I recently interviewed Peter Phillips, CEO of UnicornTraining Group, in the UK about his thoughts on mobile learning and where it istaking businesses and professional development.
Mobile really does change the game
Bill Brandon: Peter,thank you for the opportunity to speak with you about the business benefits ofmobile learning. The website for Unicorn Training Group covers an impressiverange of solutions, including mobile! Tell us about your company.
Peter Phillips:Unicorn started 26 years ago as a face-to-face training company. We’ve alwaysbeen interested in how to apply technology to enhance learning, but from theperspective of being a training company, not a technology company getting intothe learning market. We really are all about how to make the learningexperience better and more effective.
Probably 80 percent of our clients are in the insurance,banking, and financial services vertical. We work with professional bodies,particularly in the UK— such as CII (Chartered Insurance Institute) and the CFA(Chartered Financial Analysts) (who are bigger in the US than in the UK). Mostof what we do is mainly specialist areas and technical training for thefinancial sector including continuing professional development (CPD) andcompliance.
We are a solutions company. We have an enterprise learning-managementplatform called SkillsServe, which we’re very proud of. We provide a range ofoff-the-shelf content, most of it directly relevant to the financial sector. Wealso build custom content for our clients and generally deliver solutions thatinvolve some combination of custom and off-the-shelf. The custom content islikely to be hosted on our platform.
Increasingly, mobile is a big factor in what we do. It’sinteresting—you can see it partly just as a natural evolution. Mobile bringsall sorts of new opportunities and challenges—it is actually changing the game,and perhaps to a greater extent than some of those evolutions of the past.
Web-based or native?
Bill Brandon: Are youdeveloping web-based solutions or native apps for mobile?
Peter Phillips:We’re very much on the web-based solutions side, for several reasons. Ofcourse, it’s much cheaper and easier to develop web solutions. We do have acouple of native apps, but most of our clients and their learners are still attheir desks on PCs. It would be premature for many of our clients to bedelivering on a mobile app. Certainly in the States and the UK most of ourlearners have online access most of the time, when they’re at home ortravelling, as well as at work.
It’s also really important to be able to sync back to theLMS; the nature of our clients is that they want the content tracked andreported, to allocate training to learners and so on, so that they know thatcompetence gaps are being filled and that they’re meeting their compliancerequirements.
Benefits of mobile learning
Bill Brandon: What do yousee as the particular strengths and benefits of mobile for learning?
Peter Phillips: Atthe Learning Solutions Conference in Orlando this year, several speakersaddressed the forgetting curve. It’s not enough to just douse people once ayear with compliance training, on money laundering or the like, and expect thateverything will be all right. In fact, in 30 days or so they probably will haveforgotten nearly all of it.
If you want to make sure your training is continuouslyeffective, and that you don’t get compliance issues down the road, which ofcourse for a bank is incredibly expensive with fines of millions and millionsof dollars, you really need to be reinforcing your learning on a regular basis.Mobile is a very good way of doing that.
With mobile, you can push short chunks of learning, littletexts, little assessments, little case studies, to people on a spaced basis.These short, sharp, spaced interventions have actually proven much moreeffective in some of the research that Will Thalheimer has done. Mobile isideal for delivering them.
Portability is another very obvious one—the fact that peoplecan sit on the train and learn on the way to work, or can do a little bit oflearning at home. They don’t have to be at their desktop. That’s a big coreadvantage of mobile, by definition.
The real benefits are yet to come. I think the ExperienceAPI (xAPI) has got great potential and has only scratched the surface so far.The opportunity to report learning experiences across a much wider range ofactivities than just eLearning is really quite exciting. eLearning has beenalmost in a silo—companies did their eLearning “here” and their face-to-facetraining “there.” Now it’s more about learning than eLearning—everything isgoing online or has an online element to it and begins to link across differenttypes of experience. To collect information on experiences, using mobileplatforms, is going to be a real game changer in the long term.
More and more of our clients want diagnostic testing, sothey can focus on where their needs really are. By finding out up front aboutgaps between the competency required for a job and the competencies that anindividual currently has, an organization can then focus the learning to fillthat gap. Mobile can deliver the testing, deliver quick interventions, and xAPIcan capture relevant related experiences.
Another big benefit of the mobile revolution isuser-generated content and collaborative learning. People out in the field whoknow their job really well can pass on some of that information to others inthe business. They can record something (information, example, demonstration), publishit as a short video on YouTube, and post that into their learning group. Thesethings weren’t possible just three or four years ago.
Gamification is the other hot trend of the moment. I’m notquite sure where that will lead us. Gamification gets support from the factthat we now have smartphones and tablets and we all play games on them. I thinkthis changes people’s perceptions: now when they go into an eLearning experience,they can be hopeful that it might actually be amusing or interesting orentertaining as well as supporting learning. It’s going to be less and lesspossible for instructional designers to get away with the boring, text-heavypage-turners of the past. People will expect to be genuinely engaged. Mobilehas a big part to play in opening up new possibilities and in changingmindsets.
