Recent investigations questioning the potentially preventable nature of fatalities in Iraq and Afghanistan make combat lifesaving an even more critical area of focus in training and developing the future leaders of the military. Because soldiers are always on the move, mobile devices can play a big part in supporting their training. 

As the use of mobile devices is increasing, individuals have access to information anytime and anywhere to perform authentic activities in the context of learning. This provides the opportunity to bring education to any location, without the need to physically move to an academic institution or training facility.

Tracking the learning experience in typical eLearning scenarios is one thing, but how do you track the learning experiences of students scattered throughout a museum for their science field trip? Personalized learning is a growing interest in the workplace, but an understanding of the technology and path to get there is lacking. What are needed are examples of personalized learning in practice.

So, you think you want gamified mobile learning? You’re not alone. By some projections, the market for gamified mLearning applications will reach $2.3 billion by 2017, spurred on by an increase in the use of mobile devices and bring-your-own-device (BYOD) approaches. Your learners are already turning to mobile, and they’re expecting more engaging learning. But where do you start?

The federal government faces numerous circumstances that make adopting and offering mLearning, training, and performance solutions challenging. There are also expectations that government products should be made available to the public. In light of that, the Advanced Distributed Learning (ADL) initiative, a Department of Defense initiative focused on furthering distributed and remote learning, training, and performance support in government and in civil society, will provide an overview of various mLearning projects and their open source products.

When you launch an mLearning project for the first time, you start with a plan and several expectations on how things will proceed during implementation. Many learning professionals new to mobile are surprised to discover that their expectations for a mobile project are not in line with the expectations of their audience.

It isn’t enough to build performance support solutions that are instructionally and technologically sound. Motivation and engagement are essential to ensure actual organizational impact. Engagement and creativity can be engineered and trained. They can also be incorporated into the actual design of learning and performance solutions. 

Of course, all employees want learning at the moment of need on their mobile devices. What they want to know, when they want to know it, and how they choose to learn it: Just-in-time learning is not only what employees expect, but also a proven model to increase business outcomes. You may want to provide performance support tools; however, gaining executive support, funding, IT support, and so forth, can be challenging. A performance support model requires changing the conversation with all the stakeholders.

Visuals are an important part of eLearning, and this importance and challenge only increases when you are working on the smaller screens of mobile devices. Understanding how to tweak your visuals to work better in a mobile environment can take your mLearning projects to greater heights.