Tuesday, January 19, 2010

Mobile Apps that build Mobile Apps - Is there room for an eLearning Authoring App?

I have been following the UpsideLearning blog a lot lately because they have been focusing on mLearning. This Post pointed me to the RWW blogRWW blog and the PowerOne Calculator App for the iPhone. It reminds me a lot of what Wolphram|Alpha is supposed to do. Basically, for 5.99, you have the ability to create to your own calculations. This is great for real estate agents, and apparently nurses, and doctors and pharmacists who need to perform complex calculations.

My experience with Bento has been similar. Many people have written it off as being too simplistic of a database system, or just not what they need. Me too. That is until the Bento iPhone app came out. Now I create my own apps quickly and easily for many different things. No more cheesy little todo list apps. Now I make my own custom, cheesy, little todo lists (or libraries).

I've never really mentioned it but now that its been mentioned on MacBreak weekly as a pick of the weekpick of the week, I feel like its okay to mention that I use it ;-)

So, is the iPhone eLearning authoring tool that far off? Is anyone working on one, or something similar? And not just for the iPhone. Other phones too. Yes, I know everybody has an authoring tool that exports to a mobile format (okay maybe not everybody), but that's not what I mean. I want an mLearning authoring tool built specifically for the mobile platform. Who's gonna step up?

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5 comments:

Robert Gadd said...

Hi Brent, I can surely see where you're going with your comment here and agree that the future will bring a new class of content authoring tools optimized to support mlearning development though the small screens and current inability to run multiple apps simultaneously will hinder efforts for awhile. That said, we're already providing tools to allow our mobile users/learners to capture and contribute user-generated content using advanced (and supported) smartphones including the ability to capture/record then upload images (as JPGs), audio podcasts (as MP3s) and videos (as device-specific 3GPs, MP4s and M4Vs) then tag those assets for review, collaboration and sharing. This functionality may not represent the "classic" authoring tasks of yore, but they do seem more representative of where informal learning and mobile learning are starting to meet.

James Anderson said...

I've been playing with developing one. Unfortunately, my Objective-C knowledge is low, and I have had little time to spend on the process.

I've kind of based the user interface off of Epocrates, in terms of navigation and how you would interact with content.

Someone actually develops the content on a webpage that I have created, which then provides an XML stream of that content. That has been the easy part, although it certainly could use some improvement.

The user then puts in a code and password that downloads the course XML files and can be accessed at anytime.

There is no assessment component, at least - yet. And SCORM has never been considered. I've just been kind of developing a proof of concept.

Someday, maybe I'll get something 100% done as a release candidate.

Paul said...

Hi Brent - Yes, a specific mobile learning authoring tool would be good - problem is that we need to pick a destination platform to take full advantage of our design. My bias is towards the iPhone and iPod Touch - I think these are extremely well-suited to mLearning applications.

WRT authoring - I have been successfully creating iPhone learning content with Camtasia, Screenr, iWebKit, and WordPress - you can do a fair amount with these tools. I do a lot of narrated PPT presentations with mp4 format. But you are right a custom designed mLearning authoring tool would be nice.

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