Have you ever tested spaghetti to see if it’s cooked by throwing it against a wall? That’s how too many organizations now approach their training programs—throwing standalone eLearning or face-to-face courses at their staff, hoping the learning will stick. There are things we can do to increase the odds of making learning stick by augmenting standalone courses. Many of these strategies are easy to implement and are very suited to mLearning approaches, giving us a whole new set of tools to improve the effectiveness of learning events.

Unlike instructor led training or eLearning, there are no industry-accepted standards for designing mobile learning. While some instructional designers have tried to adapt course-based teaching and exam-based assessment methods to mobile learning, they are often less than successful because they are not aligned with the unique performances of mobile devices, and the way people use them. Design thinking offers a way of solving this problem.

Instructional designers are increasingly faced with the challenge of building learning programs that are being accessed on different types of devices. Exporting a course in a way that makes it accessible on a mobile phone isn’t good enough. Our learning programs should adapt their content to work on the different types of devices being used to access it: PCs, tablets, and smartphones. That’s where responsive design comes in.

To enable a more “on-demand” (or “just-in-time”) approach to performance improvement, organizations are moving away from relying completely on formal learning models to an informal approach, where people can quickly access information when, where, and how they need it. Learning strategies are evolving, with a focus on opportunities to move away from traditional LMS-centric, push, methodologies toward smaller learning modules and flexible pull approaches.

Determining if and how mLearning fits into a learning strategy is complicated. The temptation is to adopt mLearning because it’s the latest and greatest panacea to solve all learning woes. Much like eLearning was positioned as displacing classroom learning at its height, so mLearning is viewed by many as the golden child. Learning professionals also face the pressure of having to establish return on investment for an unproven strategy with significant up-front investments.

Mobile removes the barriers that historically have bound learning to prescribed times and places. The need to learn has become more urgent and opportunities for learners to interact with content often materialize in unexpected, uncontrolled, and unstructured environments. The burden of technology is to deliver content in a manner that meets contemporary learning requirements.

Many large enterprise and government customers use Motorola mobile devices for their employees, and they require the security to control any internet access or application downloads. We wanted to give the end-users access to their documentation in the field when they required it at the moment of need. Off the shelf reader products could not be adjusted to meet our needs or integrated with other software with the flexibility for these requirements.

There are many different considerations that contribute to mobile learning design. Even the strongest designer of desktop learning programs can struggle with a transition to building mobile solutions. Too often, organizations struggle with trying to find their own way during their early mLearning projects.

Training and content development departments are tasked with developing mobile learning content very rapidly and very cost effectively. This makes mobile projects challenging and represents a problem that will only get worse as technology continues to advance. Many people have not thought about how to utilize off-shore vendors to augment their process and team to assist in creating mobile courses.

How often has someone approached you and asked something like, “How much would it cost to build an online course?” or “How much does it cost to build a mobile app?” These questions are very hard to answer and change based on each project, client, and scenario. However, there are some guidelines that can help lead you through this process.

Any time you’re in a meeting, class, or at a conference and look around the room you’re likely to see a number of people seemingly paying more attention to their mobile phones than to the topic at hand. These devices are not going away. The challenge we now face is keeping our face-to-face audiences engaged while competing with the myriad of mobile devices. The solution to this challenge is to leverage the devices themselves.

iPads are used in schools, universities, and businesses all over the world. Despite being a mainstream device, many individuals and organizations are still reluctant to use iPads for learning and performance support. Most of the hesitancy comes from ignorance and the belief that developing learning content for iPads is extremely challenging and expensive.