Harness Mobile Learning With eFrontPro
"You don’t need a weatherman to tell you which way the wind blows", Nobel-winning songwriter Bob Dylan once sang. And you sure don’t need an expert to tell you that IT today is all about mobile devices and mobile applications.
We are in the so-called post-PC era, not because PCs became obsolete (they are powerful and necessary tools for many serious tasks), but because we are already spending more time staring at our smartphones than we do in front of our laptops.
This is increasingly the case for many enterprise applications too. Sure, your corporate accountant will still do your books in Excel, but busy executives and office workers are relying more often on their mobile devices to manage their workload. Heck, today even IBM, Microsoft, SAP, Salesforce, and Oracle are investing in mobile apps for the enterprise.
The Freedom To Move
Among the many uses of mobile devices for the enterprise, talent development and employee training are among the most obvious fits, provided, of course, that you have a capable, mobile friendly Learning and Talent Development Platform, such as eFrontPro.
Mobile learning (or mLearning, according to industry buzzword makers), extends online learning's major feature, the ability to study from wherever you find a PC and an internet connection, and turns it into the ability to study at any time and from literally any place. No desk- or laptop required -- just your smartphone, which you always carry with you anyway. Heck, eFrontPro, with its support for offline learning, will also let you study without even an internet connection.
But there’s also another aspect to mobile learning besides learning on the go: It’s learning "in the small" -- that is, the ability to receive small chunks information, which can be easily digested and doesn’t require much time to go through (so that you also study whenever you have a few minutes available).
This is called microlearning and eFrontPro offers that too, giving you all the tools to break down your course content into smaller units, including small tests and assessments that draw from a pool of re-usable questions, and to give users the option to study on their mobile devices.
eFrontPro For Android
The only small niggle in eFrontPro’s mobile story was that, until now at least, there wasn’t a dedicated native application to access eFrontPro on your smartphone.
Instead, users were directed to eFrontPro’s mobile web app, which, while a fine solution, with a responsive mobile-friendly UI that gave the users full access to their eFrontPro account, wasn’t totally optimized for mobile use.
This all changes with the introduction of eFrontPro for Android, a fully native eFrontPro client application that’s optimized for mobile use.
Going native allows us several things that are either not possible or not as easy in a mobile web application. First, it gives the opportunity to work closer to the "metal", and make your mobile eFrontPro experience more responsive. Second, it allows eFrontPro to take full advantage of the underlying platforms APIs, including being able to run in the background and to integrate even better with your other apps.
It also gave the eFrontPro development team an opportunity to rethink how a mobile application is used and how it would work best, and optimize and streamline the user interface to serve as a distraction-free canvas for microlearning and micro-certifications.
Among other things, the eFrontPro for Android mobile application supports transparent switching between it and the web portal (allowing learners to start studying on the web and resume on their smartphone, and vice versa), offline studying (with automatic progress synchronization to the eFrontPro server when the learner is back online), and all the familiar assessment options, question types, and unit and course completion rules that the eFrontPro web portal offers.
Besides the familiar learning and assessment features, the eFrontPro mobile application offers users access to their profile information, including their full gamification progress, and lets users belonging to a specific Branch in the web portal to connect directly to their respective Branch on the mobile app as well.
You Can Have It Both Ways
One important point to keep in mind is that eFrontPro (the web-based Learning and Talent Development Platform) and eFrontPro for Android (the mobile client) were designed to work together, give access to the same set of courses, and complement each other in functionality.
This allows your learners to use the web version (on their PC or laptop) when they have time to study in detail and go through more material, while simultaneously taking advantage of the eFrontPro mobile client when they are on the go (commuting, flying, relaxing on the sofa, etc.).
Easy Mobile Learning With eFrontPro
All in all, the eFrontPro a mobile application is a streamlined tool aiming to give users enhanced access to the most important talent development and eLearning features of their eFrontPro portal account, but with extra emphasis on offering a clean and distraction-free environment for mobile learning and micro learning.
If you are as excited to try out the new release as we were, then you would be pleased to know that eFrontPro for Android has already been made available on the Google Play Store and can be downloaded and used free of charge (provided that you’ve got an eFrontPro portal account).