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. 

The coming explosion of the Internet of Things (IoT) will impact almost every aspect of human life. The integration of different sensors and wearable devices will play a key role in addressing some key challenges associated with mobile learning. However, to take advantage of these opportunities, it is important for organizations to understand the ways of bringing standards from both the IoT and mLearning worlds together, to enhance the overall learning experience.

Clients often ask for mobile learning solutions without considering whether mobile learning is the best fit for the business, instructional needs, and technology constraints. For a mobile project to be successful, instructional designers and managers need to be grounded in the fundamentals of mobile learning strategy. What questions should you ask when determining whether a mobile solution is the best fit? How do you educate your clients on the advantages and disadvantages of mobile learning?

When thinking about training and performance support, it should not be an either /or proposition. The most effective mobile learning solutions should provide ways to support both! During the Mobile Training Implementation Framework (MoTIF) research project, ADL collected data and feedback from many mLearning and performance support experts. One of the tools developed as part of this effort is a new reference model for mLearning design.

Learning is more than just the distribution of information. Motivation, memorability, and personal meaning should be required ingredients for a successful learning moment. An additional ingredient required for mobile learning is the fidelity of interface design. Touch-based designs can help, but as a mobile designer, you are pitted against the high-fidelity game and social media apps that are just a button away.

As more and more people are adopting agile-based development methods, the single biggest thing TorranceLearning hears is, “I’ve got to get my team/clients/boss/SMEs on board with this, or it will fail miserably.” You do need to get your team, your clients (internal and external), your boss, and your SMEs on board with this—because if you do not, then yes, it is likely to fail miserably. Agile is more than a project management method. It is a culture.

Mobile learning isn’t just for re-packaging eLearning. It is about going to where the learner is ... out in the real world, beyond the computer. The tried and true method for reaching people in the real world has been the QR code, but we’ve only begun to scratch the surface of what can be done with this simple tool. Because it can open any content, the QR code affords the designer an opportunity to make a lot of things happen for the learning experience.

The world of training and development has changed. Today’s technologies provide dozens of new affordances that can be used in learning and development that were simply not available in the days of training being done in classrooms with instructors and three-ring binders. But making sense of these new affordances, and the opportunities they provide, can be a challenge.

One of the most popular authoring tools in use today is Articulate Storyline. As more organizations make the move to mobile, the need to find ways to use Storyline for mobile projects increases. But where do you start? 

There is a frustration on the part of many HTML designers and instructional designers. While they would love to be able to place content directly on an iPhone or iPad as a native app, they soon realize that a solid knowledge of Xcode is required. If you want a native experience without having to learn iOS, Android, and BlackBerry (soon Windows 8) native development, then Titanium is the perfect solution.

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. 

When it comes to mobile learning, there are a number of challenges learning and development practitioners experience. It is necessary to add context to mobile learning experiences, including using mobile devices for performance support. It is also necessary to understand the possibilities posed by new technologies. Thankfully, you can learn much of this by looking at the examples provided by organizations that have already walked this path.

Mobile devices offer an enticing array of opportunities for learning and development, so much so it seems as if it’s a “no-brainer” for training departments to add mLearning. But there are four key issues that should be taken into consideration before just jumping into mLearning: technology, people, content, and business value. All of these can have a critical impact on the potential success of any plan to add mLearning to an organization’s overall training and development program.

In today’s mobile world where learners may be accessing learning solutions on many different devices and screen sizes, it’s challenging for instructional designers to “storyboard” a solution that works universally. Many may struggle to determine if they need to design three totally unique solutions: one for phones, one for tablets and one for desktops and laptops. Is storyboarding even feasible in this situation? 

The mobile workforce will reach 1.3 billion in 2015, and people will have an average of 50 connected devices by 2020; meanwhile, mobile in the enterprise continues to lag. While 71 percent of senior IT leaders see mobile as strategic or transformational, only 18 percent today have a comprehensive mobile strategy.

It’s hard enough to get learners to engage with the content of your eLearning course. The issue is compounded even further when learners can’t figure out how to use the course or it’s too difficult to use on a mobile device. All too often, new eLearning designers put their focus solely into designing the learning content, while at the same time ignoring the interface it’s encapsulated in. This leads to confusion on the part of the learner and disrupts the learning process.

