At the eMadrid Workshop on e-learning (http://www.emadridnet.org/en/ii-emadrid-workshop-elearning), held at Ciudad Universitaria, in Madrid, at the beginning of June, Fabrizio Cardinali – Vice President of Global Business Development at eXact learning solutions – along with other mobile learning specialists including Marcus Specht of the Open University of the Netherlands, explored trends in mobile learning relating to both the corporate and the academic sectors.

“Mobile learning is something you’d use informally, on the move and often under time pressure, to continually refresh your knowledge, when and where it’s needed,” explained Cardinali. “It should be as simple as possible on the front end, providing easy means to access and locate information quickly. But, on the back end, it requires some complex technology – which is able to profile your skills and competencies, your location and your device – to give you just the right piece of information, when you need it and where you need it. You might describe it as performance support on demand, anytime, anywhere.

“Learning content that has been developed for delivery via a desktop or laptop computer is unlikely to be able to be delivered via a mobile device without some modification – if only because of screen size,” he added. “This means that you have to develop a process – and there is much to recommend the view that such a  process should be made available to all producers of learning materials – whereby learning materials can be chunked, that is, made into smaller ‘bites’ of learning which can be more easily delivered via a mobile device at the point of need. In turn, this means that content for mobile learning programs needs to focus more on essential information. This turns the learning program into more of an electronic performance support system – or even a learning ‘app’.

“With your mobile learning platform profiling the content as you need it, based on your background, the time, device and location available, you have an educational continuum following students and trainees wherever they need learning or wherever they ask for just-in-time support,” Cardinali said.

This second annual eMadrid Workshop on e-learning was co-ordinated by the Carlos III University of Madrid and included delegates and speakers from the Autónoma University, Complutense University, Politécnica University, King Juan Carlos University of Madrid and the Distance Learning University UNED.

Comment: Mobile learning is rapidly becoming today’s ‘in’ learning technology – not just in Madrid but around the world.