Video is rapidly becoming one of the most popular media formats for learning. However, many organizations struggle when it comes to distributing video for and to mobile devices. Some of the challenges that organizations developing mobile-ready video for the frst time encounter include bandwidth, closed captioning, tracking, and organization of content.

Today more people have mobile access than have safe drinking water and electricity. There are now as many mobile subscribers as there are people on Earth. Gartner predicted that there will be close to 1 billion smartphones sold in 2013. Despite the rapid consumer adoption of ever-advancing mobile technologies, many organizations still struggle with adding mobile to their learning strategy. As learning professionals, we will have to adopt new strategies and learn new skills in order to support workers in an increasingly mobile-first world.

Mobile has moved from an alternative delivery option to a mission imperative as companies seek ways to reach out and connect with their workers, partners, and customers through their omnipresent handsets and tablets. Accelerating learning delivery and increasing organizational performance have near universal appeal for companies of all sizes wanting to leverage a better informed, educated, and engaged audience through the many affordances mobile tools and technologies thus creating leverage.

Some eLearning tools work great for desktop delivery, while others are geared more towards delivering to mobile devices. Then there are those tools that do a pretty good job of delivering to both desktop and mobile. It’s become increasingly challenging for organizations to know which tools really work well for developing for mobile, and which tools just claim that they do.

It’s been more than 20 years since Gloria Gery published her pioneering work, and still the promise of real-time performance support remains elusive. What opportunities do trainers now have to help employees improve skills while doing real tasks on the job? When is it appropriate to use mobile devices and when isn’t it? What new strategies are needed when developing mobile learning as performance support?

Apple has recently introduced support for indoor positioning via iBeacon (aka Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE)). Unlike GPS, iBeacon has much lower power consumption as well as being much more accurate in detecting and connecting to nearby devices, particularly indoors. iBeacons are poised to transform how retailers connect with people indoors. They also hold great potentional in their ability to deliver highly-customized, location-based learning performance materials in real-time.

Selecting and purchasing mLearning technology to enhance classroom learning is getting more difficult as options proliferate. Tactical decisions today can have long-term consequences for near-term budgets, mid-term learning, and long-term lifecycle support. You need a way to sort through all the options, limits, and restrictions based on various use-cases and learner needs.

Organizational learning infrastructures are constantly evolving, and mobile technology is now at the forefront of the new learning environment. Mobile technology provides the platform to provide informative and useful learning content to learners whenever and wherever they need or want it. Although the industry continues to stir with talk about mobile technology and the benefits it can provide to learning and development, CLOs have been slow to adopt mobile as a learning strategy. How do you best optimize mobile technology and ubiquitous connectivity for learning opportunities that have a positive impact on business performance?

The social-service workforce in Scotland is around 192,000 employees. Most of the workers are community based and have a broad range of educational backgrounds. Its learning and development group faces logistical and financial challenges due to the economic climate and the bugetary impact when employees are brought to central locations for learning. Retention from these face-to-face learning events is marginal at best.

Everyone seems to have an app these days. Many organizations are interested in developing an app, but do not have an understanding of what such a project entails. Before you spend time and money creating an app, it’s important to become familiar with terms, resources, and app-user behaviors.

Most of the standard players used in eLearning are optimized for display on a desktop or laptop computer. When creating a course for mobile, certain elements that work well for the desktop are far from perfect on a phone or an iPad. Designers and developers need to adjust their standard practices to work better in a mobile environment.

Many organizations want to increase their deployment of performance-support (PS) programs, but are struggling to find a way to do so with a limited budget. You don’t need to spend lots of money on design and development tools for effective performance-support content. Performance support does not always need to be a product from a vendor; you can quite effectively create and deliver performance-support content using your existing software or free online tools.