The Learning Guys

Many organizations are starting to offer mobile learning (m-learning) options to their employees. As learning designers grapple with how best to get learning content onto mobile devices, we should reflect back on some of the mistakes we made when we first introduced e-learning to our learners.

The biggest mistake we all made? That’s easy….We tried to take what was delivered in the classroom and faithfully recreate it in an e-learning format. As an example, many e-learning courses simply pushed learning content (mostly text) to learners in a linear sequence. Taking a course online meant lots of scrolling and tired, sore eyes.

What was the lesson we learned? Also easy…We had to apply a new set of design principles to design a new way to learn. From pushing screen after screen of text, we moved towards interactive learning experiences which made greater use of multimedia, non-linearity and personalization.

How do we apply this lesson to m-learning? Even easier…..Once again, we have to apply a new set of design principles to design a new way to learn. We can’t simply take an e-learning course and squeeze it into an m-learning format.

Some m-learning design concepts
When designing m-learning content and structure, I have found it useful to consider the following tips:

1. Keep it simple
2. Allow learners to determine which content is delivered to their mobile device
3. Content should be highly focused, componentised and interruptible
4. Divide content into short “nuggets”- 30 seconds to 10 minutes in length
5. Don’t demand too much reading on a small screen
6. Don’t distract learners with unnecessary rich media objects
7. Use visual cues such as keywords, comments and illustrations
8. Incorporate audio files
9. Use tabloid format – headlines and summaries
10. Use short words
11. Avoid large amounts of data
12. Use selection lists for data entry
13. Consistency – place links in same place on each screen
14. Always provide link to Start page or Index
15. Avoid underlined text as this will be mistaken for Links

I’d like to hear about what others are up to.

This entry was posted on Monday, July 9th, 2007 at 11:46 and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.