Apple’s iPad: Is it a perfect e-learning tool?

Apple’s iPad has been a pathbreaker of sorts in the technological field. They were many naysayers during its launch regarding its utility, but I suppose the tremendous success of the product have shut up their mouths. The craze and euphoria has not died yet, and with the launch of iPad 2, the buzz is getting stronger. And the all-important question comes to the fore: can the iPad serve as an ideal classroom teaching device?


I strongly feel that iPad will have a part to do. It is sure to displace one-to-many teaching pedagogies in favor of interactive one-to-one studying and learning and will encourage much more participation from students.


To drive home my point about the iPad will have a role in online education for children, here is some news. It has been seen by many that those children who haven’t learned to read or write or even operate a mouse are able to operate the iPad with tremendous speed. According to an article published in  Ad Age in June 2010, “How the iPad Became Child’s Play – and Learning Tool,” there were many toddlers as who were as many as 18 months old only who were trying to provoke interaction from TV sets and PC monitors as if they were touch screens like that of the iPad. This indicates clearly that the next generation will find it very easy to respond well and interact with the intuitive device.


In another study related to e-book reading, a survey result released by Student Monitor revealed that out of 1200 college students who were participants in the survey and interested in e-readers, more than 46% of them opted for iPad as the preferred e-reader rather than 38% of them who favored Amazon’s Kindle. This indicates that iPad is known among the adolescents to be much more conducive and intuitive than the Kindle.

Educators today are stressing on the need for contextual learning and user participation. Digital whiteboards have failed to encourage interactivity, and is also less on computing power. The laptop is comparatively bulky too and can be problematic to handle sometimes. The iPad then serves to be the perfect device for comfortable online learning and acts as a useful tool for referencing, collaborating, and content creation. The best part is that of the choice for personalized content for students.


Some of the kinks are there: it does not support web pages which have Flash, it does not have a telephone, it does not have a camera and it also does not have USB slots or memory card slots although there is support for dongles. These limitations are somewhat deterrent for its use but once there are updates to the device, I don’t really see a problem for the iPad to be used as a e-learning device!

About emPower

emPower  is a leading provider of comprehensive Healthcare Compliance Solutions through Learning Management System (LMS). Its mission is to provide innovative security solutions to enable compliance with applicable laws and regulations and maximize business performance. empower provides range of courses to manage compliance required by regulatory bodies such as OSHA, HIPAA, Joint commission and Red Flag Rule etc. Apart from this emPower also offers custom demos and tutorials for your website, business process management and software implementation.

Its Learning Management system (LMS) allows students to retrieve all the courses 24/7/365 by accessing the portal. emPower e-learning training program is an interactive mode of learning that guides students to progress at their own pace.

For additional information, please visit http://www.empowerbpo.com .


Media Contact (emPower)
Jason Gaya
marketing@empowerbpo.com
emPower
12806 Townepark Way
Louisville, KY 40243-2311
Ph: 502 -400-9374
http://www.empowerbpo.com
http://www.dragonelearning.com

Mobile will become our gateway to the world

2010 marked the year in which infrastructure, technology and design finally intersected in the mobile space. For the first time, sales of smartphones outpaced sales of desktops and laptops, iPhone and iPad applications were downloaded more than 7 billion times and research shows e-mail access is now on the rise on the iPhone while declining on the computer.

With the foundation in place, in the coming year we will witness the scales tip: Mobile device users will interact with content, companies and the Web more on their phones and iPads than on their computers, and IT and service providers will create solutions that are defined by our mobile consumption and use behaviors. "The highway has been there but until now we needed a special car to get us to our destination, so the average pedestrian was not going to get there. Now that technology barriers have been lowered, mobile will become an extension of who we are," said Philippe Suchet, CEO of MyShopanion, and the recipient of the Web2.0' Summit 2010 award for most innovative startup in the mobile shopping category.

From social shopping on the go, to easy paperless transactions and check-ins, to watching (and creating) videos with friends abroad, to in-class learning and collaboration, to managing our health real-time - prepare for an explosion of connected experiences across all points of interactions between people and people, people and companies, and people and information in the cloud.

