Mobile Learning – What’s on the Horizon? – Updates from mLearnCon 2012 Conference

I along with my colleague (Dilip Rewtani) attended the mLearnCon 2012 – the Mobile Learning Conference and Expo held at San Jose, CA, from June 19-21, 2012. Harbinger was a Sponsor, Exhibitor and Speaker at this event. It was nice to see Harbinger’s large booth – well-placed, nicely arranged with standees, showcasing an ‘Edumercial’ on 50” monitor -covering Harbinger’s expertise and rightly portraying Harbinger as ‘one-stop-shop’ for all mobile development and eLearning needs. The response to the booth and overall conference was overwhelming. More than 800 people gathered at this conference to share ideas, strategies and best practices for managing, designing, developing and deploying mobile learning.This conference was heavily attended by CLO and IT/Product Managers, Directors and Publishers.

We all were busy attending to the visitors at our booth and answering their queries related to eLearning, mobile app development, native mobile apps, offline player, HTML5 et al. Some visitors wanted to see the demo of various mobile apps. developed by us and some were curious to know more about Harbinger’s ‘Offline Content Player for e-Learning’. The overall interest or trend could easily be seen in the AICC and SCORM compliant elearning content on mobile devices and bigger form factors like iPads and tablets. Other hot topic and the buzz word we could frequently hear during the conference were ‘PhoneGap’, which is an open source mobile app development framework. Some universities showed special interest in mobile learning and apps for their content delivery. Many of them already had an LMS and were looking for the way to consume content on mobile.

On the other hand a lot was getting discussed about ‘Project Tincan’. There were dedicated tables for people to go up to and talk to the ADL folks to understand it better. It was interesting to know how the information technology and the various interactive media types are getting blended with each other for education and community development.

There were many interesting sessions addressing hot topics around Digital Publishing, ePub standards and Content delivery mechanism for mobile learning.

Our colleague, Bijoy Banerjee conducted a Learning stage session. He spoke about ‘Platform-agnostic Interactive eBook – New Frontier in mLearning’. It was well received by the audience and a lot of interesting Q&A happened post this session.

Overall, it was a great experience to attend mLearnCon. The changing mobile elearning landscape, technology trends in eLearning, buzz around offline content delivery on mobile devices and much more was discussed. I am sure, mobile Learning will evolve the eLearning industry completely, Very soon!