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Chalk Featured as Pre-Eminent Enterprise Mobile Content Solution at Wharton Business School
CLOs from Leading Organizations Choose Mobile chalkboard™ as the Solution of Choice in their Masters Project for the Executive Program in Work-Based Learning Leadership
Background
The esteemed Wharton School, at the University of Pennsylvania, is the oldest
collegiate business school – offering executive education to elite executives
from a wide variety of industries. The most published, the most quoted, the
most actively engaged with global businesses and public policy, Wharton
impacts many of the Fortune 500.
In September, 2007 the Wharton School joined forces with the University
of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education (Penn GSE) to launch an
Executive Program in Work-Based Learning Leadership. This ‘first-of-itskind’
program is designed to prepare the Chief Learning Offi cer (CLO) and
other senior-level executives for success as learning leaders. It is a threeyear
program that consists of five course blocks.
The Project
In the third block of the program, one of the projects is to build a business plan
on a new learning initiative. When the fi rst cohort of the program reached this
block, one of the groups decided to craft their business plan on mLearning.
The goal was to provide justifi cation for a corporate investment (by a fi nancial
services organization) in a mobile content platform - as a means to ensure
enterprise-wide compliance with regulators and avoid risk exposure. An
increase in the number of compliance courses and decrease in busy senior
executives’ abilities to complete them had created a need to reach oftenmobile
employees – whenever and wherever they may be. Since the
executive team all had BlackBerry® smartphones, deploying mobile-based
courseware (mLearning) was an intuitive solution.
As part of the business plan, four major vendors of mobile content solutions
were considered; selected on research, benchmarking and best practices of
organizations already using mLearning. Chalk, developer of mobile content
deployment software Mobile chalkboard™, was selected in the business case
as the vendor of choice. The reasons behind this choice were the software’s
deep integration with BlackBerry, its secure network, the ability to quickly
and easily create proprietary, media-rich content, and its SCORM-compliant
tracking and reporting capabilities. Ultimately, a three-year contract with
Chalk was recommended.
The projected savings from creating and deploying content through Mobile
chalkboard™, versus the company’s existing eLearning system, was deemed
to be signifi cant – making the ultimate financial investment minimal. The
business plan also recommended that, in addition to improving regulatory
compliance and reducing associated risk, Mobile chalkboard™ be used for
daily mobile information announcements, sales updates, product promotions,
unanticipated emergency communications and new product launches. The
cited benefi ts of using Mobile chalkboard™ for these additional applications
included increased competency, decreased learning time and improved
productivity for on-the-go employees.
The Presentation
In addition to completing a business plan, the Work-Based Learning Leadership
project also consisted of an in-class presentation. For the mLearning group’s
presentation, they brought in four BlackBerry® smartphones and showcased
a mobile module - built with and running on Chalk’s software - that highlighted
the key points from their business plan. The module was created using the
Mobile chalkboard™ PowerPoint Add-in and went off without a hitch.
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