Mobile Learning: Our Goldilocks Problem

The recent announcement of Blackboard Mobile Learn, and especially our new native app for the iPad, has produced a great deal of attention.  We’re pleased to have captured the imagination of so many, and to have energized the dialog within our customer community.  Already, nearly 200 schools have enabled Blackboard Mobile Learn via Building Block or are in the process of doing so, even as Blackboard Mobile Learn has sparked numerous threads on community listservs and elsewhere in a collective grappling over what the emergence of so many mobile-equipped learners requires of those that serve them.

Everyone seems aligned in acknowledging that the iPad will be a new force for changing our thinking about how we satisfy the expectations of our learning communities.  Everyone is also aligned in thinking that the current budgetary climate in education makes this challenge especially difficult. 

And while some have taken us to task for not simply adding Blackboard Mobile Learn functionality into our base product at no additional cost, others have encouraged us to invest heavily, to move even faster than we are to innovate around the needs of mobile learners.  Most are somewhere between the poles.  

I think we’re near an inflection point where mobile devices will become a ubiquitous force in education, and that our clients will be pressured to provide mobile access to learning content and services at a wide scale.  Learner expectations will be set within the context of consumer applications built for the Android, Blackberry, iPhone and iPad, and satisfying their expectations of learning will be a stiff challenge.  One made more difficult by the Cambrian explosion of innovation and change we’ll see as the industry’s tech titans struggle to win this new hilltop.

For Blackboard this represents the classic dimensions of both challenge and great opportunity.  If we under-invest to respond to those who seek the lowest cost approach we’re unlikely to provide the combination of speed and quality that market conditions will demand.   If we invest heavily we can meet learner expectations, but at a cost beyond what some of our clients are able to meet.   

Our approach thus far – and I’ll stress that there’s more to come – is to try and thread the needle in a way that brings the innovation and support rapidly but with an offering for the budget constrained.   We’ve invested heavily, taking a bold view that our clients need more than just compatibility with mobile devices, but a platform of mobile learning that they can integrate and extend into what will be a brave new world of information delivery.  We’ve built dedicated teams to support the major device platforms so that we don’t miss the subtlety and nuance of each.  And we’re creating a dedicated support team with the knowledge of device, telecommunication issues and learning software features that this mesh of technologies will demand.   

Of course, businesses invest ultimately to seek a return on their capital, and thus we’ve offered a licensing option for this new product.  Our per learner fees may be considered high by those that compare them to those for our standard learning platform.  But learners are demonstrating a willingness to pay hundreds of dollars per year for mobile devices, telco plans, and native versions of their favorite applications.  They’re responding with highest priority in surveys today around institutional spending on technology.  Provided it’s done well, we believe that this is exactly the type of service students will want their technology fee to go to given the freedom and capabilities it brings to them.

Inevitably there are institutions that are so constrained that neither internal funding nor raising technology fees is a solution.  For these, we’ve taken inspiration from what we’ve seen with campus email systems, where institutions have learned that commercial partners are willing to fund technology infrastructure in return for an opportunity to monetize their investment through a connection to their student populations over time. The proliferation of Google and Microsoft’s hosted email offerings are vivid examples.  We’ve taken a variation on this theme, bringing Sprint to this challenge as a close working partner to assist us in building a high quality application and improving our savvy about all things telco. Like Google and Microsoft, they’re willing to provide funding for institutions that want to accelerate their path to mobile while avoiding outlays.  And they’ll seek a return on their investment over the long-term by packaging offerings for mobile learners.  It’s a variation on the text-book economic model: the institution enjoys reduced cost of product development, and those that benefit pay the incremental costs over time.

So it’s a “Goldilocks” type of problem, and we’ve set the table with a few bowls of porridge for our clients to sample.  We’re looking forward to the feedback we receive about these so that we might improve or add to them as we undertake this large challenge in front of us.   As always, feel free to share your thoughts and advice here or with me directly.

Cheers!

Ray 

Ray.Henderson@blackboard.com

Comments

[MK]

This isn't like Google or Microsoft at all. Students who use Google hosted email solutions to access their campus mail aren't forced to pay them money in order to use the service, nor is the campus. On the other hand, I'm forced to pay Sprint money if I want to use your app, because you won't just provide the support for WebKit based browsers or write a functional WAP solution.

[Kayvon Beykpour]

Thanks for the feedback MK. We are continuously evolving our support of mobile learning. We chose to develop robust, elegant and intuitive native applications, an approach we feel best supports the student experience. As with all of our products, we do have a carrier agnostic annual license version of Blackboard Mobile Learn that supports all platforms and devices. But we also have a no-cost version that several hundred institutions have already taken advantage of that costs nothing to students or the institution and includes full support for Sprint smartphones and Wi-Fi support for lots of popular Apple devices. This combination has enabled us to bring mobile learning to a wide body of users and we’ve invested much in functional development of the apps. Would be happy to talk more with you about your particular considerations directly to see how we might address them but again thanks for your input and feedback which is critical to our continued focus in this area.