For the past 250 years the idea of "learning content" has been almost synonymous with having a standardized curriculum presented by an authoritative instructor. In fact, the major innovation of the modern classroom, developed in Prussia the 1770s, was that everyone at the same grade level learned the same thing from a single teacher. The modern classroom literally immobilized learners, sitting them in rows all facing the same way, receiving instruction from the reputed expert at the front of the room (Woodill, 2010). As French philosopher Michel Foucault (1979) has pointed out, it is also a disciplinary regime, tying learners’ bodies down to a single place and making sure that they are under strict control.
Making learning mobile changes everything
Given that “frontal instruction” was the dominant model of education and has persisted to the present time in spite of the development of alternatives in the 1960s by the “new school” movement (such as active learning, experiential learning, and “open” classrooms), it is not surprising that early attempts at both e-Learning and mobile learning have been based upon the classroom metaphor. However, using a computer is not the same experience as classroom instruction. It immediately fragments the group experience into individuals learning at their own pace, and in many cases, interacting with different sets of materials. Once we add the ability to move around and to contextualize learning based on the learner's location, the classroom metaphor barely works at all. Learning content moves from neatly packaged standardized curriculum units, to a complex ecosystem of many different potential experiences and sources of information for the learner, and numerous ways for educators to facilitate learning other than presentations.
With e-Learning, and now mLearning, we produce learning content fashioned to particular rules and processes to make sure it's used appropriately, which increases the complexity of an already difficult software engineering problem. But, in our world of knowledge intensity and velocity of acquisition, where the consumers now want to use their own creativity, innovation, initiative, and “self-fashioning” based on their needs and interests, the static standardized curriculum materials just don't cut it anymore. Instead, we need intelligent learning content, content that possesses extra information built into it that allows it to be made available to learners as appropriate to their self-defined needs and desires (Gollner, 2011).
Learning content becomes intelligent
In our article we present some issues and considerations about engineering intelligent learning content, especially in the context of the latest wave of online innovation – mobile learning. To date, creating mobile learning content and experiences is not an easy task. Learning content can be anything that a learner finds useful at a particular time. The environments, in which we need to create mobile learning content, are complex mixes of different forms of mobility and different technologies used by different types of learners who learn in different ways and contexts, and then various training professionals with many different approaches to online or mobile instructional design.
Moreover, content and experiences are somewhat restricted by the requirements of different mobile carriers and regulated by several levels of government. Add to that the huge number of possibilities for what can constitute valid learning content or activities involving mobile devices, and you have a situation that is daunting to say the least. The “mobile learning ecosystem” consists of over five billion mobile phone subscriptions, using over 5,000 distinct mobile devices, with more than 30 different browsers, a multitude of input and output choices, a network infrastructure controlled by large carriers for mobile phones, and a changing Internet, with new concepts such as mashups and cloud computing.
The challenge of producing mLearning content
Producing learning content for mobile devices means that a designer needs to take all the variables of the system into account. The mobile environment is not the Internet, where standards were developed to allow you to build and render text and media-based Web pages, and send messages and media files around the world. Unlike the World Wide Web, at the moment there are limits on making changes to the system and little in the way of “best practices” and examples for guidance from those who have gone before.
Marshall McLuhan wrote, “We look at the present through a rear view mirror. We march backwards into the future” (McLuhan and Fiore, 1967). We see this in the fact that a decade ago the first versions of mobile learning were either talking heads giving a lecture, or lots of pages of text and graphics, delivered on a very small screen. The classroom metaphor persists in such conventional applications for mobile learning as course delivery, e-books, grade books, learning management systems, and multiple-choice testing. These conventions and techniques will continue to have a role to play in the choices for mobile learning in the future, but they only scrape the surface of “possibility” for this new technology.
The fact is that mLearning is not just learning as we know it. In order to move beyond the consequences of a "rearview mirror" approach to mobile learning, we need to understand the new affordances of mobile learning, and how it disrupts the classroom metaphor to produce new possibilities and dramatic change in how people learn. Mobile learning is moving us from mass education to individualized learner-controlled educational experiences. It is changing the classroom from one-directional transmission of information from the expert instructor to the passive student, to bidirectional and multidirectional possibilities. The individual is an active agent using mobile devices to interact with others or send back information gathered and aggregated in a collaborative learning project. Learning has moved from "just in case” to “just-in-time.”
