To prioritize features of mobile learning

Every learner’s behavior in e-learning can migrated to m-learning. Which behavior gives maximum benefit to business?

• To remind of a concept: We can search for the concept and remind our-self.
• To handle quick change: any change in content can be made available in device regardless of the learner’s location and time of day
• Something Goes Wrong: when something goes wrong, we are interested in what is solution and how to implement the solution.
• To learn or understand more : This happens when you can listen to same lecture multiple times beyond the class hours.

Media in mobile/tablets – nightmare

Different mobiles support different formats with respect to media. I wish that there is standard like XML that all mobile/tablets would ahere to. Rather the mobile companies are interested supporting advertising and camera capability. Some pointers where I am challenged and decisions made are

• start with image type .png or .gif. I prefer .png as it is greater color depth
• Each mobile/tablet have different sizes and support different resolutions. I go with separate images for specific mobility devices. That means my authoring software need to be able to upload images of different sizes/resolutions.
• Next comes the orientation. May be we need to have separate images one for landscape and one for portrait.
• Video and Audio formats supported across phones differ too. I prefer for video .mp4 or .3gp as it have wider support. For audio, I choose mp3

No Flash. is HTML 5 ready for content development?

1. There is no secure media streaming in HTML 5.

2. No good development tools to build animations and interactive content. Developers need to start using java script and CSS for the above activities

3. Browsers do not seem to have full implementation to support HTML 5. The popular old version of browsers do not have HTML 5 support too.

4. Each Browser supporting HTML 5 has its own rendering approach and there is no common thing in all of them to replace Flash. Developers need to write separate code for content rendering for each browser.

Flash educational content : How to repurpose for mobile/tablet solution?

Last week, we met a customer who wanted to migrate his web content to androids mobiles/tablets. They wanted to transform their interactive books to mobile format. Assuming it is HTML, I asked them for HTML content. There came HTML content with media and interactions done by Flash.  They wanted Flash to work on all tablets. I do know that flash does work in tablets version 3.0 and above. But most of tablets in India are 2.3 and above. How should I proceed?

I find that a lot of learning content today has been designed and developed using Flash and I started to look at  Flash Plugin roadmap. It was a good read and i felt that the platform is transitioning away from content authoring/publishing developers. It seems to make a lot of sense with advent of HTML 5 and Adobe interest to support the same. Also saw the page Adobe guts mobile Flash player strategy

What about the increasing number of mobile devices that we’d like to deliver learning to? We know that the Metro Touch version of IE will not support the Flash plugin.  Given its memory intensive nature, iOS  developers made that choice a long time ago. With content, one wants to be able to develop once and run on both desktop, mobile and ‘in-between’ devices.  I understand that a stable and feature-rich HTML5 development environment is yet arrive in scene to match the depth of Flash. Earlier media rich functionality was developed with Flash and technically intensive content was build with HTML.

What will a web without Flash look like? What would all companies do that have applications or games that are Flash based?  Are we going to see a mass-migration of content and  authoring tools to the HTML5 standard?

My client was not happy with me when I pointed to them that Flash was not supported and they have to think of migration. He pointed me to use Flash as we have shown that it works in our application in the tablet he has selected to push down to students. I became sad as this does not help the end users of the application who are the students.

 

Adopt m-learning in India rural? – Part 3

Let us think how to make teachers to start creating and using mobile learning content. Once this happen, the students would start using mobile learning, as students are heavily influenced by their teachers. In reality today, mobile devices usage are not allowed in schools and colleges. Today we try to convince deans or principals to allow schools to enable m-learning for students and bring contents for m-learning.