Trainers have all seen the “light come on” when participants really get a point from the training. The trainers wonder if they’ll remember it in a few days or weeks when they encounter a need for that knowledge. Over the years, trainers have all built job aids, tools, and refreshers, and provided follow-up coaching in person, online, and on the phone with varying degrees of success. Apps and mobile phones offer a new way for the participant to keep the knowledge close at hand.

Mobile is one of the biggest trends in workplace learning. But mobile what, exactly? Pinpointing exactly what mobile means in the context of your organization isn’t easy. You also need to answer the why of mobile. To do that, you need to view mobile in the context of all the current trends in workplace learning.

Classroom programs don’t often translate well online. As a result, people watching programs online are often bored and do other things while “watching” the programs. They use the programs as “background noise,” and as a result, do not learn the information presented. This problem increases as more organizations push content to mobile devices.

Learning does not happen by turning a page. Everyone has seen the Next button page-turning courses and realized that it does not work. However, building engaging content that is interactive and helps with training can be complex. Most designers do not have the technical skills to build an interactive native application or an interactive book.

The DeMaND Project is a consortium project funded by the Trade Adjustment Assistance Community College and Career Training program that trains students for careers in skilled trades, including welding, construction, HVAC, electrical, CDL, and heavy equipment. The project works with students from areas with chronically high unemployment and generational poverty. Students have difficulty entering the workforce and retaining employment. The project needed a mechanism to help students learn about job opportunities and stay connected with their instructors and one another, and to support students toward employment.

Making the decision to add mobile technologies to your learning and performance strategy is one thing; making it happen is something else. One of the biggest challenges organizations run into once they make the decision to go mobile is choosing a tool to be used for mobile development. The mobile environment is very different than that of the desktop, and a tool that works in one space may not perform as well in another.

As iPads and mobile technology become more ingrained in all areas of our lives, we need to find ways to use the same tools in learning. But this shift can be extremely challenging for learning professionals and organizations to make.

You’re a top-performing company. You’ve started using a couple of mobile apps at work. How do you turn some inspired use of mobile into a broader strategy? One of the key components of this is creating an internal corporate ecosystem for mobile. So how can you get started? Should you build or buy? How do you navigate around issues with IT security and legal?

Compliance training is a universal issue and requirement for all types of organizations. It can be tricky to design and create compliance training that’s easy, available, and engaging to all learners, yet satisfies statutory legal and HR requirements. Traditional eLearning programs have gained an unfavorable reputation for being uninspiring and complex, stuck on a restricted platform such as desktop.

The instructional design process is iterative. Going from analysis with subject matter experts (SMEs) to design and back can consume precious time and resources. Developing learning materials away from the customer can sometimes yield surprises during pilot and deployment.

Onboarding of new employees to ensure they are prepared to perform is a critical undertaking for any organization. When the call is to effectively onboard temporary employees, a new wrinkle is added, as onboarding activities can take too much time in relation to the length of their contract.  

As more and more projects are being built to accommodate multiple devices, the need to prototype grows. Whether you are creating a new project, developing an app, or simply launching a new responsive course, prototyping can help you better understand what’s working and what needs to be changed. 

A killer app has been defined as any computer program that is so necessary or desirable that it proves the core value of some larger technology, such as computer hardware, a gaming console, software, or a programming language. Where is the killer app for massive open online courses (MOOCs)? Even though higher education is available for more learners now than ever before and at little or no cost, MOOCs and other innovative online formats for higher education are struggling with completion rates. Online engagement will continue to struggle unless purpose is addressed.  

Mobile devices and applications have finally worked their way into the learning landscape, enabling organizations of all sizes to leverage modern wireless wonders to deliver training, performance support, and business communications to their on-the-go workers. Great devices and rapid technology adoption don’t always outweigh the myriad challenges that hold back mLearning projects, from scaling from smaller pilots to larger implementations. Next-generation ecosystems require next-generation tools, approaches, and teams to ensure adoption, continued utilization, and success.

Developing mobile learning solutions can become complicated if you’re not careful. One wrong turn can leave you mired in extra work you didn’t anticipate. Sometimes this happens due to design decisions. In other cases, the problem stems from choosing the wrong tool, failing to set up templates properly, or any number of other issues.  

While widely used for performance support and learning outside the classroom, and increasingly within K-12 classroom-based environments, mobile devices have not been widely exploited for use in adult classrooms. Even though use cases are not always obvious, the affordances of mobile devices offer great opportunity for supplementing classroom-based learning.

