The process of getting online learning from planning to posting can be arduous, time- and resource-consuming, and require hundreds of hand-offs between team members. Every measure must be taken to expedite each step along the way in order to make online learning relevant and timely to learners and therefore provide organizational benefits equal to costs. Adding mobile deployment to this equation only further complicates it.

Grainger was seeking a way to get a safety message to customers via our sales force without the training impacting face time. This created the challenge to train 3,000+ salespeople to enhance their selling approach and deliver this new message to thousands of customers in a consistent fashion, in a compressed time frame, and with limited time away from selling. To accomplish this, we needed to deploy a next generation blended learning program delivered just-in-time to an on-the-go workforce.

Recent studies in the neuroscience of emotions reveal that there are connections between cognitive and emotional functions. In other words, training programs are more successful when they take into consideration the relationship between learning and emotions. Effective training and development changes the brain, and mobile training content needs to be inclusive of what is actually required for this change to occur. Mobile learning programs will be more effective, efficient, and successful when engaging, experiential brain-based activities are included.

So you’ve started your journey into building learning experiences, no matter the screen size. You’ve already built and feel confident about your eLearning, large-screen digital learning, and learning objects. However, your brand is critically important, so how do you create a consistent look, feel, and experience for learners across your entire learning ecosystem?

The SCORM specification is now over 10 years old and is showing its age. The need for mobile training content, distributed e-learning, and flexible data tracking are just some of the elements missing from SCORM. The Experience API (xAPI) has laid the foundation for a new generation of SCORM. Now that ADL has adopted the CMI-5 specification, it is clear that CMI-5 is the solution to many of SCORM's problems. 

While the popularity of mLearning has been growing, supports are needed to help trainers and educators discover apps and seamlessly integrate them into their curriculum and LMSs. At the same time, developers might find it problematic to use technologies like the xAPI due to the overhead required to adopt it in their apps and LMS systems.

For most organizations, starting to explore adding mobile to an organizational learning strategy can be confusing. Some organizations see mobile learning as nothing more than HTML5. Some instructional designers think mobile learning is a concern only for developers. Still other organizations think mobile is nothing more than a different publishing option from an authoring tool. It’s only when you start walking down the path that you realize just how wrong those assumptions, and countless others, truly are.

Building a native HTML5 mobile game can take very complex code to build. This is especially challenging if you want to add elements like flex and responsive layouts, natural motion that interacts with user actions and the device’s accelerometer, take user input, and more. While you may wish to build this type of interactive learning experience, you may not always have the resources, development team, or knowledge to build these types of games.

Responsive and adaptive designs are extremely popular in the world of mobile learning, but they are also very commonly misunderstood concepts. Today’s mobile learning professionals need to understand what responsive and adaptive designs really are in order to plan and implement them effectively with HTML5-based solutions.

The Experience API (xAPI) has been in production for more than a year now, and it is becoming more important for training and development teams to learn the ABCs of this important new set of technologies and the approaches to learning tracking and reporting they provide. Heed the call of that morning school bell, and come ready to learn your ABCs.

Most of the discussions around mobile learning are about how to develop for mobile. In the rush to go mobile, we’re skipping a step—deciding if we even should go mobile. So much mobile training is developed that isn’t needed in the first place, or that won’t solve a business need or fill a performance gap.

For instructional designers who need to create interactive content that can be consumed across a variety of devices, especially mobile, the availability of suitable technologies proves problematic. Many educational technologies have a tendency to be overly simplistic and lack the robustness found in their commercial counterparts. But despite the simplicity of these tools, faculty often tends to revert to novice status when interacting with technology. 

Attacks against enterprises and their technology vendors are facilitated by the current rapid adoption of embedded systems, cloud solutions, and web-based platforms. These attacks often undermine the very monetization, scalability, and user experience goals for which these systems were designed and deployed. As malicious hackers advance their techniques at a staggering pace, often rendering current defense tactics obsolete, so too must security practitioners obsess over deploying progressive techniques.

Next generation visualization devices like Oculus Rift and Google Glass are changing the ways people learn. They will also change the ways we train in the eLearning industry with an emphasis on using mobile gamification, augmented reality, and electronic procedures across all mobile platforms.

Many people today view mobile phones as more important than their toothbrush or deodorant. Some statistics estimate that people reach for their phones more than 150 times per day. This new world order requires massive changes from both enterprises and the learning organizations that support them.

