Training Magazine Network Session Recap

Training Magazine Network kindly invited me to present Creating the Mobile Virtual Classroom for their audience on June 23, 2015. The event was a huge success - attendance was high and interactivity was off the charts thanks to the wonderful promotion by Training Magazine Network. We had many of our "regular" InSync BYTE attendees participate as well which is always great.

We need to focus on the differences in the mobile interface and the engagement techniques used to create interaction and collaboration on a mobile device.

It seems like everyone’s talking about mobile learning, or m-learning, these days. And it’s no surprise, as tablets and smart phones are everywhere. So, how does m-learning relate to the live virtual classroom?

If you think back to the early days of the virtual classroom, this should feel familiar to you. When the virtual classroom first was introduced in the 1990s, the training community assumed it would be just like the traditional classroom.

At a recent conference, I attended a number of great sessions on mobile learning (popularly known as 'mLearning'). Since then, during my daily visits to my local coffee emporium, I have been thinking about mobile learning’s place among the many different learning strategies available to us, especially the idea of a mobile virtual classroom.

Recently, a town-wide power outage resulted in my son’s school being ‘in the dark’ for about four hours. Most classes didn’t need to skip a beat – it was a sunny day and electricity is not required for the instruction of algebra.

But what to do in “Computer Class”? Electricity has been a requirement in computer classes practically since the abacus went out of fashion.   

When I asked my 13-year-old son about this, he told us that the teacher first asked the class who had cell phones. Every student in the class answered in the affirmative, so they were instructed to take them out.

Did you realize that BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) was one of the hottest buzzwords in computing? Try an experiment. Go to Twitter and search for #BYOD and see how many references have been made using that hashtag in just the last hour. It’s everywhere. Posts about security (Bring Your Own Disaster), inevitability (young people will use their own devices even if it is not allowed) and usability (How great is this!) will be immediately available for your perusal.

BYOD is not just a trend – it’s happening all around us. For those in corporate education, it is becoming an expectation. Our audience wants to learn WHENEVER and WHEREVER they are.