E-Learning professionals have grown accustomed to the challenge of designing and developing content for learning where the content is singularly prioritized above all else. This is understandable, as the content must be accurate and engaging. But in the world of mLearning, although content is still very important, we need to pay careful attention to another word: Context. The user’s exact needs and situation at that moment are part of the context. The device's constraints, the bandwidth, and many other technology issues also feed into the user’s context that you must design for. This new design consideration is foreign to many e-Learning developers used to a corporate IT structure and typical PC platform requirements.

1. Design Approaches
Adapting Content for mLearning

2. Intro
• Chad Udell
• Solutions Architect - Float Learning
• Blog at Visualrinse.com and FloatLearning.com

3. What we’re going to cover
• How to recognize how the user's context
affects design of the content
• What constraints certain contexts place on
content design and delivery
• How to effectively leverage your users' context
to produce effective learning

4. The worst case scenario

5. What’s wrong with that?
• No concept of the user experience
• No curation
• No guide for decisions
• No context

6. A Primer on Context
• The Where, When and Why of Mobile
• Setting (Physical and Social)
• Time (Relative and Absolute)
• Intent (Reason for Access)

7. Setting
• Differences between at
home and on the go
• At the office vs. at a
client’s location
• How does this change
what is important?

8. Time
• Relative Time
• Proximity to another
event
• Absolute Time
• 11:32AM,
Wednesday June
3rd, 2010
• Three days before
New Year’s Day.
• 10PM Everyday

9. Intent
• What does the user
really want at this
juncture?
• Difficult to infer
• Use of device
sensors and
usage history

11. Placing something in Context changes everything!

12. Should have checked the context before traveling

13. The perfect mLearning device?

14. Contains some useful information,
mostly about towels.

15. Lets you know when there are three armed men
inside the building

16. Check the controls

17. How do we start?

18. Draft the Personas

19. What’s in a Persona?
• Demographics
• Goals
• Tasks
• Device Specifics
• Connectivity
• Tech Familiarity
• More?

20. Use them!
A scene from a Yahoo! Session

21. Craft Use Cases
http://www.alistapart.com/articles/tamingscope/

22. Categories of Contextual Design
• System Aware
• Network Aware
• User Aware

23. System Aware
• Adapt to device-specific interaction techniques
(Touch vs. Multitouch vs. Cursor vs. Terminal)
• Different display on different screens (resolution)
• Functionality specific to the delivery platform

24. Network Aware
• Account for differences in network access and
bandwidth - Wifi vs. 3/4G vs. EDGE
• Using local device storage when offline

25. User Aware
• Inferrals of intent
• Personalize content based on usage history
• Integrate social data
• Provide varying levels of service and data access

26. So, let’s try it out.

27. Scenario #1
• A Technophobe Sales • Likes Talk Radio
Professional
• Doesn’t mind calling
• Needs access to homebase
current whitepapers
and soft skills training • Has an older
smartphone, not
• May have long drives always sure how to
use it
• May not always have
web access • Has an iPod

28. Scenario #2
• Manager(s) for a • Has dozens of permits
Construction company and regulations to
check the jobsite
• Needs quick info on against
the machine fleet
• Has some existing web
• Just got top of the line apps they use, not
Android phones sure about how they
work on the mobile
• Wants an “app for
that”

29. Scenario #3
• Company has a large • Users have a large
number of tech number of SKUs they
professionals on the have to know about
road
• Product bulletins come
• Needs up to the out weekly, sometimes
minute info on jobsite daily
conditions
• A lot of employee
• No single type of turnover
phone

30. The only chance for assuring a successful contextual advertising system is merging it with top social
networks like MySpace, Facebook, etc. where the system will better understand its users, their needs,
search habits, likes and dislikes, and serve them perfect ads – ads that they will click on.
http://www.mangeorge.com/2008/08/contextual-advertising/

31. In Summary
• 3 types of context
• These types require User Focused Design
approach
• System, Network and User aware applications
can all flow from these approaches
• User focused design works regardless of the
technology

32. Questions?
http://floatlearning.com/blog