Saturday, October 24, 2009

Commercial Mobile Learning Content Examined

I have been looking at some commercial mobile training modules recently and have found some excellent examples -- as well as some lessons learned.

The first one is Presenter Pro for the iPhone ($.99 in the iTunes store). The content includes presentation skills techniques with supporting graphics, audio, and video; hundreds of quick tips accessible by shaking the device; a checklist feature to capture and email any content for later review; notes capability; practice exercises; and knowledge check quizzes.

There is a lot of information and it is organized for quick retrieval. Overall the UI is quite good, however when arriving at the end of the knowledge check, there is only a previous and next. The next does not work, so the user needs to assume that they have finished and need to go back to the main menu. How much nicer it would have been if QA has caught that and added text either with the score or some text like congratulations you have completed the knowledge check, press here to return to the main menu. In addition, a nice feature would be to offer to return to the applicable content for review when missing a question rather than just saying sorry, try again.

Understanding Photoshop Quick Fixes ($1.99 in the iTunes Store) includes three modules plus an introduction and help section. Each of the modules has videos, tips and a quiz. Favorites and a search feature are included, plus an included recent Twitter feed from @rhedpixel. The quiz feature is quite nice with the results, as well as a link to the video for missed questions. Unlike Presenter Pro, there is no easy access overview of the content, but there is the search feature. The videos are well done. By submitting your email address you receive a link with the examples from the video. These are only available on a computer -- not an iPod or iPhone and must be downloaded separately for each module.

Thanks to an email from Dr. Davide Terranova fom Italy, I checked out his new site medicalearning. Currently there are four care and management modules featured for asthma, diabetes, hypertension and influenza virus H1-N1. The modules use Flash Lite and are available for a large number of phones (and even larger following the recent Adobe announcement of upcoming partnerships and availability of the Flash player on mobile devices.) The catalog, store and clean user interface are quite nice. Check it out.

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