Source: edustange.posterous.com

The next level for creating training courses

The smart phone devices have outclassed its prime adversary landline phones. Today the peripheries of smart phones have moved beyond corporate houses to universities.

Content development in mobile devices is a new concept that had been thought of for quite some time now and that makes a lot of sense — the adoption of these devices around the world is just tremendous. Mobile Learning is growing at an expeditious pace. Business professionals and universities are embracing mobile learning on all sorts of devices.

As advancement of mobile applications continues to expand its global reach with corporations and universities in particular are actively investigating how to deploy learning to mobile professionals.  With careful planning a course developers in particular should be able to craft and deploy a wide variety of content to help those learners who are on the go.

Duke University, Abilene Christian University, Hamilton County Virtual School, University of Adelaide’s Faculty of Science , Hastings College, Leeds College, St Helens College, Walsall College are some of the well known institutes who have opted to replace textbooks and use iPhone and iPad instead. iPad and similar smart phones utility as a mobile learning device has been successfully experimented in many sectors and is recently being introduced to the healthcare sectors.

The term authoring tool can be somewhat misleading. People can easily be deceptive when they hear the term for the first time, the reason behind its close resemblance with word-processing software for professional writers. But the fact is the authoring tools go far beyond writing and word processing.

E-learning authoring tools provide trainers the opportunity and liberty to integrate an array of media to create professional, engaging, interactive, creative and innovative training content.

Today there are numerous types of authoring technologies to choose from, the task may seem somewhat daunting, but if planned in a proper and systematic way it doesn't have to be. One of the secret to pick the correct authoring tool is having a clear understanding about your own technology restrictions, instructional needs and business requirements.

empower, one of the leading provider of comprehensive Healthcare Compliance Solutions through Learning management system (LMS) has developed an iLearn Application compatible with iPhone, iPad and iPod touch. This application is very useful for course developers to promote their courses using the ilearn application to users with basic stuff to advanced topics, Healthcare to IT, in an interactive and engaging method.

The iLearn application by empower contains tools to create your own course in your field of expertise. Content developer can create categories and courses in such manner that it can be managed easily by end users who can download the iLearn App from iTunes which comes with a few preloaded courses. End users can view these preloaded courses or can go to store front and can download free courses or demo courses or pay and purchase paid courses. Once the courses are downloaded are visible in his App on his iPhone/iPad. The tool/GUI will automatically create a course in an attractive graphical format as an output. Various others functionality can be easily deployed using the iLearn application.

empower iLearn application is simple and effective it provides tools so effortlessly that you can create your training module within minutes. Put videos, images, audio, text and make the learning the way you want it to be and then since it‘s your amalgamation of hard work and smart work – you give a price tag to it and share it with the world.

About emPower

emPower is a leading provider of comprehensive Healthcare Compliance Solutions through Learning Management System (LMS). Our mission is to provide innovative security solutions to enable compliance with applicable laws and regulations and maximize business performance. We provide range of courses to manage compliance required by regulatory bodies such as OSHA, HIPAA, Joint commission and Red Flag Rule etc. Apart from this emPower also offers custom demos and tutorials for your website, business process management and software implementation.

Our Learning Management system (LMS) allows students to retrieve all the courses 24/7/365 by accessing our portal. emPower e-learning training program is an interactive mode of learning that guides students to progress at their own pace.

For additional information, please visit http://www.empowerbpo.com

University of Adelaide’s Faculty of Science going Mobile

From next year, the University of Adelaide’s Faculty of Science will be moving towards mobile delivery, with all first-year students provided with iPads, and textbooks replaced by digital materials.  They will be the first Australian University to begin delivering in this way, and this is the first step towards an overhaul of their teaching strategies, including moving to fully online delivery of first-year Science courses from 2012, according to Professor Bob Hill, Executive Dean of the Faculty. To help ensure that teaching materials and activities are compatible with the iPads, teaching staff will also be receiving the devices.

I have a modicum of skepticism about some aspects of this planned course of action, however.  Firstly, the focus on iPads might force thinking around mobile learning into a iPad-shaped box, rather than encouraging the development of mobile learning activities and resources to suit a wider range of devices.  This is already apparent in the kinds of materials they describe as being prepared for their iPads:

“The aim is to transfer all learning content to an electronic version which includes many currently printed textbooks for first-year students sometime in 2012.”

