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Youtube owes its success to increased bandwidths across the world as well as two key features -> streaming videos as Flash [well they have graduated to HTML 5 streaming] as well as embedding functionality. The latter, allowed YouTube to penetrate websites, blogs and forums. The key, YouTube made itself [and the videos] available to where the people already were. Eventually, YouTube itself became a place that people started visiting.

authorStream, a web product from authorGen [the company behind WiZiQ], launched two killer features to become one of the largest PowerPoint sharing websites in the world. The two features were Send PPT’s to YouTube or Convert PPT’s to iPod compatible format automatically on the website. Both YouTube and authorStream leveraged the access, reach and utility of already popular mediums. The medium of present and certainly, of the future is mobile device. Why? Sample this [India statistics only - found through a quick Google search]:

• India already has more than 600 million mobile users [that is more than the population of Europe].
• 50% of the users in India will access Facebook from mobile in the very near future. Twitter is accessed by a majority of people from Mobile.
• In another 05 years, more than 260 million people in India will have some form of mobile Internet connectivity.
• As devices continue becoming shorter, there is also increased acceptance of accessing web over mobile devices.

Now add similar numbers for China. This poses some questions:

• What does this big shift in the way people interact with Internet/ World Wide Web mean for Learning in the future?
• Has learning on the web had any sort of stabilization?
• Is m-Learning or mobile learning the future?

The answer to the last question is probably the one that is clear. In all likelihood that will happen. And just because the second question gets asked does not mean it is related to the third. Something did not need to exist in physical world for it to exist in the desktop browser; similarly, something does not need to exist in the desktop browser world [let alone be successful or useful] for it to not exist in the mobile web. It is also entirely possible that apps/ features which found limited success in desktop browser world might actually flourish in the mobile space [like for instance Foursquare]. By mobile we mean, your mobile phones [smart or dumb does not matter], iPods, iPad etc. Some people also include NoteBooks as part of mobile devices.

It is not like online education companies haven’t been trying or have been sitting idle. Babbel was probably the first off the wheel with its iPhone apps which also included speech recognition. Being first off the wheel meant that they get time to refine it over a period of time. Livemocha seems to be thinking of mobile layer/ access for their courses. Although not particularly designed for online classes delivery, Fuse Meeting got a lot of attention with their Online Meeting features for iPhone and Blackberry [with iPad features coming soon]. An interesting product shared by one of the persons on my Twitter PLN is Zyebo. Apparently, they enable learning General Knowledge and English for competitive examinations [this could be really useful for aspirants of exams like CAT - used to screen hundreds of thousands of people applying for around thousand seats in premier Indian MBA colleges]. An interesting product that Kirsten Winkler shared with me is Virt2go. The tag line is definitely eye-catching enough: Finally a Mobile Platform for Online Education. This product is right now available only for iPhone but is soon coming to other platforms.  There are also custom apps being developed by companies for their in-house eLearning projects [Ericsoon and Tata Interactive Systems for instance]. Then there is YouTube mobile and Wikipedia mobile for those who think that is all you need for your online learning. That seems to be all. I could not find much else [if you have more examples, would love to hear about them].

Prima facie, the opportunity seems big. However, are people ready to learn on mobile? Are they ready to pay for it? Those are probably wrong questions. Just like, are people ready to learn online using computers and are they ready to pay for it, are wrong questions. Enough people across the world are already learning using their computers and Internet. They are paying for online education because they find value in it. Hence, the right question to ask could be What value can we add for learners using mobile devices? Now, who will answer this!