Instead, teachers should be educated to understand values/benefits received by them for contributing to mobile learning. They should be equipped with case study and procedures to restructure their content or produce new content for mobile delivery. Some things to share with teachers can be

• Reduce the time teacher spends on assessment evaluations and conducting exams. Multiple choice assessments are delivered as mobile application to student’s mobile and the student answers them and selected answers are send to the centralized content server for rich reporting to teacher.Timings for the exam can be self selected and tests can be time bound. This enables teachers with access to questions bank that can be used as required in future.
• Enable audio exams on the mobile that are in viva formats. The viva could be either live tele – vivas that can be conducted on call or recorded submissions using the mobile recorder, the audio file from which can be transferred. Best teachers can be involved in viva voices.
• Learning content can be downloaded, categorized and provided to students using SD cards similar CDs/DVDs of PC era. Schools can perform the download and distribute to parents for them to enable children as and when required in the academic year.
• Teachers from far distances can be brought together to collaborate using mobile . A urban/experienced/retired and one rural/new teacher can collaborate in peer or mentor roles. This enriches their subject knowledge and reflects in the class lectures benefiting of their students. This can happen with presence of central system that enables collaboration and a directory to find related peers/experts.
• Teachers should be provided incentive to contribute and to enhance adoption of m-learning in their students. This can be made possible though scholarships, income tax benefits, special skill building programs or m-teaching training subscriptions. Also there should be a mechanism to appreciate free sharing of knowledge by teachers, rank teachers based on the popularity of their learning content and the ranking given by their peers or students.

Mobile app test scenarios

I have been helping my QA team to write test cases for testing the mobile application. I see that there are generic test cases to be tested for any native application.some of the scenarios are captured here.

1. Install of the application
2. Un-install of the application: Are all the files created by the application deleted?
3. Network Issues: In our office, we have places where the network connectivity is best on the mobile and area where the connectivity is worse. Though we cannot help this, what happens when a data download is initiated and the user moves from the best connectivity area to the worst and vice-versa? I find my tester get frustrated with this testing and i am afraid that this can lead errors to slip.
4. Voice Call Handling: What happens to the timer when there is a sudden call and user decides to take the call? This is very important when one is testing audio application. Can the user resume the audio from where the audio was interrupted due to the call? if there is data download operation, running in the background, will it be affected by the voice call. Some of the above scenarios also apply for receiving SMS in the mobile.
5. Verify that application logo comes properly. some times i find developers using the same image for different applications and if user installs it is not good for the user to select the application. i also ask for the version of the application to be mentioned to validate the same during testing.
6. Which server is the application connected? The application connects to server on the cloud, and the challenge is to determine at runtime where the mobile application connects to local development server or staging server on cloud or the production server. Though it is easier to display on the mobile, does it make sense for the end user and can it be displayed? Sometimes. i am going to build a debug and release config file to determine what gets displayed.
7. Application Start/ Restart: i would expect the application must not take more than 25s to start.
8. Exit application: Though we all think running application is challenge, some times exiting application is night mare. The commands in display are not displayed and the user enters a zombie state. Effectively the user should be able to exit the application in every form or activity and from any point or work flow of the application.
9. Low memory: We find that our application needs more runtime memory than available in the device and the application stops at the launch step. Though i am not happy that my app could not run on user’s mobile, i am happy that my application did not hang or interrupt the mobile operations. Same is the need for applications to check whether there is sufficient memory before the application initiates download of files.
10.Data Download: How to make sure that the data is downloaded in its full extent to be used by the application? Some times due to network issues, the complete file might not be downloaded and the application needs to handle this gracefully.
11. Mobile Storage: if your application is J2ME based and if you make use of record store, then you need to test the stability of application by removing the battery.I found scenario where RMS(record store) of the application was totally corrupted when application restarted after reinserting the battery. Can your application still go forward? May be the application needs to detect the corruption and ask the user to reinstall the application?

Mobile testing is fun

I have been working last month on testing our mobile application and trying to deliver the same. We have native mobile application, which makes use of SMS and GPRS to interact with central server on the cloud.

