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?