Introductions

[Amit Garg]

Hi All, 

Welcome to the Corporate m-Learning week.

I look forward to sharing thoughts and perspectives around this topic with you all and get your perspectives. 

It would be great to start introducing ourselves. You may want to share 

- where or what type of organisation you work with

- what brings you here to the Corporate m-Learning strand of MobiMooc. Please feel free to list any specific expectations you have from this week and let's together try and address that

- what challenges you've faced or are facing when planning/ implementing m-Learning in your organizations

I'll begin posting some thoughts on this group to help initiate a discussion and allow the live webinar sessions for more interactions.

Regards,

PS: Some of you did introduce yourselves in the main mobimooc group earlier. If you don't mind sharing it again it will great for everyone who joins us only for this week.

[Simon Rae]

Hi,

I'm Simon and as I said in the general introductions, I'm a 'holic. I've been working with 'Computers in Education' since '74 and able to take part in several projects like this mobiMOOC. I did a course on SNOBOL via an email Listserv, did research on an online course on Augustine, studied online for an MA in Open and Distance Education and evaluated a few EU Networked Learning projects. Any lesson learned from all these experiences? The main one that has informed most of my thinking is that learners will tend to do it their way, irrespective of what educators plan! They will use whatever they are happiest using in which ever way they want to do what they want.

I've most recently been working in a unit developing Learning Solutions in the Corporate world, a slight change from previous roles which were aimed at the normal university student market; a change to B2B from B2C!

B2B seems to introduce a new player into Laurillard's Teacher <-> Learner conversational framwork relationship.  I have seen the framwork extended to include the Learner<>Learner interactions afforded by the sort of supported forum work that we are engaged in on this mobiMOOC - and now perhaps, for use with the corporate  world, the framework will have to be extended again to acknowledge and relate to (satisfy the needs of) the Employer. The Business Case finances implicit in corporate work are more apparent (and naked) than the academic pressures of Higher Education! 

Simon

@simonrae

[Rebecca Hogue]

Hi,

I'm Rebecca. I'm not sure if I'll be lurking here or participating. Many moons ago, I started out my career at Nortel (then Bell Northern Research) in software quality control and customer trial management). After Nortel, I transitioned to instructional design and specifically creating training programs for high tech companies. I used to create single-source training programs for companies like Microsoft, Symantec, and Adobe. I've also worked as a training manager in a high tech company (cryptography related software). Now, I'm playing in the education and medical education sectors. I'm a PhD Candidate in Education at the University of Ottawa, doing my thesis helping Family Medicine Physicians use iPads in their teaching and clinical practices.

So, I've moved from the corporate / private sector into the academic/health sector.

I'm curious to see how mobile learning is affecting corporate training? And how BYOD changes things too. My husband works for a high tech telecom company, but I have not yet seen him use his iPhone for any training.

Cheers,
Rebecca

[Amit Garg]

Hi Simon, 

Great to have you here. 

I really liked when you said "learners will tend to do it their way, irrespective of what educators plan! They will use whatever they are happiest using in which ever way they want to do what they want." This is more prominent in the corporate world of learning and development I guess. 

There's so much to learn from someone like you. Look forward to continued interactions during this week and beyond.

Regards,

[Amit Garg]

Hi Rebecca, 

Great to have you here!

With you vast experience in corporate training and learning domain I'm sure you can help many of us in this group with you wisdom. Urge you to not be just a 'lurker'. I'll be great for the group to have you participate actively.

No wonder you've not seen much mLearning happening on iPhones. iPads (and other tablets - though iPad is most significant) is actually the driving force of mLearning in the corporate world as well. We find the interest level in mLearning is steadily growing, many discussions are now taking place in the corporate world on how to implement it. Sadly a lot of confusions (myths) still remain which I believe are holding back widespread adoption of mLearning. Good news though -  it's changing for the better.

Look forward to more interactions during this week and beyond.

Regards,

[ET_Russell (Elizabeth)]

Hi Amit and team,

Thank you for today's session.

I come from a career in TV, Broadcasting and Communications. For the past 14 years been working with government developing resources and communication solutions that provide equity of access to information and education.  Currently working in health department (over 65,000 staff), latest challenge is to evolve a face to face 5 day training program on Indigenous cultural capability for staff to e-Learning (that is what management are thinking) I wanted to take it a step further and go mLearning.

Cheers

ET

[Amit Garg]

Hi Elizabeth, 

First of all apologies for referring to your by your last name. 

Thanks for attending the webinar and for sharing your thoughts here. I can imagine a 5 day f2f program to be quite intensive and probably not whole of be suitable mobile delivery. I'm thinking more like a blend of e-learning and m-learning. 

I would happy to discuss this further.

Regards,

[Rebecca Hogue]

Hi Amit,

In your response you said: "Sadly a lot of confusions (myths) still remain which I believe are holding back widespread adoption of mLearning."

I'm curious what those myths are. It's been a couple of years since I've looked at mLearning within the corporate sector, so I'm wondering how the iPad and iPhone have changed (or not changed) the view of training.

Cheers,
Rebecca

[ET_Russell (Elizabeth)]

No apology required.
Will draw up a bit of a summary and post it. Would really appreciate any suggestions.
Regards ET