Spotting Mobile Learning Opportunities

How To Spot Mobile Learning Opportunities

The mobile learning explosion has tempted many organizations into simply making anything and everything available for mobile, whether it’s suitable or not.

This may be due to pressure from management and their desire to get everything on to mobile ‘now’. But making all your eLearning and other learning materials available on mobile devices is not always going to produce a desirable learning experience.

To help you understand how to produce the best mobile learning experiences for mobile devices, I’ve devised 4 categories.

1. Audience

What do mobile device users want and need? This sounds obvious but is often missed and training-pushed rather than requested. Make sure you know:

• How your learners work with mobile devices
  Are they ready to buy into mobile learning, is it the right time? Does your target market use mostly smartphones or tablets? (As this will affect your creative strategy). Do your groundwork, and start with a tightly targeted pilot.
• How your learners want to consume content
  Is your target market open to mobile learning? Find out by asking them if, how, and when they use their devices. Use this information to develop a concept and put it out for feedback.
• Your learners’ attitude to training
  Is it positive or negative? Additionally, do they understand the value of life-long learning? Would they regard mobile learning, often done away from work, as an imposition? If your consumers’ attitude to learning is negative, you will have to address this before moving forward with a mobile learning strategy.
• What your learners want to consume
  There’s no point simply dumping content on users. Any mobile learning roll-out will be more likely to be a success if you research what kind of content your users find interesting and useful and what they would see as training or performance support content.
• Your learner's age range
  As discussed by Marc Prensky in Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants (2001), not all of us were born in the 1980’s and not all of us are steeped in digital culture. Put simply, an older user base will need more hand-holding and more encouragement to deal with mobile learning, something which may be entirely new to them.

2. The Business

Having established what your learners need, you then need to see what the business they work in wants, needs, and does already.

• Business goals
  What is the business hoping to achieve with mobile learning, how to best get buy-in from your sponsor community? Establish the desired learning outcomes of the business. To get full buy-in, maybe start with an ‘easy win’, rolling out a mobile learning program, for example, to the sales department. There, users would already be used to working independently and remotely with mobile devices.
• Stay on budget
  Don’t go mad about your budget! Use it wisely, and create an intriguing, attractive, and successful pilot to breed more budget.
• Criteria for success
  Define a tight list of points by which the success of a project will be judged, make them achievable and realistic and simple to understand. Make sure all involved in the project know how they can contribute to achieving these criteria.
• The scope of mobile learning
  What is the scope of your new mobile learning project going to be? Don’t promise to move everything mobile, it won’t work. Instead, identify the most useful and mobile-adaptable elements; make the scope of your project ambitious but achievable.

3. Current Training

Examine current training programs to establish how mobile learning will fit in. It should add to and enhance the current program rather than duplicating it or replacing it.

• Moving current training to mobile learning
  Review your training curricula. What parts of it would be suited to moving to mobile learning? Is it aimed at an audience that may be better served by mobile learning, or would benefit from mobile device performance support?
• What learners think
  Review any user comments you may have regarding mobile learning; it may be that only you and the board are sold on the idea, in which case you may need to sell the idea to users.
• What to move to mobile learning
  Tying together the above 2 points, one of the factors in deciding what training is suitable to migrate to mobile learning should be what your consumers think should be available in that format. Discuss and consult.

4. Technology

Avoid basic traps here. Don’t come up with iOS solutions for an audience of Android users because that’s what the CEO wanted.

Make sure you know:

• The devices your audience has, and how they prefer to use them.
  This is an important point to understand as it will affect your design choices. For example, you may wish to use HTML5 content, but this is not going to work if you’re audience needs to access content offline, in which case you’ll need to look at App-based solutions.
• What devices and browsers are supported by your IT department.
  In the absence of an organization-wide Bring-Your-Own-Device (BYOD) standard, it’s important to liaise with your IT department to find out which devices they’re ready to support. If you don’t do this then, even by using standard options like HTML5, you’ll end up being bogged down by a host of compatibility issues. Get your IT people on board, ask their advice, and never assume compatibility; always test training content before rolling out.
• The potential for integrating mobile learning with your Learning Management System (LMS).
  This often requires a technical solution. If your LMS tracks user training to create management information reports, ensure that your mobile learning can update the LMS tracking system. Problems can arise here with offline training as the LMS can’t track the progress of people who are signed on. Even with a SCORM-compliant LMS, you may need to look at solutions conforming to the experience API standard that can update a learning record store (LRS).