The introduction of new technologies has continuously impacted personal and professional learning. Individuals have used desktops, smartphones, tablets, and other technologies to enhance the way they learn, and organizations have struggled to keep up with the changes. Organizations desiring to make the move to mLearning often hit roadblocks, and find it challenging to find a place and meaning for mobile learning.

Blended mobile learning should be an experience that holds value for both training and performance support. The growing usage of tablets and mobile apps provides an opportunity to combine more traditional eLearning with user-friendly mobile applications that can also capture real-time data to enhance the overall instructional content. Pairing performance support apps with learning materials ensures that content delivered in a training session stays relevant to the user on the job.        

There are close to a dozen different iOS devices and over 4,200 different Android devices on the market. Designing your content for these different devices is challenging. When considering building training material for mobile devices, you may wonder if it’s best to build a native application or a web application. It’s important to know the advantages and disadvantages of both native and web training applications, and to understand the significant differences between developing for mobile as compared to a traditional desktop.

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.

There are so many variables to consider when L&D professionals or learning vendors try to decide how to best use mobile methods to boost the success of their learning initiatives. One critical element is understanding how to balance the amount of content and functionality you should include. Our recent experiences with testing several apps over the last three years has led us to some findings that will shape the role of how the Ken Blanchard Companies will use mobile tools and materials going forward.

The use of smart phones, tablets, and the apps they utilize has grown quickly in the corporate space. These devices provide educators and developers with an exciting new way of reaching audiences, but the skills needed to develop mobile-learning programs are very different from those for desktop-based eLearning. How much knowledge and expertise is required to develop mLearning?

Mobile technology is a powerful tool to support learning. Its ubiquitous nature offers great potential in terms of accessibility, connectivity, and collaboration, its ability to support blended face-to-face and online learning experiences, and its ability to aid differentiation to meet learning needs. But using mobile devices for learning also comes laden with complex problems. These problems may revolve around a lack of knowledge or skills to overcome technical barriers, implement mobile devices for teaching and learning purposes, or adapt content to a mobile learning environment.

There is a popular myth in our industry: that courses do not belong on a mobile phone and that only performance support can be successfully delivered to mobile. This session will disprove this popular belief.

From the smartphone in your hand to the 27-inch screen on your desk to the giant television on your wall, the range of ways to access the Internet just keeps growing and growing. This presents a huge challenge for training departments charged with cost-effectively and efficiently developing eLearning content for their organizations. What devices should they design for? How many versions of a course do they need? Do they sacrifice one type of delivery for another?

The process of getting newly hired salespeople trained and actively selling products is a key concern for most businesses. Organizations typically throw new hires into a classroom for a week or two, and then send them on their way with a couple of three-ring binders with little or no follow-up. Grainger was seeking faster and more innovative ways to make our new hires successful while recognizing that people learn better over time.

It’s increasingly difficult for administrators and developers to cope with the speed at which technological devices enter the market and the pockets of learners. eLearning professionals are faced with the challenge of finding the best response to internal or external demands for content delivery in the latest device, while still demonstrating sound pedagogy/andragogy, learning outcomes, and fiscal responsibility. And it’s only going to get more challenging in the future.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.