Week 2 - Mobile Learning and Globalisation
My initial thoughts on this topic were Mobile Learning, learners on the go, access content any place any time. How can we accommodate this learning, with so many options available?
There is, of course, iPad. Which is most favoured by schools, K-12 and many teachers.
Readings have shown, Android is very close to being equal with the number of apps available.
In discussion with groups of students (18 +), it is interesting to note, Apple products are not necessarily the preferred option.
I myself prefer Android.
In my context, VET, we are working towards mobile learning. The online courses I develop are purely in LMS's so therefore mobile access has not been much of an issue. Trial and error has found documents, spreadsheets, etc for student downloads should be PDF, easiest to open on all devices and usually smaller file size.
Flash player has been the biggest issue, some devices are still unable to play flash files.
Cloud storage has become a saviour for adult education. From my humble beginnings as a facilitator, storage has always been a disaster. Our first storage media was floppy disk (most students wouldn't even know what these are now) to the revolutionary USB. The problems students encountered were damaged disks, viruses, loss of files, the list goes on and on. I have now encouraged my learners to use Google Drive, the main emphasise being workplace simulation, collaborating on documents as a team, etc.
My recent work has been in Canvas. I find this LMS to be quite clean, uncluttered and easy to navigate.
I have learnt quite a bit about developing for devices over the last couple of months, but what stands out for me is to keep it simple and easy to navigate. Devices are small whether it is a phone or tablet, there is also no mouse or keyboard to help us move around, therefore the learning environment has to be simple enough for the learner to use.
BYOD is becoming more and more the norm for e-learning and in the workplace. As a designer or developer of e-learning, we have to be mindful of our learners' choice of device. It cannot be acceptable to develop on iPad to find our students cannot access because they have chosen android. To dictate the device to use is archaic.