Factors that reduce organizational resistance to mobile learning
Bill Brandon: What drivesadoption of mobile learning?
Peter Phillips: Thereare verticals where there are dispersed workforces, branch networks, retailoperations, and large numbers of employees out in the field. In thosesituations, mobile has been adopted much quicker than in banking and insurance.
Even so, those in the boardroom, who have been the first todemand the latest up-to-date tablets and smartphones drive a surprising amountof the demand. When they get those, they want there to be something on themthey can do. They are often the ones who have pushed the reluctant IT departmentsto enable mobile. Many organizations have sales teams who rely on mobile tosupport their calls on prospects and clients. And finally, everyone also has theirpersonal tablets and smartphones, and they bring them in to work.
The short answer is that organizations are being pushed fromthe roots to not resist mobile.
Impediments to mobile learning you may not have considered
Bill Brandon: What wouldyou say are important impediments to implementing mobile learning?
Peter Phillips: Changemanagement is a bigger challenge for some groups than others. We often have betterluck with L&D than with departments that focus on compliance.
Mobile is a different mindset, isn’t it? In our case, we arevery often dealing with, not HR, but compliance directors and complianceofficers. They can be particularly challenging, because they want everythingtied down and recorded and controlled from the center. It requires quite achange of mindset for them to accept that learners are responsible people andthat they can have an input to their own learning.
Another factor is organizations that are still on IE7 andIE8. Anything you design for HTML5 will not work with the older browsers.
Bill Brandon: Is securitypart of the concern that your clients have about apps?
Peter Phillips:Yes, very much so. And not just with apps, but with mobile platforms generally.The big banks, which are very security conscious for obvious reasons, are quitereluctant as you can imagine. It’s not just paranoia; security of data is veryimportant to them. It’s very important that learner records are secure andbehind the firewalls. So they have been quite slow to allow bring your owndevice or to issue iPads or other tablets to their staff.
Security has become a bigger and bigger issue. We have to dopenetrating testing and security audits on our platforms and systems on aregular basis. This has definitely held back the pace at which mobile hasbecome a platform for learning in the corporate sector.
Dealing with resistance
Bill Brandon: Do you findthat referring to that strategy of using mobile for reinforcement is effective indealing with the reluctance of the compliance officers?
Peter Phillips: It’shelping. Compliance officers are not the easiest people to get to change. Justthink about the nature of their job. If L&D can measure the effectivenessof the training, that makes it much easier to go back to the complianceofficers and say, look, we can show you that if you do it this way you’re goingto get better results than if you just do the once-a-year refresher. It’s aslow gradual process of persuasion.
To be fair, it’s easy to generalize. There are somefinancial companies, particularly the smaller ones, which are lighter on theirfeet and way ahead of the pack.
Authoring tools
Bill Brandon: Whichauthoring packages are you using to producemobile learning?
Storyline has become our core tool for conventionaleLearning, which is still most of what we do. It enables us to convert Flashcourses to run on mobile platforms and still have engaging, attractive,high-quality graphics and animation. In developing for the iPad, by usingtemplates and themes, we can build in Storyline very quickly to meet smallbudgets and tight deadlines. If a client wants something a bit more clever,creative, or innovative, it’s got the power to do that as well, and we’veproduced some really nice stuff for those clients. You can deliver it ontomobile platforms, with some limitations. Articulate gives responsive supportand has a strong user community. I do think Storyline is less appropriate formobile phones.
There are other tools that we use as well. Certainly if we’rebuilding a native app we wouldn’t use Storyline. We use PhoneGap and HTML5 forthose. Captivate is a very good tool, and we use Lectora where the clients havewanted us to. We rather like iSpring for the PowerPoint conversions.
Bill Brandon: Peter, thank you for your time! I hope to see youat future eLearning Guild conferences!
Want more?
Mobile is no longer a matter about which organizations can“wait and see” if it has any real application to learning. Mobile learning isno longer a separate strategy, but one that integrates fully across thelearning ecosystem. As Peter Phillips points out, mobile presents a channel forreinforcing learning as a counter to forgetting. It offers a practical way todo diagnostic testing and, in conjunction with xAPI, a way to identify andaddress competency gaps. Mobile technology turns user-generated content intocollaborative learning and performance support. At The eLearning Guild’s mLearnCon Mobile Learning Conference & Expo 2014 in San Diego, June 24 – 26, youcan see actual examples of these applications and more, learn from mLearning experts,and talk to developers and colleagues who are successfully implementing mobilelearning. Find new directions. Understand new possibilities. Join us in SanDiego.
