BYOD for e-Learning

13 Jun BYOD for e-Learning

Posted at 17:04h in Access Devices, e-learning, m-learning by DfLsAnBmn 0 Comments

The e-learning industry is currently engaged in a mad rush to get their stuff to work on mobile devices (smartphones and tablets). This rush is driven primarily by clients who can be a little naive when it comes to the tricky technical bits (think of those car buyers who are never interested in looking under the bonnet). For many projects we get a reasonably sensible brief but then tacked on the end is the request that the e-learning also has to be ‘accessible on mobile devices’. Now, in the words of software development, this is ‘non-trivial’ – there are many challenges to developing e-learning that works across the vast number of mobile devices.

However, one of the key challenges is not actually technical at all. It’s about device ownership – because in the majority of cases the mobile devices that learners will be expected to use to access their work based learning are their own personal devices. These are devices that they have purchased and for which they pay all the bandwidth usage costs. This simple fact can throw a big spanner in the works for any roll-out of work based learning on mobile devices.

The simple solution of course is a ‘bring your own device’ (BYOD) policy and here’s a really useful infographic that explores the pros and cons of BYOD.

“BYOD has freed up many enterprises from the responsibility of exclusively purchasing and maintaining computing devices, such as notebooks, tablets and smartphones, but companies still need to have policies set in place to make things work.”