Despite decades of research and years of touchscreen mobile phones and tablets being in use, there’s still a great deal of myth and disinformation in place about how these devices work, and how best to design touch-based interfaces. Mobile technology is now mature enough to mandate that we design mLearning solutions in a way that better matches the ways our learners actually interact with these devices. Too much mLearning design involves scaled-down desktop interfaces, or makes incorrect assumptions about how people’s thumbs work. We can’t design with poor foundational knowledge, and expect good outcomes.

The introduction of new technologies has continuously impacted personal and professional learning. Individuals have used desktops, smartphones, tablets, and other technologies to enhance the way they learn, and organizations have struggled to keep up with the changes. Organizations desiring to make the move to mLearning often hit roadblocks, and find it challenging to find a place and meaning for mobile learning.

Blended mobile learning should be an experience that holds value for both training and performance support. The growing usage of tablets and mobile apps provides an opportunity to combine more traditional eLearning with user-friendly mobile applications that can also capture real-time data to enhance the overall instructional content. Pairing performance support apps with learning materials ensures that content delivered in a training session stays relevant to the user on the job.        

Organizations are not using technology in ways that match with how we think, work, and learn. The learning and development (L&D) function is focused on limited options, when there’s so much more they could be doing. On the other hand, people are using mobile devices in ways that are natural, ways that augment their ability to do. The intersection here is the opportunity that mobile provides.

Augmented reality (AR) can take any situation, location, environment, or experience to a whole new level of meaning and understanding. Mobile AR technologies provide an innovative tool for contextual learning, but mobile learning designers and developers are unaware of where to look for examples or development options.

There are close to a dozen different iOS devices and over 4,200 different Android devices on the market. Designing your content for these different devices is challenging. When considering building training material for mobile devices, you may wonder if it’s best to build a native application or a web application. It’s important to know the advantages and disadvantages of both native and web training applications, and to understand the significant differences between developing for mobile as compared to a traditional desktop.

Mobile technologies and web platforms are advancing faster than training methodologies so keeping up with the trends is getting more and more difficult. There is a growing need to develop training initiatives for a technology landscape that is evolving at a remarkable pace without having to redevelop content for each device or platform.

Organizational leaders often see gaming and immersive mLearning solutions as frivolous and potentially a waste of time. As a result, an engaging learning medium is often overlooked, resulting in missed opportunities to use mobile solutions as a strategy to improve employee skill building. Studies show that participants learn either because they are motivated to learn or because they are engaged in the learning. The challenge is in helping stakeholders understand that mLearning can be extremely immersive and effective for learning.

A new approach to credentialing learning is on the horizon. Digital badges is a new credentialing model will have a profound impact on trainers, designers, developers, managers, and learners. A digital badge is a credential that is ideally suited for the age of electronic networked learning and work. But how does an organization initiate a badge program? Digital badges are transportable, sharable, embedded with information, and authenticatable. Before issuing badges, organizations must understand the process for issuing, storing, and sharing digital badges.

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.

eLearning developers are used to being able to use rapid eLearning development tools to quickly build and prototype eLearning materials. In the mobile world, these tools are a bit different and have their own constraints and implementation considerations. Development of mobile apps can be a tricky, specialized skill set. If you are new to this world, the barrier to entry likely overwhelms you.

Technology innovations, increased learner expectations, and leadership demands continue to change the learning ecosystem. Learning organizations are challenged to deliver mobile learning solutions that range from just-in-case compliance training to on-demand performance support at the moment of need. As a result, gaining support and resources for mobile learning requires executing the correct business model and having the proper framework to have tough consultative conversations (i.e., trade-offs, budget) with executives.

Video is rapidly becoming one of the most popular media formats for learning. However, many organizations struggle when it comes to distributing video for and to mobile devices. Some of the challenges that organizations developing mobile-ready video for the frst time encounter include bandwidth, closed captioning, tracking, and organization of content.

Today more people have mobile access than have safe drinking water and electricity. There are now as many mobile subscribers as there are people on Earth. Gartner predicted that there will be close to 1 billion smartphones sold in 2013. Despite the rapid consumer adoption of ever-advancing mobile technologies, many organizations still struggle with adding mobile to their learning strategy. As learning professionals, we will have to adopt new strategies and learn new skills in order to support workers in an increasingly mobile-first world.

Mobile has moved from an alternative delivery option to a mission imperative as companies seek ways to reach out and connect with their workers, partners, and customers through their omnipresent handsets and tablets. Accelerating learning delivery and increasing organizational performance have near universal appeal for companies of all sizes wanting to leverage a better informed, educated, and engaged audience through the many affordances mobile tools and technologies thus creating leverage.

Some eLearning tools work great for desktop delivery, while others are geared more towards delivering to mobile devices. Then there are those tools that do a pretty good job of delivering to both desktop and mobile. It’s become increasingly challenging for organizations to know which tools really work well for developing for mobile, and which tools just claim that they do.

It’s been more than 20 years since Gloria Gery published her pioneering work, and still the promise of real-time performance support remains elusive. What opportunities do trainers now have to help employees improve skills while doing real tasks on the job? When is it appropriate to use mobile devices and when isn’t it? What new strategies are needed when developing mobile learning as performance support?

Apple has recently introduced support for indoor positioning via iBeacon (aka Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE)). Unlike GPS, iBeacon has much lower power consumption as well as being much more accurate in detecting and connecting to nearby devices, particularly indoors. iBeacons are poised to transform how retailers connect with people indoors. They also hold great potentional in their ability to deliver highly-customized, location-based learning performance materials in real-time.

