XplanaZine

Apple announced big profits for the last quarter and its success, once again, was driven by the iPod division. The path for Apple’s success, in turn, provides important lessons for online learning.

For the recent quarter, Apple revenue rose 30 percent to $2.01 billion from $1.55 billion. Much of the growth could be attributed to the continued explosion of demand for its iPod products.The company sold 860,000 iPods in the quarter, accounting for $249 million in revenue, up from 304,000 iPods sold in the year-ago quarter.”In the markets we’re participating in, demand looks good for us,” Peter Oppenheimer, Apple’s chief financial officer, said in an interview.

The domination of the iPod continues in direct contrast to the fairly stagnant position of the company’s computer division. And, while the computer division generates more gross revenues, the iPod division is more profitable and much more so if you take into account its partner Web-based product iTunes.

There are important lessons to be gleaned from this iPod story — lessons, I believe, that apply directly to online learning and its associated technologies.

• What you think is most important might not be most important. Apple’s real victory in all of this is to be able to see themselves as something other than what they imagined they would be. They started out as a computer company and will likely finish this decade as a personal electronics provider with much less emphasis on computers. It was necessary to survive and now seems to be the cornerstone of profitability. This hit home yesterday as I was reviewing content I had written for a proposed Web course five years ago. At the time, none of the technologies I use now really existed in any coherent form. This meant that my “vision” for what an online course should/could be was necessarily limited. As technology changed over the past five years, my understanding of design and usability altered dramatically as well. And, since online education is such a new discipline, and technology will continue to change, I/we need to be ready to constantly refine our understanding and vision for what makes a good online course or appropriate instructional design.
• Information flow is as important (or more so) than platform technology. Another lesson from Apple is that organizing and retrieving information (in the iPod and via iTunes) is as much a factor for success as the technology itself. iTunes intuitive information storing and browsing design allows users to catalogue and retrieve songs in the easiest manner possible. This translates into actual use of the product and an rapid learning curve for owners. It also means that a greater number of users will move beyond the “casual-use” stage and into the “advanced-user” category. In online learning, we are still in an era where platform technology is seen as the ultimate solution. This will give way, in the next phase of online learning development, to an era of information design and management. In that era, the intuitive storage and retrieval of information will be more important than any particular platform.
• Users demand the ability to manipulate information on the fly. The development of iTunes’ popularity provides insight into what users are looking for in terms of information management. To that end, the most popular feature of the iPod/iTunes combination is the ability to create playlists on the go and to modify those once they are created. What this means is that users do not want to be confined in terms of their information. They want to be able to take their information and work with it anywhere and under a variety of circumstances. In online learning, we have been limited in terms of platforms as well as standards for this kind of information flexibility. The standards are coming into place and the platforms must follow. In the future, online course and information designers will have to take this need for information flexibility seriously.
• Design flexibility is a high priority. Finally, we can learn a thing or two about the importance of design flexibility from Apple. The iPod was great but the min-iPod may be even better. Apple has long had a history of developing diverse products to match differing usability needs and tastes. In the early days of online learning, there is often an attempt to create or sell “one-size-fits-all” solutions. Not only is this not adequate from a pedagogical perspective, it will prove even more lacking as technology continue to evolve. Design, both instructional and graphic, need to be created and implemented in the broadest possible ways to accommodate the maturing process of this discipline.