1. Lack of physical devices: We are building for j2me and android applications. How do i make sure that the application works on different permutations of android and j2me phones in the market? In India, we take the help of mobile stores that sell second hand mobiles to test on variety of physical devices. We also engage our friends, ex colleagues and family to perform testing. But we always question what is quality that is good for our friends to spend their personal time free for our application testing.

2. State of connection for QA testing: When the application uses SMS, we have to really send SMS to test the end to end functionality of the application. The emulators cannot simulate SMS sending and receiving in the local developer or QA environment. it was a great relied with GPRS connection on native j2me application and native android application, as they provide their emulators a mechanism to connect to the web server running on local-host.

3. Scale testing and pilots: For a test engineer to use emulator and perform testing multiple times is not easy job. In pilots too, there is a good amount of effort spend to educate students to find where the application is available on the mobile and launch for the same. I see that this challenge reduces with android phones and high end j2me phones.

All of us remember our passwords and mobile numbers. But when we use mobile number as identifier in the application, it is difficult to remember multiple identifiers. To add with the mobile number when used as identifier is 10 digits long and is not easy to remember multiple of them during testing.

4. Time: We see that application developers choose to hit ‘fast forward button’ on their testing process, as it occurs at the end of the cycle. Small glitches, crashes and malfunctions are overlooked.In addition once developer are used to error, it never occurs that there is a better way to fix the same and they start to live with the same.

5. Reliability: we try to store all message received from the mobile on the server prior to processing the message. This helps us to make sure that message from the mobile has reached the server and also to be aware of the capability of the mobile used to add this part of our test configuration. There is a long way to go here.

6. Different Mobile Platforms/OS: There are different Platforms/OS currently present in the market. Android, iOS,J2ME phones, Windows 7, Blackberry (RIM) and so on. Diversity in mobile platforms, different OS versions and platform limitations make it a challenge for testing mobile applications. The challenge is increased as there is more inconsistency in terms of functionality across multiple devices of same platform and every platform may have some limitations.

Mobile learning: Design guidelines

While building m-learning applications, we need to think of a lot of guidelines to design the content and the technology. Summarizing the same here.

1. Do we add value to both students and teachers?. While m-learning can help students, what do we offer for teachers to move to m-learning? Does the system help teachers to build learning material? Does the system store responses given by students to enable teacher to keep track of student’s progress? How could mobile usage enable teachers to understand strengths and weakness of their students? Wi ll instant feedback enable the teacher to refine their teaching skills?
2. Does the existing PC learning content good for mobile? May or may not be. How do we educate and help teachers to build content for mobile learning? What type of learning should be delivered on mobiles? The contents for the mobile phone must be significantly reduced in conformity with the limited capacity of the device. Contents available in PC-based learning mode needs to be evaluated for use on the mobile phone.Excessive scrolling to see the entire item and options should also be avoided.
3. Should we have excess use of multi-media in mobile learning? While multi-media can improve the quality of learning systems,it always does not enhance learning and we need to be aware of the fact that having more media will make the system less responsive and may even distract users from the intended learning goals.
4. Can we use SMS? The learning materials could be sent using SMS to students and the students could interact or respond to questions via SMS. This method is tricky to organize over a long duration of time. Delivery times of SMS messages vary greatly. SMS messages can be duplicated or delivered out of sequence causing errors in scoring.
5. Delivery using mobile browser and GPRS?: Different mobiles come in-build with browsers with varying capability and this can cause confusion among the students and there are interruptions in mobile data transmissions due to network issues. Things might change with wide adoption of HTML5.
6. Deliver using native connected application:: In native application, the application has control over data transmission and can resend the data in case of errors. The application can also help to organize the sequence of display of the learning material. In addition,they can create consistent user experience across various mobiles.
7. Deliver learning on hybrid(native, connect on demand) application. Here we consider the application that connects to internet to download learning contents. Then the mobile application do not need internet connection to learn the downloaded content. The mobile application uses internet on demand and uses when there is need to download and when there is response to send to a central place.