Selecting and purchasing mLearning technology to enhance classroom learning is getting more difficult as options proliferate. Tactical decisions today can have long-term consequences for near-term budgets, mid-term learning, and long-term lifecycle support. You need a way to sort through all the options, limits, and restrictions based on various use-cases and learner needs.

Organizational learning infrastructures are constantly evolving, and mobile technology is now at the forefront of the new learning environment. Mobile technology provides the platform to provide informative and useful learning content to learners whenever and wherever they need or want it. Although the industry continues to stir with talk about mobile technology and the benefits it can provide to learning and development, CLOs have been slow to adopt mobile as a learning strategy. How do you best optimize mobile technology and ubiquitous connectivity for learning opportunities that have a positive impact on business performance?

The social-service workforce in Scotland is around 192,000 employees. Most of the workers are community based and have a broad range of educational backgrounds. Its learning and development group faces logistical and financial challenges due to the economic climate and the bugetary impact when employees are brought to central locations for learning. Retention from these face-to-face learning events is marginal at best.

Everyone seems to have an app these days. Many organizations are interested in developing an app, but do not have an understanding of what such a project entails. Before you spend time and money creating an app, it’s important to become familiar with terms, resources, and app-user behaviors.

Most of the standard players used in eLearning are optimized for display on a desktop or laptop computer. When creating a course for mobile, certain elements that work well for the desktop are far from perfect on a phone or an iPad. Designers and developers need to adjust their standard practices to work better in a mobile environment.

Many organizations want to increase their deployment of performance-support (PS) programs, but are struggling to find a way to do so with a limited budget. You don’t need to spend lots of money on design and development tools for effective performance-support content. Performance support does not always need to be a product from a vendor; you can quite effectively create and deliver performance-support content using your existing software or free online tools.

Learning professionals have long battled what is allowable from an organization’s IT group. Understanding why IT has these issues is the best method of lowering these barriers. In today’s world, data theft has become big business. The IT group sees allowing personal laptops and mobile devices onto organizational networks as a surefire method to data disaster. As such, IT groups often shut all the doors to minimize risks. Opening those doors can yield huge benefits and can be relatively easy, if you know how.

There are so many variables to consider when L&D professionals or learning vendors try to decide how to best use mobile methods to boost the success of their learning initiatives. One critical element is understanding how to balance the amount of content and functionality you should include. Our recent experiences with testing several apps over the last three years has led us to some findings that will shape the role of how the Ken Blanchard Companies will use mobile tools and materials going forward.

According to ASTD Research, the most common forms of training across all industries are management and supervisory. These also represent a large percentage of training budgets in many organizations. Finding ways to address these training needs in a cost-effective way is critical, as is the need to integrate the social aspect that will unlock knowledge and share personal experience.

Every year, thousands of America’s service members separate from the military to start a new chapter in life as civilians. The re-entry into civilian life can be a difficult phase that results in unfamiliar challenges. The increased number of separations from the military strains the current infrastructure, resources, and techniques to prepare for post-military life.

As a mobile usage grows, we no longer get to decide which device learners will use to access learning. Applying responsive design enables your customized, interactive course to display beautifully in both desktop and mobile learning environments. With true responsive design, course content needs to automatically rearrange and reflow depending on screen size and orientation. It is important to take the mobile environment into consideration beginning with the initial storyboarding of design and development.

Onboarding is a universal issue for all organizations. Employee-orientation programs raise awareness about people, practice, and processes, but there are lingering challenges that a new employee faces to acclimate to their new job: Each workplace brings a different vocabulary set, often unique to the organization, and quite commonly heard in both formal and informal conversations. How do newcomers learn different lingos and acronyms to become part of the conversations?

The use of smart phones, tablets, and the apps they utilize has grown quickly in the corporate space. These devices provide educators and developers with an exciting new way of reaching audiences, but the skills needed to develop mobile-learning programs are very different from those for desktop-based eLearning. How much knowledge and expertise is required to develop mLearning?

Making the move to mobile can be overwhelming. There are many obstacles organizations fear that give them pause about making the shift. Some organizations doubt they have the budget, design, and delivery skills, or even the devices required to support multi-device delivery. The good news is that most of the perceived obstacles to making the move to multi-device learning can actually be easily overcome.

The amount of attention the topic of game-based learning is receiving in our industry makes the average practitioner who hasn’t implemented game-based learning in their curriculum feel like they are falling far behind the curve. Many professionals also feel as though they lack thorough understanding, necessary experience, human resources, and/or budget to get a game-based program up and running.

Online students and faculty are demanding mobile access to their online courses and institutional resources. Focus groups with our students and faculty have shown that mobile skins for the LMS, student portal, and library are not enough to satisfy mobile users.

Research shows that only 20 percent of corporate learning happens during formal training, regardless of the delivery modality. However, 70 percent of learning occurs during on the job experiences. One way of bringing more job experience into formal training is through online role-play simulations. The challenge most organizations have is a belief that simulations are too expensive, take too long to build, or require skill sets we cannot support.

Video has long been respected as a great tool for training, but has often been dismissed due to costs. That is changing, and a dramatic drop in production costs and a wide array of YouTube-framework solutions has accelerated the role of video in corporate training. The challenge for eLearning developers is to move beyond traditional linear experiences and incorporate engaging interactions on top of traditional video.