With more than 700,000 apps in Apple’s app store, mobile content is here to stay. But the jury remains out on just how effective mobile learning is.
Todd Richmond, director of advanced prototype development and transition at the University of Southern California’s Institute for Creative Technologies, said his gut feeling is that what a user gets out of mobile learning depends on the user. “If you have a user that is comfortable with a tablet or a smartphone, they will be more willing to put up with issues and engage with the content,” he said.
Among mobile devices, desktops and laptops, there will always be tradeoffs in convenience, computing power and multimedia capabilities. Richmond plans to study the effectiveness of learning content on different platforms, though he notes that “these are tricky studies because there are so many variables.”