Aaargh.  Transferring learning content to computers, including textbooks, does not equate to e-learning.  Transferring learning content to mobile devices is unlikely to result in quality mobile learning.  The REAL task here should be to develop new learning activities and resources that target the required learning outcomes and utilise the affordances of mobile devices, rather than thinking that an electronic textbook on an iPad is somehow better that a paper-based textbook.  Instead, the focus appears to be on the *delivery* of content, rather than ways in which students can interact with, and create on, iPads:

“The online material will take a variety of forms with students being able to access lecture notes, audio, background documents and textbooks through tailored web-based apps. This is in addition to all the student services currently available through the MyUni website such as timetabling, video downloads, slides and email.”

THERE IS NOTHING NEW or innovative about ANY of those content sources or activities.  All that’s happening is that they’re being displayed on a shiny new device, instead of a laptop or a desktop computer, and they’re accessed through “app” buttons.  Contrast that philosophy with a learner-centric pedagogical model in which learning activities are developed that use key affordances of the iPad: for example, designing activities where students annotate or complete worksheets or experiments using an app like Noterize; or focusing on using mobile devices equipped with cameras to document science experiments or field trips using blogs, images, and video.

I hope the University of Adelaide will take time to consider how learning with technology is much more than learning ON technology.  A successful mobile learning strategy requires working with the inherant strengths and limitations of mobile devices to enhance learning and engagement – not just trying to do the same thing as before with the new tool!

The Future and trends in Mobile Learning

In the early phase of 21st century mobile phones were considered as a status symbol now it’s a necessity. The present usages of mobile phones are not just limited to new modalities for communication; they are like a pocket computer with latest hi-tech technological mélange with amazing features. The growing demand for mobiles especially amongst the different groups has opened the thresholds for mobile development companies to develop dynamic and creative mobile applications on different themes and concepts. 

Today’s youth live in a world enveloped and surrounded by hi-tech gadgets. They get information from online publications, publish their content on blogs, and share up-to-the-minute updates using social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter etc. And for some years now they’ve been doing all this on their phones.

Mobile learning can be augmented by using the functionalities of both handheld computers and mobile phones. With the inception of the iPod, “Podcasting” created new ways to distribute content. Similarly, convergent devices like the iPhone and smart phones using the Android, Symbian and blackberry operating system are extending the boundaries of education.

In the 2009 Parent-Teen Cell Phone Survey, conducted by Princeton Survey Research Associates, 75% of 12 to17-year-olds own cell phones (up from 45% in 2004).

Duke University was the first to use mobile devices in the field of education. Mobiles are used to access symposia, class material, and school news through iTunes. The faculty and students carry the course material with them on their iPods with help of a specially build program called iTunesU.

In 2008, Abilene Christian University came up with the first-in-the-world mobile learning initiative. It was an innovative initiative for students and faculty to try something new and unique, which was never tried before an experiment with new forms and very advanced next-generation digital platforms including the iPhone and iPad.

Similar milestone was set by Hamilton County Virtual School working in partnership with Emantras. An application in the name of Mobl21, enables teachers to create and publish text, video, and audio content in the form of short quizzes, flash cards, and guides.

The scope of mobile learning includes:

• Enhance group collaboration among students and instructors using a Pocket PC.
• Job training, learning with handheld or wearable technologies solves a problem of classroom education
• Student can learn outdoors, for example on field trips.
• Support informal or lifelong learning, such as using handheld dictionaries and other devices for language learning.
• Provide audiovisual support in order to enhance training similar to a corporate business or other classroom environment.

Most personal technologies can support mobile learning, including:

• Tablet PC UMPC mobile phone, camera phone and SmartPhone
• Learning Mobile Author, e.g. for authoring and publishing WAP, J2ME and SmartPhone
• Utilize audio player, e.g. for listening to audio recordings of lectures
• Handheld audio and multimedia guides at outdoors
• Handheld game console, modern gaming consoles such as Sony PSP or Nintendo DS/Wii
• 3GP For compression and delivery method of audiovisual content associated with Mobile Learning
• Wi-Fi access to instructors and available of resources via internet

In the past few years, mobile learning has certainly moved beyond the hype. The ubiquitous availability of technology, the advancement of technologies in smart phones, and the development of learning applications have brought mobile learning into schools and universities. On the contrary it is also important to have a clear understanding of how and where tomorrow's mobile technology can be employed to support valuable learning, as looking at the current trend the educational developments continues to be more technology driven rather than user learner driven.

