There was a time (before I was born) when people called television “the small screen,” as opposed to movies, which people called “the big screen.” (OK, they also called movies “the silver screen” too.) In fact, the small screen was not much bigger than an iPad when TV first started getting popular in the early 1950s. Early TV sets had round picture tubes with a rectangular frame placed over them, which made them even smaller.
Today when we talk about the small screen, we’re talking really small. Really, really small. Micro. Micro, as in having a diagonal measurement of about four inches (10 cm). That’s small. Mobile devices are rapidly becoming a delivery channel for e-Learning, or mLearning. But is mLearning on a very small screen really the same as e-Learning on a larger screen? Can you simply take the video or the training screens (the ones that are like PowerPoint) that you already have, and repurpose them without any modification for mLearning? Nope, well … maybe, but let’s explore this.
Smaller screens, less information
When viewing a standard computer monitor these days, say on a 15-inch screen, you can see over 1,000 (usually 1,080, but sometimes 1,360) pixels of information across that screen. What does this mean? A pixel is a unit of discrete information with brightness and color information that the system delivers to your eyes. My 17-inch computer screen has 1,920 X 1,200 pixels of discrete information. An iPhone has 320 X 480 pixels of discrete information available. Put another way, the total pixel count for an iPhone is 153,600 pixels. That 17-inch UXGA screen on my 17” laptop has 2,304,000 pixels of information for my eyes to see. That’s 15 (fifteen) times the information capacity of my iPhone (a 3G). This is a huge differential. Obviously, something will get lost in the translation of video from a big screen to a small screen unless some awareness of the small screen is taken into account when originally creating the video.
Figure 1 is an example of how screen sizes differ.
Figure 1: Small screens carry far less information because there are far fewer pixels on them.
The sizes in Figure 1 are relative since a Word document (which I used to create this article) typically doesn’t have the ability to show the larger screens full size, nor does the browser you’re using to view this article. But the point is if I made a video that filled up the big 17-inch computer screen with all different kinds of information, even an Adobe Captivate video that was a software demo, it would overwhelm the really small mobile screen.
No? Try it using any program. You can’t see the menus. You really can’t see the mouse either on the small screen. But it plays fine and everything is visible on the 15-inch screen. Even a 12-inch screen is large enough to see the demo, but on a screen much smaller than that, you can’t see the action. I’ve done software demos for Premiere Pro and After Effects and since I know these programs well, I can see the demo fine on the small screen, but I’m usually taking audio cues while I have the actual program open on my screen.
Strange effects of size and distance
We see with our eyes. We process what we’re seeing with our brains. There were some interesting studies in the 1960s and 1970s that determined how much information could be taken out of an image. The researchers found, for example, that a picture of Marilyn Monroe could be broken down to a five by five block image and viewers could still identify it as Marilyn Monroe.
Today, Aude Oliva, a professor at MIT, is doing studies of how our brains make sense of sight. This link, http://www.wired.com/medtech/health/magazine/17-05/st_alphageek, shows a picture of Albert Einstein that morphs into Marilyn Monroe as you view it from greater distances. How does this happen? It has to do with the information our eyes can process and how our brains process that information. It’s why optical illusions exist. It’s why we can’t trust our own eyeballs to tell us what we’re really seeing. As educators, we need to be very careful of the information we put in front of our learners so they can see and comprehend what we intended them to see and comprehend.
What to do about it
The end result of all this is for me is KISS. My motto: Keep It Simple, Stupid. And I’m the stupid one. It’s easy to fill up a video shot with all kinds of different information, people, backgrounds, words over the backgrounds, menus, whatever. But if you’re going to make your training for mobile devices, then you’d better keep it simple. Or if learners will use your training on mobile devices and on normal computer screens, shoot it twice — once for a larger screen and once for a mobile screen.
What follows are some simple rules that you should bear in mind for creating video for mobile learning:
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Use a good camera. It doesn’t have to be expensive and have three chips, but a camera like a Flip, Webby, mobile phone (yes, like the iPhone 4) or cheap camcorders that record higher contrast video, which is one of the things that these micro-sized camcorders do, will not produce video that works at both ends of the display size range. High contrast video is difficult to translate to the small screen on a mobile device. These micro-size camcorders record video that doesn’t have enough information to make any subtleties in the image.
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One or two people in a shot is it. You should plan on no more than that in any shot. Any more and they’ll look like ants on the mobile screen … unless you’re shooting ants.
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Big type—probably not more than 6 to 10 words on the screen at a time seems appropriate.
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If you’re making quizzes that need multiple choice or true-false responses, be careful about how long the questions and responses are. For multiple choice, short questions and short answers are the most appropriate.
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If you created your project in Flash, you’re out of luck when it comes to the iPhone. And this is not the place to debate that one.
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If you still think you can repurpose your video, render the video you have at small screen size and give it a look. Have others do the same. If they like what they see, and can make visual sense and pass a quiz, then by all means, use the small screen. But suppose someone says something like, “What’s that?” You’ll know then that it’s too complex for the small screen.
