Contributors - Colleagues - Collaborators

Saturday, June 25, 2011

Learning Interrupted

"Learning interrupted" is how mLearning was described by Richard
Culatta
during the final panel discussion at mLearnCon 2011.

This got me thinking about what, for me, is the biggest challenge for designing and developing mLearning.

How do we get our train of thought back when we are interrupted from the learning?

How do we minimize the time to reorient and to get back to being productive?

Jason Fried argued in his wonderful Ted talk that "people need long stretches of uninterrupted time" in order to get meaningful work done. Contrast this to what we are saying about mLearning; we say that we should create content in small, easily consumable chunks.

But does that help someone learn, ingest, and apply what they learned? How do we help our learners connect all the smaller chunks to create a meaningful whole?

And worse, even the small chunks may be interrupted, and when that happens the learner
wastes time to reengage, what do we do to help our learner get back his or her train of thought?

Jeremiah Owyang argued that a key component to developing successful mLearning was to provide context.

Context - this is key to any mLearning development - or any lesson plan for that matter. Whenever I engage in learning, and in that lesson I am reminded why it's importation, and I am given a timeline of where I am in my course of study, I know exactly why I need to know this information; I know exactly why it's important. When context is provided, I remember more content and the lesson seems more meaningful. And studies show this to be true for most learners.

So, how do we provide context in mLearning with our small screens and short bursts of information?

How about incorporating intelligent bookmarks? Picture this, the learner is interrupted and pauses a module. But this time, when she reengages, a window pops up that outlines what was learned so far and provides a road map to what's next.

What's your creative solution on how you would provide context in short learning modules?
How would you help the learner stay on his or her train of thought?

*Picture "China Train" by Mark Unrau can be found in Burn Magazine.

2 comments:

Mojotillett said...

Lisa I really like the intelligent bookmarking idea. I can see this being specifically helpful for mLearning. Thank you for your thoughts!

@mojotillett

Adam Behrens said...

Great points. If only the bookmarks in the physical world could do that. It would make a great feature on a DVR as well. If you return to paused show it can remind you why you stopped it the first time - then auto-delete :)