A mobile device affords the ability for a personal experience, such as the apps one chooses, the way the device is organized, preferred media types, the means of communication, and more. People are used to customizing their devices to make their lives easier and to be more efficient. When it comes to training and improving performance, however, people are asking for the same customizability to personalize their learning experience to get exactly what they want/need, when they need it.

Raytheon Professional Services had as a client a global company that has a distributed workforce diagnosing and repairing technical equipment at their customers’ stores. The client wanted to provide a mobile solution to its workforce to allow them to improve upon their key business metrics.

Rent-A-Center has always prided itself on being a pioneer in the rent-to-own industry. In an effort maintain its competitive advantage and significantly increase its customer base, Rent-A-Center decided to occupy the smartphone space. This initiative would require an innovative and revolutionary training strategy to introduce this product line.

Instructional designers are constantly in the process of considering which tools to use in order to best meet the training and development needs of their clients, customers, or learners. Without carefully reviewing the affordances of technologies, instructional design professionals could negatively impact the effectiveness of their educational intervention, lose time, or create a poor design. 

You’ve made a great eLearning course designed to be delivered over your intranet or the Internet. Part of it uses Flash, and your learners use a lot of devices that won’t display Flash. You need to rebuild the Flash parts using HTML5-compliant animations. How do you build a responsive site that all devices, from desktop and laptop computers to tablets and smartphones, can use? 

Global eLearning is a growth market, driven by its benefits of cost reduction, flexibility, and operational ease of use. The creation of a truly global training strategy requires synergy between several areas of expertise. You've invested heavily in instructional design and recruited the best mobile app developers. Now you’ve created a powerful product and you want to offer it across the world in other languages.

How can you prepare for tomorrow when you spend so much of today addressing the needs of yesterday? Mobile technology continues to evolve at a rapid pace. Historically, the technologies themselves have always preceded L&D by two to four years. This is the time it takes for solid user trialing, new vendor products, and widespread platform adoption. Unfortunately, this lack of forward visibility makes it challenging to keep up with learner expectations and map out future learning technology strategies.

The modern learner complains that they don’t have enough time to do their job, let alone make time for formal training. Many workers are developing their skills and knowledge one problem at a time. They are untethered, empowered, and looking for on-demand access to learning—how do we get them the content they are demanding? 

Accessing learning or performance support assets when on the move is challenging to the learner as well as the expert or provider. We are all moving around the office, complex, country, or world. We need to access information or guidance exactly when needed without leaving our location or process. However, we also need to provide or push information when learners need it without even knowing they do. The speed of business dictates our learning needs, and these days the need for speed is overwhelming.

In recent mobile learning research, college-bound students initially showed a preference for learning environmental science in the classroom through lecture or reading assignments rather than through hands-on learning activities. Though students had access to mobile technologies, they used the mobile technologies for classwork the same way they could use a desktop: searching and reading electronic documents. The classroom teacher and researcher intended to leverage mobile learning technologies to break out of this mold, helping students engage the subject of environmental science first-hand through using mobile tools in the natural environment.

The use of personal mobile devices is a rapidly growing trend in clinical practice and in nursing education. Recent years have seen an increase in the use of personal digital devices (PDDs) by healthcare professionals as well as by the general public. In addition to being small and easy to carry, these technologies combine communications and computing abilities, facilitating mobility as well as information retrieval at the point of care.

More and more companies are creating mobile strategies and mobile applications to integrate with their existing businesses. Training groups are being tasked with getting users up-to-speed on mobile applications and are facing unique challenges with incorporating mobile devices and applications into the traditional classroom setting.

In the transportation industry, many pieces of outdated equipment are being replaced with new, more efficient models. Changes like this can be very disruptive to affected workers. In today’s digital world this problem is becoming ever more common as mobile technologies move processes from levers and handles to buttons and touch screens.

Although microlearning videos are often described as less boring and tedious than their longer workplace training counterparts, brevity alone does not accomplish this. The key is to begin with really good scripts that spell out precisely what you plan to produce, including visuals, narration, dialogue, action, and more. They are essentially design documents with content rolled into one. 

Two of the most popular technologies used to engage learners today are video and mobile. Videos are becoming increasingly interactive—even on mobile devices—but developing these videos can be complex. Where does an organization start?