Video and other multimedia should be carefully considered before being placed in a course.
- If you're going to create multi-media limit the length to less then 30 seconds. Longer then 30 seconds will result in your learner spending more time watching the multi-media buffering then actually viewing it.
- Bandwidth in many areas is not yet strong enough to make viewing multi-media on a mobile device an enjoyable experience.
- Just 10 years ago it would have been miserable to watch TV over a computer, now it is a big business.
- On page 3.2. there is a short video. The video is in Flash in our eLearning course. In our mLearning course we added a Quicktime version so that the video would appear on iPhones and iPads.
- On page 5.1 of this course we have included a three minute long video. In our mLearning version of this course we have links to the video. Unless someone is in a WiFi hot spot they will not be able to view this video.
- Multimedia has inconsistent SmartPhone support between players.
- Plug-ins such as Flash, PDF, and many types of movies work work on some SmartPhones but not on others.
- Flash - iPhone and Blackberry do not support flash, while Android does support Flash. Also, since flash scales to the browser size flash simulations that work well on a computer may be scaled too small to be usable on a SmartPhone.
- PDF - PDFs work on some SmartPhones, but since PDFs scale to the browser size PDFs are typically scaled too small to be usable on a SmartPhone.
- Movies- some SmartPhones support movie formats, but even then, the user must be in a hot spot area that supports the data transfer speeds necessary for watching movies.
- HTML5, the web standard supported by most popular mobile browsers, including Android, Blackberry, and iPhone. HTML5 has a built in audio (OGA) and video (OGV) capability. When you save audio and video as OGA and OGV your SmartPhone learner is not required to download a plug-in to access rich media.