Here is the press release on the article: SyberWorks
Media Center Presents a New Article: “Documentation and e-Learning
(Part 6): Get Real!—Delivering Training to Mobile Users”
The article, “Documentation
and e-Learning (Part 6): Get Real! − Delivering Training to Mobile Users”, can
be found in the SyberWorks Media Center.
I have also posted it below:
Documentation and e-Learning
(Part 6): Get Real! –
Delivering Training to
Mobile Users
By Dave Powell, Documentation Manager, SyberWorks, Inc.
Would you like (or do you
need) to deliver current or future courseware and documentation directly to
mobile users wherever they are… on their cell-phone screens… without having to make significant changes to your LMS?
You can start doing so right now, thanks to the ever-inventive Japanese. Their
amazingly simple technique allows you to bring greater reality into both the
courseware students receive and the environments where they receive it... and,
in fact, will let them receive it anywhere.
This is possible using “QR
(Quick Response) Codes.” In Japan, you’ll see these quirky square “bar codes” everywhere… on billboards, magazine pages, advertisements,
coupons, store windows, product packages, busses, taxis, and even T-shirts,
caps, scarves, and tattoos. They’ve even covered skyscrapers with ‘em. When a
viewer (wherever they happen to be) points their cell-phone camera at one of
these codes (wherever it happens to be) and photographs or “scans” it, their
hand-held device immediately launches the web-page URL, displays the text
block, calls the telephone number, or displays the Short Message Service (SMS)
message that was “encoded” in the QR-Code image.
Many e-Learning Applications
The
ways that QR Codes can be used in e-Learning, blended training, and even
product documentation are limited only by your imagination. They could, for
example:
· Bring mobile-phone learners directly to your
training portal, to enroll in and take online courses.
· Enable cell-phone users to call up assignments,
reference/reading lists, and other training-support materials in subways,
busses, taxis, or anywhere… without using PCs.
· Build online training catalogs containing both web
links (for PC users) and corresponding QR Codes (for mobile users).
· Let students at training PCs call up extra
information and resources on their phones, through QR Codes in course screens,
PowerPoint slides, Adobe Flash movies, PDFs, and printed class materials.
· Allow classroom attendees to call up schedules,
building maps, and other useful information from QR Codes posted throughout the
facility or campus.
· Permit students in seminars that aren’t equipped
with PCs to access extra information and resources through their phones.
· Allow students taking physical training (like
police or fire-fighting drills) to receive information on their phones that’s
pertinent to both where they are and what they are doing at the time.
· “Tag” objects and displays in physical training
settings, so that students can view instructional videos, usage guidelines, or
safety information about them.
· Take students’ cell phones to Google Earth
destinations that are pertinent to course material.
· Take online or classroom students to assessment
pages that run presentations and ask questions about them.
· Collect training feedback from students through SMS
messaging.
· Make e-Learning materials accessible to people who
don’t have computers or can’t use them (but who can use cell phones).
· Allow users to view product documentation wherever
they happen to be... without using a PC.
A simple four-step process
is all that’s needed to pull this off in your e-Learning projects:
· Tell learners how to load free QR Code readers into
their phones.
· Create needed QR-Code images through a free web
service.
· Include these QR-Code images in your training
pages, sites, and materials.
· Tell your mobile learners how to use the new codes.
Here’s more about each of
these steps:
Getting QR Code Readers into Users’ Phones
There’s a whole
infrastructure out there to support QR Code applications. Both Europe and Asia
are way ahead of the U.S. in this area.
Several Web sites permit any cell-phone or iPhone user to determine if a
QR Code reader is available for their device. And if one is, they can
usually download it directly into their phone. (NOTE: Many BlackBerry devices
contain their own “Messenger” QR-Code scanner for connecting with friends… and
in our tests, this scanner could also launch web content from QR Codes.)
Here are just a few of the
sites for doing this search:
· Kaywa
· I-Nigma
· Quickmark
· Barcode
Once a reader is activated
in the user’s phone, it’s easy to read QR Codes. Depending on the phone and
reader software, the user either takes a snapshot of the QR Code or simply
scans the phone’s camera across it. The linked content then appears on the
phone’s screen.