Now that mobile learning development is becoming more accessible to enterprise learning professionals, use cases are more common. Learning and development departments are deploying mLearning at an increasingly greater rate so they can reach their audiences with “just-in-time, just enough, and just for me” training deliverables. With the new wave of mobile learning, another issue has surfaced that really is not so new: Because mLearning introduces many unique aspects of context, usability, and design, there are now many instances of poor user experience (UX).

No training is more important than for those with the lives of others in their hands. Increasingly, continuing education courses are being offered to medical professionals and others in mission-critical roles online and through mobile devices. The convenience of mobile instruction is undeniable, but are learners retaining information as readily as they would through a desktop browser or in-person?

You’re all excited about the promise of an Experience API-enabled world, but you’ve still got a learning management system (LMS) and a whole host of SCORM-based courses. Now what? In most cases, you’ll need to manage the transition—read: republish your library for the Experience API (xAPI)—over the months and years to come. But what if you could get the most out of both an LMS and a learning record store (LRS) at the same time as you move to your next-generation learning-and-performance infrastructure?

Instructional designers tend to define what is possible by the limitations of our chosen authoring tools. We remove ideas like responsive courses from consideration because our authoring tool does not support the capability. Sometimes common modern web practices don’t always transfer over to eLearning authoring tools until it is too late. Why not take control over what you can do in your eLearning authoring by building it yourself?

Building learning programs can be a complex endeavor, especially in a multi-device environment. Simply porting eLearning and traditional face-to-face experiences to mobile often isn’t a viable solution. There are other ways to effectively facilitate mobile learning. 

“There’s an app for that.” We hear this all too often and there’s definitely some truth in this statement. So how does this impact learning as a whole? We have to go beyond responsive design and develop learning that matches the way the learner uses their device, whether that’s at a desktop, tablet, or smartphone. Developing responsive content can be time-consuming and expensive.

Current studies show that more than five billion people will be using mobile devices by 2017, making smartphones and tablets more prevalent and accessible than desktop or laptop computers. Mobile learning has the ability to be a truly global solution for education delivery. Many companies who embraced the eLearning movement years ago are now facing new challenges in reaching mobile learners. 

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 many expect to serve as a quantum leap forward is Apple Watch. 

One of the most powerful catalysts to engagement is involving employees in the decision process when solving your organization’s most pressing challenges. By opening up these important conversations, employees feel as if they are an important part of the business and have contributed to the achievement of meaningful results. Mobile technology provides us with an excellent portal for engaging learners and having them co-create learning content.

When organizations make the move to mobile, one of the first barriers they encounter is how to handle all of their existing content. Many organizations have large amounts of legacy content that needs to be accessible on mobile devices. Just republishing for mobile without redesigning the content does not make an effective mobile learning experience.

Today, the concept of mobile is not reserved for a specific technology or for a select group of people. Mobility is now the norm for our work and our lives. In our business, mobile is much more than training on the go. But what role does mobile performance support play in the overall picture?

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.

We know that the workforce today is increasingly remote. Yet with all the support and dramatic early adoption for mobile learning, what we don’t yet know is how to either assess or measure mobile effectively, especially since it’s not as simple as applying the same success metrics from a traditional LMS to mobile. If you are considering a mobile learning strategy, how will you know if it’s working? And if you’re already deploying one, what triggers tell you if you need to change course?

Sales coaching is receiving a lot of attention these days, because research indicates that it can greatly increase revenue and reduce inefficiencies in the sales process. But sales coaching is about a lot more than just providing support and guidance to sales reps. There are strategies and frameworks required to achieve real success, and there is mobile technology available to help make it happen. All of this might seem overwhelming, but it does not have to be.

Location-based learning is not new. It aims to involve people with their local community as a primary resource for learning, and benefits them by focusing on problem-solving abilities and higher-level thinking skills. With the widespread availability of smartphones and tablets, location-based learning is massively extended by the integration of mobile technologies.

What is the business case for deploying content to mobile devices? Everyone knows that mobile learning can be used to deliver content no matter where learners are, enabling a far wider reach and greater access to learning than ever before. But time is just as important as place when it comes to offering content on smartphones and tablets. Integrating mobile into your learning strategy really can help learners reach competency faster, but what works best, and how do you make the case?

For many organizations, mobile learning has a limited outlook. They have taken the desktop eLearning paradigm and simply applied it to mobile technologies. But that view does not take into account the differences between mobile and desktop environments, nor does it take advantage of the uniqueness of the mobile platform.

It's all about flexibility. In this new age of eLearning, where our content is being accessed on all sorts of devices, our animations need to step up and be responsive.