mLearning Towards Open Formats

Much of the current discourse in the emerging field of ‘mobile learning’ looks at traditional learning, happening in existing educational institutions. A parallel (and less well understood) tribe of mobile learners are adults at work, using their own, personal technology to access critical information at their moment of need for ‘just in time’ and ‘as and when necessary’ training (Wishart and Green, 2009). As smartphones become more and more ubiquitous, and the boundary between work and leisure becomes more and more blurred, the expectations of devices and what they can do are higher than they have ever been. Users are tending to use their devices for all aspects of their lives: work, personal organisation, leisure activities, communication, recording etc, and make less distinction between these different activities than before. And as Traxler says, “mobile devices demolish the need to tie the particular activities to particular places or particular times” (Traxler 2011). This blend between “work” and “play”, and increased expectations that any learning apps accessed on your private phone should “perform” as well as any other app, places an impossibly high expectation on educators, learning technologists and mobile developers interested in supporting mobile learning. How to craft a mobile app experience that rivals the best commercial apps available, yet offers rich and pedagogically sound access to resources in a cost effective manner? To do this requires a new methodology that allows mlearning content to “travel well” between platforms, and device types, and provides solutions to a broad range of technology challenges, some of which are unique to mlearning. As part of their work on the US Government funded Mobile Learning Environment (MoLE) project, the author and his technology team have been wrestling with many of these challenges, whilst creating a suite of mobile content, performance support tools, and job aids designed to be used across many nations, languages and devices. Their software is currently in use in over 20 nations, preparing emergency workers for disaster situations. Their findings, and technical solutions are already the basis of an open framework for defining and building mobile learning content. This paper describes some of the technical challenges and shares a possible foundation for open sharing and reuse of mobile learning content. Author