Craig Taylor’s review of our Encore mobile learning app

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Libby Cross, Senior Marketing Executive

This guest blog sees Craig Taylor, a Learning & Development professional with 21 years experience, including 7 years working with learning technologies, share his thoughts on Learning Pool’s new mobile learning app Encore.

Regular readers of my blog will know that I’m a big fan of anything that can be done to minimise the forgetting curve and automate the process of ‘forcing’ the act of recall around a subject so I was pleased to see Donald Clark highlight ‘Encore‘ mobile learning at a recent event that I was at.

In a nutshell, it’s a Moodle plugin that can be used to synchronise with a free app. The plugin is configured with certain content reminders/frequency etc and then pushes those to the app allowing a steady drip-drip-drip of ‘tasks’ directly to the employees/students mobile device.

The FREE demo involves undertaking a SCORM piece of eLearning with a Moodle, completing  a ‘self assessment’ using Moodle’s inbuilt assessment tool which then unlocks the ‘Encore’ plugin.

At this stage you can select to receive the automated ‘tasks’ by email or the Encore app.

As sound as the principle is, there are a few areas where I feel some improvement could be made.

Having spoken to Learning Pool they were very vocal about their desire to receive feedback.

1. Firstly (and this is not a criticism, just an observation) but if you’re not using Moodle  then this obviously isn’t for you! Hopefully, other LMS/VLE providers will latch onto the idea though?

2. Despite this being a Moodle extension it’s not freely available. Having spoken to Learning Pool they said that even if your Moodle isn’t supplied by them that that the Encore extension could probably be purchased from them.

3. The Encore app is only available on iOS and Android, with Windows on the roadmap but a definite ‘No’ to Blackberries (possibly a stumbling block for corporates who currently use BB?).

4. Whilst the end user has the option of receiving the reminders via email or the app for me this still relies on (assuming that the organisation is wishing to tap into the mobility of the employee/student)  the end user having a smartphone. I’d like to see the option of using SMS as a delivery channel. Sure, some of the more media rich activities may not be accessible to feature phone users, but as I see it, at present, none of it is accessible to feature phone users.

5. Some of the activities I undertook in the trial period were just tests of short term memory, which for me, weren’t the best examples of spaced activation of learning (see opposite).  However, I think with some thought around reflective questions (possibly with the option for ‘free text’ responses) and short videos there could be a real opportunity for this app to serve as a ‘trigger’ for deeper thought and processing.

All in all, I think this is a great step forward in terms of demonstrating that mobile learning can be and is so much more than responsive ‘click next’ e-learning.