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.