[ mobiMOOC ] Mobile Massive Online Open Course started

On Monday I participated in the kickoff of my second MOOC course (my first one was the learning and analytics course organised by George Siemens). It's the MobiMOOC course on mobile learning. It centers around a wiki and a Google Group. The first week is about general introductions and getting to know terminology and state of the art of mobile learning. The sessions was conducted by Inge aka Ignatia.

One nice thing about this initiative is that participants (over 400 so far) need to have a particular mobile learning project in mind. That's a great way to link learning with outcomes and make the experience goal oriented. In my case, I want to remake the prototype module I've created last month. I basically made a sales guide that works on most mobile phones (except that peculiar blackberry platform) and has a 'Know' and a 'Sell' section with small sales talk simulations. But it is still too much 'mobile content' to my liking. We want to go much more into mobile performance support than mobile courses per se. So for my MOOC project, I want to convert it into an actual sales aid, so people can go through it preparing a sales conversation with a particular client in mind and at the end have a 'cheat sheet' of what they should mention in that conversation.

Will this be the year of mobile learning? It remains to be seen.... Five years ago, it was going to be the next big thing. But it didn't happen. Four years ago also. Same three years ago. And two years ago. Last year it was going to reach the tipping point but it didn't. And now it's going to be 2011. We'll see. But I do notice that this year alone has brought more requests and prototypes and experimenting with mobile learning than the previous years combined. So there is definately augmented interest. But I'm still part of a learning business, so if the money will not follow the interest, it is not going to be 2011 either.

With that in mind, I'm looking forward to the remaining weeks on MobiMOOC.