1. education
2. distance learning

Delivering E-Learning
in a Mobile World
by Arlyn Asch, CTO, Articulate
Demand for Multi-Device Learning
Adopting a multi-device learning strategy delivers many benefits
to organizations and learners alike. For organizations, offering
training and education across multiple devices extends all the
cost, time, and productivity benefits associated with e-learning.
Now, learning can happen closer to the point of need. Armed with
tablets and smartphones, staff in the field or on the floor have
access to performance support the instant they need it.
If online learning gives learners a taste of freedom, multidevice learning untethers them completely. They can choose to
take courses wherever they want, and however they want—on a
computer, tablet, or smartphone. They’re no longer bound by an
office or even a computer unless they want to be. And for many in
developing countries, the ability to learn on a smartphone or tablet
isn’t just a convenience, it’s a necessity. It’s no wonder that mobile
now accounts for 25% of all web usage, up 14% from a year ago.1
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KPCB Internet Trends 2014, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers
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Given these realities, global organizations who adopt a multidevice learning strategy will have an easier time standardizing
training and education across all their audiences, while continuing
to lower costs.
Challenges
While there are many reasons organizations want to deliver
e-learning to multiple devices, there are some serious challenges
currently undermining mobile learning adoption.
The first is device proliferation. While the explosive growth of
mobile puts tablets and smartphones in more hands, it also means
there are myriad platforms organizations must consider when
developing multi-device e-learning.
Devices range widely in operating system, form factor, processing
power, and more. In today’s world, courses will rarely look or
perform the same way (or even at all) across all these various
devices. As a result, organizations must currently decide which
devices they will develop courses for, and then constrain their
learners to those particular devices.
The second major challenge stems from the very nature of
e-learning. Some e-learning courses are composed of simple slides
containing graphics and text. Others include embedded videos and
software simulations that demo click paths through an application.
And increasingly, many e-learning courses feature media-rich,
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interactive slides that prompt learners to engage more tactilely
with educational content.
Yet while e-learning courses are diverse, they share a common
nature: they’re typically slide-based. The positioning of elements
on a slide matters in the same way that the positioning of content
in a video matters. It’s immutable.
The Star Wars you watch on your TV is exactly the same on your
smartphone. It’s just smaller. Princess Leia’s “Help me Obi-Wan
Kenobi, you’re my only hope!” hologram won’t disappear when
you watch the scene on a phone. We’d never expect the content
on a video to reflow or change position to fit smaller devices with
different aspect ratios. The video wouldn’t make sense if it did.
The same goes for slide-based e-learning content. The position
of elements on the screen must not change, regardless of screen
size or aspect ratio. Just like with a video, slide-based e-learning
wouldn’t make sense if objects changed position or simply
disappeared to fit smaller screen sizes.
So the question becomes, how do you make slide-based e-learning
work across multiple devices with different aspect ratios and
screen sizes?
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Requirements for Multi-Device E-Learning
To answer that, we need to look first at what learners,
organizations, and course authors require when it comes to multidevice e-learning.
First and foremost, multi-device learning simply won’t be effective
and widely adopted until learners have a great experience on each
device. Given the maturity of the mobile and tablet markets, they
expect it. Courses should take advantage of all possible screen real
estate and provide natural, intuitive navigation.
Organizations also must have confidence that their courses will
work across any internet-enabled device with any form factor.
They shouldn’t have to build or maintain different courses for
different devices, or limit their learners to only certain devices.
For courses to work across devices, they should be publishable to
HTML5, which is supported by nearly every phone and tablet on
the market.
Finally, the burden of adopting a multi-device e-learning strategy
shouldn’t land on course authors. They shouldn’t have to manually
adjust or create courses to fit each device a learner might use (nor
could they feasibly accomplish such a Herculean task.)
If we rely on people, rather than technology, to solve the issue
of multi-device e-learning, we undermine the very benefits of
e-learning: its scalability, cost-effectiveness, and speed
of deployment.
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Is “Responsive Design” for Slide-Based E-Learning
the Answer?
Adobe contends that “responsive design” is the answer to
delivering slide-based e-learning to multiple devices, and it has
oriented its e-learning product strategy around that premise.
However, we believe responsive design as reimagined by Adobe
fails to meet the critical requirements learners, organizations, and
course authors have around multi-device, slide-based e-learning.
To understand why, let’s take a closer look at the mechanics of
responsive design. First coining the term “responsive web design”
in his 2010 article “Responsive Web Design,” Ethan Marcotte
describes the practice of responsive design this way:
“Rather than tailoring disconnected designs to each
of an ever-increasing number of web devices, we can
treat them as facets of the same experience. We can
design for an optimal viewing experience, but embed
standards-based technologies into our designs to make
them not only more flexible, but more adaptive to the
media that renders them.”
The key here is that web developers can code once for an “optimal
viewing experience” and let “standards-based technologies” do the
heavy lifting of adapting that design to various screen resolutions
and sizes. These technologies include flexible grids, media queries,
and CSS style sheets that will dynamically resize content, change
layouts, scale and swap images, alter text size and leading, and
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selectively show or hide elements to aid navigation—all based on
the viewer’s screen size, platform, and orientation.
