Tablet Education or tLearning has really advanced over the last couple of years accompanying the hardware advances that have been made. On the face of it, portable hand-held devices that can augment learning are a natural ask from the consumer today in many markets. In my opinion, tLearning will succeed where mLearning (m=mobile) failed, primarily because of the increased screen estate and touch based technology makes it viable.
Some of the advantages of tLearning include:
- Ubiquitous learning, portability and ease of use
- Sufficient screen estate to accomplish learning tasks when compared to the mobile
- The current spate of innovation is making a host of tools available that are suitable for the medium & hardware
- Closer to chalk and talk or traditional pen and paper teaching and learning through features such as pen (stylus) based collaboration
There are a spate of offerings & initiatives now on the ground to leverage the power of tLearning. Here are a few interesting ones.
- Kineo Brainchild
- iProf
- Prazas
- Kno
- Nook
- iPAD
- India’s 35$ tablet
- Notion Ink’s Adam
- Marvel / OLPC XO 3.0
As a result, a lot of companies are getting into or promoting tLearning. From my perspective, tLearning offers a fresh new field for instructional designers, technologists, graphics people and eLearning solution designers where research and innovation is required to leverage the new collaborative features of the medium. For example, Prazas combines online tutoring/collaboration with an “upload any content” feature, which makes it easy to access, share and co-annotate learning material.
This is an exciting time to be in the industry. Hopefully researchers will take a strong look at tLearning and start contributing to learning solutions design thinking for this medium.
Viplav Baxi's Meanderings 
Leave a Reply