On Tuesday, March 8, 2016, I interviewed Chad Udell, solutionsarchitect for Float Mobile Learning, a strategy-consulting firm that guidesindustry-leading companies to understand and leverage the power of mobilelearning. Chad creates strategies and designs and develops mobile-learning weband app solutions for industry-leading Fortune 500 companies. He is recognizedas an expert in design and development, and speaks regularly at conferences ondesign, development, and mobile learning. Chad, who holds a BS degree ingraphic design from Bradley University, is the author of Learning Everywhere: How Mobile Content Strategy is TransformingTraining and Mastering MobileLearning: Tips and Techniques for Success. Chad was named a Guild Master atThe eLearning Guild’s mLearnCon 2015 Conference & Expo in Austin, Texas.
Chad Udell, Float Learning
BB: Welcome,Chad! Let’s start with a little history. How did you get started in eLearningand mobile learning?
CU: My backgroundis in graphic design and art history—that’s what my degree is in. My first jobout of school was doing web design. I worked for RollingStone.com and a numberof other high-profile music web sites. These sites had what I consider prettycomplicated information architectures—they operated much like a Wikipedia ofmusic in some regards. They were some of the first listening stations online.They had thousands and thousands of pages and the data was assembleddynamically. It was still in the days when database-powered sites were relativelyrare. It was the late 1990s and the web was pretty new.
I became very interested in how to quickly and easilydisplay lots of information in a highly searchable, findable, memorable kind ofinterface. It’s not much like eLearning, except for the fact that it’s almostexactly like how eLearning should be designed. I began to build a lot moreinteractive elements into our web sites. We started building games out,interactive media players, and things that would be skinned for the latestbands or for commercial clients that were coming online.
Then the dot-com bomb hit and took me and almost all mycolleagues out. So I spent a lot of time in freelance work. I just slidnaturally into game design and development. That work blended a lot ofentertainment and educational stuff. I was doing work for brands like CartoonNetwork and Nickelodeon, Veggie Tales and PBS, and other educational web sites.So I began to slide into the learning realm in the early 2000s. I ended upgetting a job at the Iona Group, the company that started up Float, and movedfrom gaming into designing wholesale interactive educational kiosks for museumsand trade shows.
We did a lot of work throughout the mid-2000s for just aboutall the major museums in the Chicago area—the Shedd Aquarium, AdlerPlanetarium, Museum of Science and Industry, and The Field Museum. For exampleat the Museum of Science and Industry we did work related to the U-505 Project, we did work at Shedd related to how they stock and fill theiraquarium, and how they acquire and care for their animals. We did work withAdler Planetarium related to planetary exploration.
Those were didactic, interactive kiosks—essentiallyeLearning without a lot of measurement and assessment, but they are trulycreated for educational information and access. In addition, we were doing alot of work at that time with some of our corporate clients for their learningmanagement systems. They were bringing some of the first learning managementsystems online in the early to mid-2000s.
About 2009, we said, “This mobile thing is really takingoff!” The app market started to emerge and that’s when we founded Float. Wewere focused on bringing our learning content and chops and skills to themobile market. That’s been where we’ve been ever since. We continue to moveinto all the cool new emergent technologies that we’re currently working on.
BB: You got intoxAPI pretty early too, didn’t you?
CU: xAPI didn’treally get started until late 2010 and early 2011. The steamroller didn’tactually get rolling until late 2011. As soon as I saw a presentation done byTim Martin of Rustici, I was sold. I saw the intro video and I saw the potential. Ithought, this is absolutely where it’s at. The previous methods that we hadbeen using for tracking and storing assessment data, eLearning measurementdata, just was really archaic. Since I had a pretty good background in webanalytics and other types of data acquisition for usage and tracking, this wasin my blood. I always felt hamstrung by SCORM, so I saw xAPI as a very freeingkind of thing.
BB: Who are twoof the people who have had great influence on your career—what did each of themcontribute to your understanding or passion about learning?
CU: Robert Gaddhas always been a tremendous influence on me. For about as long as I canremember, when we started dabbling in mobile, he was already there with apretty good presence and a real positive mindset. The thing that has alwayskept me going and had me keeping an eye on Robert is his attitude and hispositivity. He’s such a great force. He doesn’t ever let the market get himdown, he doesn’t really seem to be begrudging. You know, some people can havethis negative attitude toward certain types of technologies and trends. As muchas it can be frustrating when people don’t want to think outside of the courseor outside of the way they’re currently getting things done, Robert is a man ofthe people and he understands that this is like an aircraft carrier and ittakes a while to turn the entire thing, it doesn’t just happen overnight. He’salways been a tremendous influence on me. He’s another Guild Master—I think hisreputation precedes him.
On the other end of it, when we were founding Float, I kindof gravitated right away toward people who had already written pieces in themarketplace. Gary Woodill, who was with i5 Research at the time and before thatwith Brandon Hall, had already written TheMobile Learning Edge as well as a couple of other books. I really likedwhat he had to say about mobile. Gary’s a futurist at heart, so he’s alwayskind of had his head in the clouds, seeing what people are going to be doingfive or seven or ten years from now. While he understands current applicationsand he’s a tremendous researcher on current trends, he’s also an excellentforecaster. Whenever I need a little bit of insight into where things are goingto be headed, he’s about the first person that I call.
BB: Whattechnology today are you most excited about applying to learning?
CU: There are somany! We just wrapped a pretty good-sized project with the government relatedto augmented reality and virtual reality. In that project we did a lot of workwith object detection, spatial recognition, and facial detection andrecognition as well. That aspect of learning excites me. I think augmentedreality is a huge avenue of research and development that’s going to paytremendous dividends.
I also think that machine learning is a big deal. Peoplealways talk about “big data,” but big data to what end? One of the things thatbig data actually powers very well is this concept of machine learning. Theseare systems that get progressively better and get smarter as they adapt toconditions and understand the world around them. If you apply machine learningto augmented reality, it becomes really powerful. Right now augmented reality,or virtual reality, is something in which you basically have to create theworld around you. You have to inform the system about what things are. That’spretty hard right now. There’s an API that Google has opened recently calledTensorFlow that Float’s just started to mess around with—that’s a superpowerful tool. I think machine learning, coupled with big data and augmentedreality, will be a huge, huge area for us. Definitely an area of interest for Float.
BB: How do yousee machine learning affecting what we’re doing with human beings?
CU: If we havesmarter bots, better and more competent agents around us, that would be almostthe ultimate performance support tool, right? If we’ve got little digitalfriends that can help us understand and interpret what’s going on around us,and what the things are that we should be prioritizing, focusing on, orunderstanding, that’s going to be a tremendous benefit to us. Situationalawareness, everything from maintenance and technical applications, even softskills. Imagine a system that can guide you and let you know about social normsand customs in a contextual area that you’re not familiar with, or potentiallyalert you to people that are in the space with you that you should know about.There’s so many different aspects. From a performance support and machinelearning perspective, that’s a really powerful combo.
BB: Are youlooking at Internet of Things (IoT) along with that?
CU: Without adoubt. The thing that makes machine learning so powerful or that makes augmentedreality so powerful is when there’s instrumentation or sensors on devices or inthe area or context in which the experiences are being used. IoT is really anumbrella term that includes things like sensors and beacons. Sensors andbeacons are pretty vital for ensuring that people in the space know what theyneed to know about the space.
BB: Chad, thanks for your time and for sharingyour experience with our readers! I look forward to seeing you at LearningSolutions 2016 in Orlando and our FocusOn event this summer.