About emPower

emPower is a leading provider of comprehensive Healthcare Compliance Solutions through Learning Management System (LMS). Our mission is to provide innovative security solutions to enable compliance with applicable laws and regulations and maximize business performance. We provide range of courses to manage compliance required by regulatory bodies such as OSHA, HIPAA, Joint commission and Red Flag Rule etc. Apart from this emPower also offers custom demos and tutorials for your website, business process management and software implementation.

Our Learning Management system (LMS) allows students to retrieve all the courses 24/7/365 by accessing our portal. emPower e-learning training program is an interactive mode of learning that guides students to progress at their own pace.

For additional information, please visit http://www.empowerbpo.com

Media Contact
Jason Gaya
jasongaya@empowerbpo.com

emPower
12806 Townepark Way
Louisville, KY 40243-2311
Ph: 502-400-9374
http://www.empowerbpo.com
http://www.empowerlms.com/

Mobile Learning in Classrooms: Benefits of m-Learning

Colleges and universities are using M-Learning to help students perform tasks by providing information, guidance, and learning experiences when and where required.

• Puts training and performance support where the actual work takes place.
• Allows students new skills or knowledge to be immediately applied
• Enables student training when it is needed
• Allows use of rich media when appropriate
• Builds a community of practice
• Connecting and continuously sync training to back-end systems

Some of the examples of colleges using Mobile learning to thrived in educational environments

• Hastings College used ipods with construction students
• Leeds College of Building used netbooks and mobile phones with construction learners
• St Helens College used Sony PSP’s with electrical engineering students
• Walsall College used Nintendo DS games handhelds with some disaffected and disengaged learners where they reported: This programme has seen learners enjoying education again and the number of exclusions is down by 65 per cent.

One of the better ways to find out the value of training in financial terms is to measure the return on investment (ROI) of your training programs. Mobile based training using iPad and other smart phones have proved to be very effective devices for future and have already made several significant claims: Saves time without decaying learning benefits; minimizes travel costs; minimizes time away from work; cost effective; can meet the needs of a geographically disperse employees; provides consistent course delivery or research materials; offer more individualized instruction; and consistently higher learning results can be achieved over traditional training.

Studies over the past few years show the following results: better learning curve as compared to traditional instruction; students had doubled higher content retention for e-learning over traditional classroom instruction; students demonstrated greater gains in learning than did students who were taught by traditional instruction.

While the most obvious impact of m-learning on ROI is the significant time and cost savings it can produce over traditional training, more significant impact on ROI can be achieved as a consequence of m-learning. 
Well constructed and develop m-learning tools is not only faster than classroom training but also more effective in general. Numerous studies have shown that people learn faster with such trainings; student using iPad and similar smart phones can have easy access to materials and can use the time to accurately recall what they learned over a longer period of time, and are better able to transfer what they learned to actual performance.


About emPower

emPower is a leading provider of comprehensive Healthcare Compliance Solutions through Learning Management System (LMS). Our mission is to provide innovative security solutions to enable compliance with applicable laws and regulations and maximize business performance. We provide range of courses to manage compliance required by regulatory bodies such as OSHA, HIPAA, Joint commission and Red Flag Rule etc. Apart from this emPower also offers custom demos and tutorials for your website, business process management and software implementation.

Our Learning Management system (LMS) allows students to retrieve all the courses 24/7/365 by accessing our portal. emPower e-learning training program is an interactive mode of learning that guides students to progress at their own pace.

For additional information, please visit http://www.empowerbpo.com

Media Contact
Jason Gaya
jasongaya@empowerbpo.com

emPower
12806 Townepark Way
Louisville, KY 40243-2311
Ph: 502-400-9374
http://www.empowerbpo.com
http://www.empowerlms.com/