Some facts to be aware of
1.While a teacher can try to migrate a great classroom learning to mobile, it is not a straight forward approach. For example you need to modularize and customize content so that people only take what they need. To perform this, teacher should be ready for a huge shift from traditional linear start to end approach(encourage by LMS).
2. It is dangerous assumption to assume a great LMS tool or authoring tool shall create a great m-learning experience. With good tools, you’re just getting started.
3. Making the course enjoyable is a fine idea, but is the course challenging, interesting, rewarding, authentic, worthwhile, and relevant?.
4. Lot of technologists project that “Getting the technology to work is the hard part”. This is not always true. Creating quality content and programs to run on that technology can also be a challenge. Try to balance the investment in great technology with the investment to create quality content.

Distance Learning Education – Challenges

We all know that distance education has been around for at least 30 years. In India, the medium of distance education is mainly in terms of pencil and paper even today. There are three parties involved in distance learning, teachers,students and universities. All of three parties have barriers that prevents distance learning to more effective. Let us look at the distance education landscape prior to look for solutions.

Challenges faced by students

• Generally distance learners have insecurities about learning due to reasons like disruption of family life, perceived irrelevance of their studies and lack of support from employers.
• There is no face to face contact with teachers and students have trouble in self-evaluation.
• Isolated feeling reported by distance students. They miss the collaboration of larger school community, and an important part of their social lives.
• Lack of support and services such as reach to tutors, academic planners and schedulers. This added to the isolation in the distance learning process complicate things.
• Students find that design of the study materials provided do not cater to the special needs of students undertaking distance education for the first time. The course content affects student persistence and poorly designed course materials contribute to student attrition rates.

When we try to introduce technology based learning, one needs to recognize the fact though mobile is available with students, they have used mobile only for making phone calls and entertainment and not for learning earlier.If mobile based distance learning is to be successful, technical barriers must be made a non-issue and the solutions should be easy to use and adopt.

Challenges faced by teacher

• Faculty might perceive distance learning as threat to service tenure and human resource staffing.
• A lot of upfront effort is needed to design distance learning material. This increases the workload on teachers who already have material for traditional classrooms.
• Faculty must meet the needs of distance students without face-to-face contact. Teachers primarily teach 18 to 22-year-olds students. When majority of distance learners are adults, teachers may need to change their teaching style and is not easy task.
• Teachers have less respect for the academics of distance courses. This can be enhanced by making distance programs have similar admission process as on-campus courses.
• Some teachers might not like the idea of distance learning, nor want to participate. interest and motivation are not success factors reserved only for the student, even the teachers need the same.

So long as college faculty feels there is a burden associated the distance education program currently in place, there will be little support for expanding distance education opportunities.

Challenges faced by university/institution
Though universities understand some of the challenges faced by students, they have challenges of themselves which hinder them from solving the problems of students and teachers.

• Technology needs investment and funds to setup toll-free lines and computers and pay ongoing costs of telecom and internet connectivity costs. In addition,the student also incur ongoing technology costs and possibly capital costs to purchase PC. Students might decide not to join the course and the problem continues.
• There is reliable internet connectivity/network to carry large amount of learning content. This would make browser based education delivery little tricky. In addition, the perceived anonymity of the Internet can give raise to abusive behavior and this is a new challenge that needs proper care and regulation.
• People believe distance courses are inferior to traditional courses and this reduces the motivation of teachers and students. To prove the belief wrong, universities need to ensure the quality in content and delivery of distance learning courses, matches with the regular campus classroom learning.
• Assessing student performance is a problem area in distance learning. How to do assessments? who and where to administer assessments? Who would value and give feedback on the assessments? Should we recruit separate staff for distance learning compared to classroom learning? What is the best way to go forward?

I feel that mobile based learning products(with cloud as back-end) can help to resolve a lot of challenges faced by distance learning education.Let us look in another post how technology based distance learning programs can solves some of the challenges.