The whole point of responsive design is that web developers can
make sure the experience of viewing web content will be great on
any device without having to write new code for each one—they
don’t shoulder the burden of keeping up with the dizzying array
of new devices that flood the market. With responsive design,
web developers simply define how a website will reposition,
resize, hide, or swap content at various screen size and resolution
breakpoints. The browser does the hard work, using CSS to guide
the way.
Adobe would have e-learning developers believe that this
responsive design model is the answer to multi-device, slide-based
e-learning. But it’s not. Here’s why.
Responsive web design works because the relative positioning of
web content doesn’t really matter. The content still makes sense
if text goes from three to two or even one column, or if images are
placed in a different spot or disappear altogether. But that’s not
the case with slide-based e-learning content. As discussed above,
relative position of objects matters in slide-based content. If a
slide shows a person pointing at a map, it won’t make sense if the
map is repositioned above the person’s head when viewed
on a phone.
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What that means is that when slide-based content is reflowed at
various breakpoints, it won’t “just work.” The e-learning author
needs to review every slide at each breakpoint to make sure that
the content still makes sense. That puts the burden on the course
author to manually redesign and reposition objects on each slide
for each device learners will use.
Even if organizations are willing to have their e-learning
developers manually adjust slides for each breakpoint, Adobe’s
responsive design approach won’t let them implement truly
universal multi-device e-learning. Remember, there are hundreds
of devices on the market, and they’re constantly changing. Given
the manual work involved, course authors won’t be able to keep up
with them all, so organizations will have to choose to support only
a few devices.
Articulate’s Vision for Multi-Device E-Learning
For the reasons outlined above, Articulate does not believe
responsive design for slide-based content is the answer to multidevice e-learning. Course authors shouldn’t bear the burden of
tweaking the content of every slide in a course for every device,
and organizations shouldn’t have to limit the devices they support.
At Articulate, we believe that technology, not course developers,
should power multi-device e-learning.
Our approach to multi-device e-learning is three-fold.
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First, we’re providing exceptional HTML5 output that works well
on any computer or tablet device with an HTML5 browser. We’re
doing that today. Without any extra effort, course developers can
deliver a great experience to learners on iPads and Android tablets
by simply publishing their Articulate Storyline and Articulate
Studio ’13 courses to HTML5.
Second, we’re developing a responsive mobile course player (the
frame around your course) tailored specifically for mobile learners.
This responsive mobile player responds fluidly to different screen
sizes and orientations. It gets out of the way on smaller-screen
devices, leaving more real estate for the content itself. On phones,
for example, the responsive mobile player hides sidebar menus
behind icons, eliminates browser chrome, and delivers mobilefriendly playback controls. The result is an immersive, full-screen
experience for learners.
We’ve optimized everything in the responsive mobile player for
touch control, including finger-friendly buttons, clear iconography,
and improved support for common gestures such as swiping,
dragging, and pinch to zoom. Courses take full advantage of the
extensive HTML5 support built into the latest mobile browsers,
delivering smooth animations and transitions, high performance
media playback, and complex interactivity—features previously
reserved for learners on desktop and laptop computers.
With our new responsive mobile player, Articulate courses will
scale perfectly and automatically across all desktops, laptops,
tablets, and mobile phones, just like a video would.
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Let’s take a look at how this works.
Here’s how a learner will experience courses on a desktop
or laptop:
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This is what that same course looks like when the learner views it
on an iPhone with our new responsive mobile player, which runs
in the mobile browser. There’s no app required.
Notice how the responsive mobile player maximizes the screen real
estate and has mobile-friendly navigation and menus. The course
content itself maintains full integrity; just like a video, it simply
scales with the device.
And in contrast to Adobe’s approach, course developers don’t need
to review and tweak every slide at every breakpoint to deliver this
great mobile experience to their learners. In fact, they don’t have
to do a thing. Articulate’s responsive mobile player does all the
work, and learners on any device have a great experience.
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We’re currently developing this responsive mobile player and will
release it to market as soon as possible.
Third, while we believe that responsive design isn’t the right
solution for slide-based e-learning for all the reasons described
above, we do believe responsive design is a natural fit for
web-based e-learning.
We’re deep into development on a web-based authoring tool that
makes it easy to create responsive web-based courses that include
media-rich interactions, scrollable articles, quizzes, and embedded
web objects. These web-based courses run directly in modern web
browsers without the need for a player.
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Our new responsive authoring tool leverages all existing
technologies that make the web responsive—such as fluid grids
and media queries—and eliminates the object positioning problem
that plagues Adobe’s responsive approach for slide-based content.
Content developed in our new responsive authoring tool can
reflow naturally—based on the learner’s screen size, platform, and
orientation—without its meaning being destroyed.
Because this new authoring tool is web-based, creating courses
is as simple as launching a web browser. There’s no software to
download, install, and manage. We’re planning to release this webbased responsive authoring tool this year.
The Future
The world has gone mobile, and at Articulate we’re intent on
changing the way this mobile world learns.
We’re confident that our strategy for multi-device e-learning is the
right one for organizations, course authors, and learners. It’s this
strategy that feeds our aggressive product development pipeline.
We’re fully committed to giving organizations everything they
need to easily and scalably develop and deploy e-learning that’s
fun, engaging, and effective for learners on every
device, everywhere.
© 2015 Articulate Global, Inc. All rights reserved.
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