You can tell your mobile
learners about these QR-Code reader sites through emails, ticklers, and your
online training portal.
Creating QR Codes
The next step is to create the QR Code
images that you’ll use in your e-Learning screens and materials. This too is
easy, and the many generators out there include:
· Kaywa
· I-Nigma
· Adobe
AIR
· Snappr.net
To use Kaywa’s, for example:
1. Go to Kaywa’s code generator page:
2. In the Content type area, select URL, Text,
Phone Number, or SMS.
3. In the Content area, enter the URL or other content that the QR Code will launch (http:// is already included… and necessary… for URL
content).
4. Select the Size (M
or L is usually fine).
5. Click Generate!
6. Right-click the QR Code image that appears, save
it, and then import/paste it into any document… Adobe Photoshop image,
Microsoft PowerPoint slide, Word document, spreadsheet, class handout, online
HTML course page, or whatever.
7. Users’ cell phones can then go directly to the
encoded content by photographing or scanning the image… wherever you placed it.
Snappr.net is an interesting generator. Once you open a free
account, you can create QR Codes linked to music files, images, URLs,
and polling/voting applications. Also of great interest for e-Learning
applications is their:
· Geo-targeting controls, which can trigger
alternative content based on user location.
· An application called MMS that supports users whose
cell phones don’t have available QR Code readers. These users can photograph
the QR Code with their phone’s camera, email the image to [email protected],
receive a link back to the content hosted on Snappr.net,
and then use their phone’s internal browser to launch the link.
And again, you can tell your mobile
learners how easy it is to photograph/scan these codes, wherever they see them
during their training.
See For Yourself
If you’d like to see how this all works, I
encourage you to load a QR Code reader into your own cell phone or iPhone (and
if you have a BlackBerry, it may already have the software). Then scan these QR
Codes one at a time and see where they take you:
A Few Downsides
While QR Codes are easy to
set up and use, here are some points to keep in mind:
· Users whose phones don’t have cameras are out of
luck.
· Web navigation is still fairly difficult on most
cell-phone screens. Standard website layouts usually require too much panning,
scrolling, expanding, compressing, and squinting for easy use, and it takes a
powerful device (like a Nokia N95 or Apple iPhone) to mitigate the pain.
· This could be addressed through some page redesign
on your end… or you could contact a service like Brand Attention (http://www.brandattention.mobi/mobile.php)
that redesigns web pages for display on mobile devices. When their own page
opens, note the how its nav controls and content run down the left side of the
screen, in a narrow, mobile-readable column. We viewed it on several phones
here at SyberWorks, and it worked quite well indeed.
· If mobile users are an important part of your
training market, you could create similar mobile-viewable duplicates of your
existing e-Learning pages. Then, with those pages’ URLs converted to QR Codes,
learners who scan the codes will go directly to your mobile-training pages
through their phones.
· Obsolescence is another potential downside. Mobile
devices are inching ever closer to being able to scan and interpret plain text
through their cameras. When that happens, using QR Codes to encode URLs could
become unnecessary. And tomorrow’s mobile text-recognition could capture and
process an almost infinite variety of printed information.
· But even if this happens, QR Codes are much less
tedious to enter than URLs. They are also fun to use, which may always appeal
to some learners... especially younger ones (most of whom will know what to do
the instant they see one of them!).
That may be why the BlackBerry includes a QR Code reader… to appeal to
younger “mobiles.”
- Depending
on your target users, your LSM may or may not need to be altered to handle
QR codes. Most existing LMS web sites CAN be navigated by cell-phone
browsers, though this usually requires a bit of scrolling. If this isn’t a
particular problem in your application, then QR Codes can bring users to
your existing LMS and pages without major modification. For
instance, a retail store where I once worked suffered from an
all-too-common training weakness. Training PCs locked behind back-room
doors described products that were out on the sales floors. This did not
permit real-world reinforcement
through touching and testing the products themselves. This training would
have become immediately more effective if the LMS just let employees log
into the training system through their cell phones. Employees could then
walk around the store, scan codes beside products, and view descriptions,
usage instructions, sales pointers, and demos during their training
sessions. All this material would come from the existing training-page
URLs… but it would now reach cell-phone screens through QR Codes
throughout the store. (Regular shoppers’ phones would not deliver this
data, if it is delivered as part of the password-protected training
session.)
