The way consumers buy cars is changing. Customers are now far better informed prior to entering a dealership, and the rise of the use of the Internet and mobile browsing is a major factor in this change. There is often a disconnect between the high-tech customer’s online browsing experience and the traditional in-dealership buying experience in which sales occur right by the vehicle itself. Jaguar Land Rover decided to leverage mobile technology as a means to address this challenge.

In order to develop a learning strategy that responds to the rapidly evolving world, learning professionals need to look at the business environment differently. On the one hand, the traditional business needs of the organization will continue to be critical and must be served. On the other hand, the next generation of learning strategies must place equal importance on the actual performance and learning needs of employees. Future learning strategies will look different, be delivered differently, and be led by a new breed of learning professional.

The space restrictions on mobile devices and the increasing demand for translated content by global users makes every word we put on a screen count. Choosing the wrong words can define the difference between a successful product and a failure.

mLearning is about much more than just mobile technology. mLearning is a different experience than desktop-based eLearning, coming with its own unique set of design considerations and challenges. Organizations considering making the move to mobile need to understand the challenges of creating content for mobile devices if they want their mobile learning strategy to be successful.

Citrix leverages a DITA-based solution for mobile learning that rapidly adapts to changing business, technology, and customer requirements. We want to ensure our source content is future-proofed against changes in delivery technologies in order to avoid vendor lock-in and retain tight control of the types of activities we include in training and how we present them to learners. It was also important that we minimize code maintenance and automate aspects of quality assurance by mining our content as data for metrics related to language and engagement.

There’s a great deal of discussion about HTML5 and how it is changing the future of the web. While there is tremendous potential in place, there is still much confusion about what its impact is on technology-based learning, and what steps learning professionals should be taking to develop specifically for HTML5.

Learning from the lessons of the past is critical in order to make the future better. This truth of life also applies to the world of mobile learning. There have been a large number of organizations that have gone down the mLearning path and an enormous amount of resources generated from lessons learned. There’s great potential to learn from the lessons shared in this mountain of data, if we have the tools and capabilities with which to analyze it.

One of TELUS’ key goals is to have a majority of its workforce work in a flexible mobile work environment. Learning strategies had to adapt to this goal. Learning could no longer simply be available on one’s laptop or in a face-to-face class. Our learning strategy had to be enhanced and updated to accommodate our growing mobile workforce.

In today’s fast-moving world it is increasingly difficult for individuals to allocate time to a long-duration learning event. In fact, the amount of time learners can allocate and maintain attention to a single learning event seems to shrink all the time. More and more, learning professionals are expected to deliver solutions that are minimally disruptive to work while still providing the support needed for performance.

Mobile learning is about more than technology. Too often organizations simply move bad practice to new technology. Before we step forward and look at the next best-technology or coolest new gadget in our field we need to step back to basics and consider our design. Before organizations can make the move to mobile, they need to ensure they have strong visual-design practices that work for myriad devices and audiences.

From the first desktop PCs to today’s cutting-edge smartphones, technology has a history of fundamentally changing the expectations of learning and development programs. We are now on the cusp of another technological advance, one that will once again change some of our definitions and how we address performance issues: wearable technology. This technology will come in various forms, but the one that is blazing the path is Google Glass.

When building web or native applications, it can be daunting trying to learn new coding languages for various platforms. Even if you are just targeting web applications, there is still a lot of CSS to get the HTML to look good on both phones and tablets. To get the effect you want you may have to spend hours learning CSS, JavaScript, and HTML. The integration with jQuery Mobile has been a lifesaver for the non-techie or even the techie that wants to get the task done quickly and efficiently.

Managing your mLearning development efforts is challenging. It’s easier to do so with project management software or tools, but they can be very expensive. Understanding which tools are available and which features are needed to manage your mLearning projects can help you pick the right project management tool at the right price.

In a fast-paced environment with lots of information flying at learners, it’s difficult to retain information. Forgetting often begins as soon as learning ends, leaving you hoping that the learner retains as much as they can. Learning professionals need to find ways to bridge this gap, and mobile technology provides us with an opportunity to do so.

A common business problem is that employees want to advance their career, but they often build a plan that is focused on promotions. They want to move up but do not consider lateral moves or moves outside their profession or outside their function. Beyond that, employees need the knowledge, tools, and resources to prepare for career change opportunities. Cisco has addressed this problem by constructing a mobile solution that enables employees to explore careers based on a career lattice approach.

It hasn’t been that long since we only worried about testing online training lessons on Internet Explorer and Netscape. Those days are long gone. Today we face a myriad of testing challenges due to the vast number of devices and operating systems that are being used by our learners. Developing and testing our applications to ensure that they will work for everyone is an increasingly challenging part of an organizational learning strategy.

The Arizona Center for Integrative Medicine has a custom LMS to deliver our online medical education offerings. This platform has been mostly adequate for about five years, but our offerings have expanded to new programs with many more learners in many different contexts. These learners want and often need to use tablets and other mobile devices to access and complete curriculum. The Arizona Center for Integrative Medicine learning platform needed a more flexible mobile strategy that could scale to multiple devices.

Instructional designers are increasingly faced with projects that have a mobile component. In many cases the projects are presented before the design team has the requisite knowledge and skills to design mobile learning. In situations like this, it’s challenging for organizations and professionals to know where to begin.

Learning is often built on technology, taking place in different forms and locations such as eLearning, mLearning, and social media. What if learning, resources, mentorship, and performance support strategies could all be found in one place, when your employees needed them? That is the ideal scenario, and one that would provide specific measurements for observable data outcomes.

The increase in mobile usage has led to an expectation in consumers to have a seamless experience across all devices. This creates challenges for designers, who now need to design content that works not only on desktops, smartphones, and tablets, but on devices with varying screen sizes within each category. Responsive design is a great solution to the fragmentation of devices across smartphones, tablet, desktop, and more.

Mobile is the new way of learning. Learners want it, and companies want to provide it. However, app development can be expensive, especially if you are starting from a mostly print or standard eLearning model of training. Finding a way to give learners and organizations the mobile learning they want without breaking the bank is a must in today’s training market, especially for companies with populations of mobile learners (e.g., sales).

Like many organizations, Goodwill is facing the challenge of supporting a large mobile workforce. It has over 2,700 retail stores staffed with sales associates and processing staff. There is usually no more than one computer in any single location that is available for training. Due to the premium placed upon retail floor space, expanding the desktop-based PCs that are available is prohibitive. This created a difficult challenge to provide training, share knowledge, and disseminate/gather information for the workforce.

There are a great number of tools available to use for building mobile learning. The challenge with many of these tools is that they use legacy functionalities and a fixed canvas that do not effectively support the ultimate goal of designing device-agnostic experiences. These tools often trap us in PC-based paradigms that have been used for decades to design static content and now fall short of designing more flexible content that can better respond to the end-users needs on and beyond the desktop.

Most instructional designers found their way to their role by accident, via a combination of circumstance and subject matter expertise. This is why many IDs share the challenge of “learning as we go” rather than receiving formal training and education before starting a job. This challenge is further complicated by the need to add mobile learning design to our skill sets.