Welcome to an interview with Sameer Bhatia, founder of ProProfs, innovators in interactive elearning elements which are used in mlearning and elearning, with degrees, including online teaching degrees.
1. What is your name and your relation to elearning?
I am Sameer Bhatia, the founder of ProProfs. ProProfs provides comprehensive elearning tools for building, testing and applying knowledge. Through its Quiz and Training products, ProProfs offers trainers and educators powerfully-simple features that allow them to create elearning courses, quizzes and managing their classroom online.
2. How do you see the role of mobile learning evolving in the future?
By 2013, more people will use mobile phones than PCs to get online. Mobile is having a significant impact in elearning and helps learners stay engaged anytime and anywhere. Learners expect that the mobile experience will be as good as the desktop experience, however there are restrictions around screen size, support for technology, etc. The challenge for instructor is to cater to multitude of devices, browsers, screen sizes & operating systems that the learner may be on. At ProProfs, we simplify that process so any course or quiz created once works across all devices so the instructor is ready for the ways today’s learners interact with elearning content.
3.How can we overcome the problems of a) rented digits, rather than being able to download information for later access when there is no connectivity; b) intermittent connectivity creating a digital divide?
The web is growing and accelerating at mind-boggling rates. The quality of connections has continued to improve, limiting the impact of issues like intermittent or no connectivity. There is also increasing adoption of interactive & adaptive content that simply cannot run offline. However, there is also content that is authored offline such as PDF or word documents. Today's instructor has the dual problem of taking offline content online and dealing with content that needs to downloaded to go from online to offline. We focus on solving that problem by essentially handling that issue end to end for the instructor. As an example, our new technology allows instructors to upload PDF or Word docs, which can then be converted to a webpage automatically - or instructors can simply click "Allow Download" and content becomes accessible as downloadable content.
4. What is QuizMaker and how can it be used in mobile applications?
Quiz Maker allows users to create custom quizzes quickly and easily by using the largest library of pre-made questions (more than 3,000,000) and quiz templates (more than 300,000) on the Web, and track performance through a powerful new reporting tool. Quiz Maker is fully mobile compliant and works across all devices & browsers. It even converts any user uploaded documents into HTML5 so they can be loaded seamlessly across mobile devices. Any video uploads are also converted into a mobile friendly format, so it essentially does all the work for the instructor to ensure compliance with mobile while still allowing them to use their existing teaching or training material.
5. What are new capabilities of QuizMaker? What are the pedagogical purposes of products / activities made on QuizMaker?
We just added several new features including pre-made quiz templates and questions, as well as the ability to create and track quizzes for separate classes or groups. Users also now have access to an enhanced statistics dashboard that allows them to generate reports by quiz-taker, individual question, quiz and group or by custom meta data, view quiz data by average time spent per question, percentage of correct/incorrect answers, and more. These new Quiz Maker features are focused on giving users a powerfully-simple, comprehensive tool set that helps them not only gather and manage quiz data, but also apply that knowledge, empowering them with valuable insight about their quiz-takers. And through Quiz Maker’s dashboard, educators and trainers now have the ability to reveal knowledge gaps, helping them create more efficient and productive learning environments.
6. What do you think will be the future of mobile learning?
I can sum that up in one word: "ubiquitous"