But if you really want to give mobile users the easiest possible access to your
LMS and course materials, you probably WILL need to redesign your e-Learning
pages for mobile use. Your own in-house experts (or firms like Brand
Attention, mentioned above)
can do that… though it will require both need and commitment! For example, let’s
say that you need to train customer reps to repair PCs, cars, or other consumer
products. Like the above retail store, you could run them through a battery of
online pages in some remote training room… and let them try to practice from
notes and memory out in the shop floor. Or, you could redesign your LMS
functions and layouts for easy access in the shop floor where practice units
are located. Then, students can begin training by scanning a QR Code that calls
up the login screen, and then view demo videos on their phones through QR Codes
for each procedural step.
Here are a few interesting
QR-Code resources:
· http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QR_Code
· http://www.beqrious.com/
· http://etec602.wikispaces.com/QR-code
· http://2d-code.co.uk/
· http://www.qrme.co.uk/
· http://reader.kaywa.com/tryoutzone
· http://emilychang.com/2008/10/qr-codes-mobile-tagging/
· http://zxing.org/w/decode.jspx
· http://searchengineland.com/what-is-a-qr-code-and-why-do-you-need-one-27588
· http://www.joeyanne.co.uk/index.php/2010/02/11/barcode-and-qr-code-fun/
· http://www.denso-wave.com/qrcode/qrfeature-e.html
· http://www.google.com/help/maps/favoriteplaces/business/barcode.html
· http://www.qrstuff.com/
· http://www.2dsense.com/default.aspx?id=details&sid=overview&tid=0
· http://moblearn.blogspot.com/2006/09/qr-codes-anyone.html
· http://molenetprojects.org.uk/moletech
And click this
link for a list of sites that discuss QR Codes in mobile
e-Learning applications. Here are some of the more interesting ones I found:
· http://www.digital-learning.info/
· http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/programmes/elearning/ltig/qr.aspx
· http://www.qrcode.es/?p=350&language=en
· http://blogs.bath.ac.uk/qrcode/
· http://blogs.bath.ac.uk/qrcode/qr-codes-and-moodle/
· http://mlearning.edublogs.org/?s=2D+barcodes
· http://www.elearningguild.com/content.cfm?selection=doc.1057
With QR Codes, students
can access your e-Learning portals anywhere—in printed workbooks, online course
pages, classrooms, or out in the streets. The codes can be taped to the walls
of your training facilities, painted on the exterior of your headquarters, and
even printed on the back of that ratty old baseball cap you wear to work every
day. And I… standing right behind you on the subway or street corner… could
scan your cap’s QR Code and immediately be taken to your e-Learning portal,
marketing/blog site, or even your product documentation.
THAT’S very cool!
About the Author
Dave Powell is Documentation Manager for SyberWorks Inc., a
privately-held supplier of e-Learning software and training. For the past 15
years, he has written award-winning marketing collateral and user documentation
for hardware/software companies like PictureTel, 3Com, Philips Medical Systems,
Polaroid, and SyberWorks. Prior to that, he edited and wrote for publications
like Computerworld, Infosecurity
News, Networking Management, Digital Design, LightWave, Popular
Computing, Harvard Business
Review, and Leaders. (During that time, he also served as an author and
Editorial Advisor for Sesame Street.)
About SyberWorks
SyberWorks, Inc.
(www.syberworks.com)
is a leader in the custom e-Learning Solutions and Learning Management System
industries for Fortune 1000 corporations, higher education, and other
organizations. Located in Waltham, Massachusetts, the company serves the
multi-billion-dollar e-Learning market. Since 1995, SyberWorks has developed
and delivered unique and economical solutions to create, manage, measure, and
improve e-Learning programs at companies and organizations in the United
States, Canada, Europe, and other countries.
Dave Boggs
SyberWorks, Inc.
SyberWorks e-Learning Podcast Series
SyberWorks LMS e-Learning Implementation Podcast Series
e-Learning Lingo Podcast Series
SyberWorks Training Center Learning Management System
Join the SyberWorks Learning Management Technology Group on Linkedin
Follow SyberWorks on Twitter
