What’s common between Apple’s IPad, Samsung’s Galaxy, HTC’s Flyer, Motorola’s Xoom, Dell’s Streak and Blackberry’s Playbook? Well, all are tablets of their brands respectively and this list is not exhaustive. It is estimated that about 70% of the world’s population have mobile phones and that equates to about 5 billion mobile connection subscriptions of a world with a 6.8 billion population. To know more about these ridiculous mobile stats, check out this interesting video.
Now that we’re seeing such a great penetration of mobile subscriptions to the remotest of areas in the world, it is certainly an optimistic view to consider that MLearning has a lot of scope, but indeed with hoards of challenges. When we talk about challenges, it used to vary between screen size to bandwidth speeds, compatibility of proprietary formats in several mobile devices to establishing e-learning standards for mobile learning and a lot more. But considering the emergence of smart phones and the fact that Google’s Android is dominating the mobile OS market (expected to have a 45% share by 2015, according to an IDC report), compatibility issues doesn’t matter any longer. Moreover, screen sizes of tablets and smart phones have increased aesthetically without making the devices look bulkier. Talking about bandwidth, internet speeds have greatly increased – thanks to 3G and 4G. So what do all these convey? Is MLearning coming of age? Sure, and definitely with LTE and WiMAX battling it out to prove who’s best.