, we don’t have a way of sending audio back to the meeting via VoIP.
PC: Can the presenter have more than one share pod displayed?
RM: We have a fairly complicated algorithm for how we handle multiple share pods and we prioritize based on different things. For example, if the share pod is set to full screen view, then it's considered to be the one that should be broadcast. If there's more than one share pod in the view and there's one that's larger, then we broadcast that one. So we are recommending that presenters stick with the standard layout with a single share pod if they anticipate having an audience that may include mobile users. We have created a best practices document that will give guidelines to presenters on these types of considerations.
PC: Can the mobile user view Flash content and interact with it?
RM: In this first generation, there are limitations to the Flash content that you can view on the mobile device — Captivate content for instance. That's one of the limitations of the mobile version versus the browser version. The same with polling — the mobile users are not able to view or participate in polls. However, Connect Pro Mobile supports FLVs (Flash video files), so the presenter can show brief videos that will play for the mobile audience as well as for the desktop attendees.
PC: What’s your favorite feature of the app?
RM: The feature that I think is really great is being able to view the Webcam video right on my iPhone. (See Figure 3.) It’s pretty exciting to have that video streaming right to your phone. If there are multiple people using Webcams, the app gives you access to each of the Webcam feeds, simply by tapping to pan through the available feeds.
Figure 3: Using the Camera button gives the user access to Webcam feeds from other users.
PC: I use Adobe Presenter regularly for developing self-paced online learning. Will it be possible to create and view Adobe Presenter content for the iPhone?
RM: It’s not available right now but we have had discussions with our engineers and are looking into the possibilities in the future. One idea we have is that it would be great to have the ability to create an on-demand presentation in Presenter and then publish for the iPhone. We are excited about the possibility of doing this, because one of our future goals is to offer convenient ways of creating and delivering mobile learning. Both Presenter and Captivate would be ideal for that — and not only have them running on mobile devices, but potentially caching the interaction data and sending it back to the server or LMS.
PC: Does Adobe have any other plans for mobile access to content?
RM: I can only speak for the Connect Pro team, and yes, we are looking at ways to provide access for users to Connect Pro Training via the iPhone or mobile device. We would like to offer something along the lines of our current “My Training” tab in Connect Pro Central. A learner might be able to see available training and access online content specifically designed for mobile learning. All of this is a vision right now, but that’s the direction we want to move in.
We are also looking at the possibility of delivering recorded Connect sessions on the iPhone. One of the challenges right now is the size of the recordings, so rather than stream them directly to the mobile device, we may have users download them to their desktop first, and then perform some method of synchronization to get the recordings onto their mobile device.
