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.

Mobile technology is a powerful tool to support learning. Its ubiquitous nature offers great potential in terms of accessibility, connectivity, and collaboration, its ability to support blended face-to-face and online learning experiences, and its ability to aid differentiation to meet learning needs. But using mobile devices for learning also comes laden with complex problems. These problems may revolve around a lack of knowledge or skills to overcome technical barriers, implement mobile devices for teaching and learning purposes, or adapt content to a mobile learning environment.

In the last few years, organizations were busy evaluating whether mobile devices are an effective channel for employee learning needs. However, research suggests that “organizations have moved beyond this stage and are now focused on solving challenges around security, content, bandwidth and cost” (Brandon Hall). Why is it that many organizations excited about mobile learning are yet struggling to start implementing them?

Mobile computing continues to explode as consumers’ adoption rate of mobile devices increases significantly. How do we create and implement a strategy to capitalize on this and other new and emerging technology platforms? Many organizations are interested in walking this path, but they struggle with knowing how to get started. Knowing what the audience wants, whether to build or buy, and how to fund the project are just a few of the strategic questions that organizations face.

There is a popular myth in our industry: that courses do not belong on a mobile phone and that only performance support can be successfully delivered to mobile. This session will disprove this popular belief.

The AutoTrader.com sales-training department designed an innovative strategy to support their fall product releases to a team of over 700, going completely mobile rather than using traditional classroom and eLearning. The strategy employed a combination of mobile core content, performance-support video and documents, scenario-based learning, and manager coaching and support. Partnering with the sales-training team, the AutoTrader “MyLearning” mobile application was used to deploy 21 nuggets of core content and 41 support resources structured via gamification and badging.

The Brandon Hall Group’s research shows that most organizations are still in the early stages of mobile learning, if they have begun at all. All organizations have some level of a learning strategy in place already, and it can be very challenging to integrate mobile with that and to develop a strategy and identify what works and what doesn’t for your particular company.

Making the decision to go mobile is one thing—making it happen is something else. Mobile-learning projects are complex, and change often. For an organization accustomed to a linear project timeline for eLearning development this can be a challenge. It’s important that mobile-learning projects are managed in a way that allows for flexibility and organizational success.

Field-based performance support (PS) generally means printed job aids, which quickly become dirty and outdated and are nearly impossible to replace with new information. Today’s professionals carry and prefer using mobile devices. They expect performance support whenever and wherever they need it, which makes mobile devices the perfect vehicle for delivering PS. When PS can be accessed by scanning images and real objects, it’s not only the fastest and most preferred way to get PS, it’s fun and amazing!

The Internet is full of compelling images, video, and sound, but most learning designers and developers struggle with understanding what content they are allowed to use, and which content is limited based on copyrights. There is a continuing struggle to quickly develop content while balancing speed with protecting our own work, respecting the work of others, and using copyrighted works fairly.

A number of different documents are distributed to learners during an instructor-led course. In many cases these documents exist as PDF documents, which creates a number of challenges. Distributing the documents securely may eliminate external resources like USB drives. When the documents are stored locally, there is no central way to update them and keep them up-to-date. Most critically, it is extremely challenging for workers to take notes on PDF documents.

One of the emerging technologies that learning professionals are interested in is augmented reality. There is tremendous energy and excitement attached to the opportunities presented by augmented reality, but few actual case studies that organizations can learn from as they contemplate walking that path themselves.

In 2013, the sale of smartphones exceeded the sale of traditional phones and the sale of tablets exceeded those of standard PCs. This trend has led to more organizations who want online courses that can be accessed from both mobile and desktop devices. Because the technology is different, it is challenging to develop learning that accommodates each device’s unique attributes.

People have yet to see major enterprise-level examples of Experience API (xAPI) adoption and the value of its features and functionality. Without these examples, bringing fully formed ideas about the xAPI’s capabilities back to their workplace is a challenge. Learning professionals need to see advanced integrations of the xAPI in non-traditional adaptations so they can understand how it can be used effectively.

From the smartphone in your hand to the 27-inch screen on your desk to the giant television on your wall, the range of ways to access the Internet just keeps growing and growing. This presents a huge challenge for training departments charged with cost-effectively and efficiently developing eLearning content for their organizations. What devices should they design for? How many versions of a course do they need? Do they sacrifice one type of delivery for another?

There is an overemphasis on mobile technologies in the mobile learning conversation. That may sounds strange, but it’s true. Mobile strategy isn’t really about mobile devices; it’s about taking your existing learning strategy and extending it so it can be supported optimally on whatever device the leaners have in front of them, wherever they are. Organizations should not have to reinvent their learning strategy to go mobile.

Medical training and continuing education that qualifies for American Medical Association (AMA) CME credits is traditionally done via classroom, online, and one-to-one training. However, these modalities have not kept pace with the technologies used by today’s medical professionals. More and more, medical organizations are confronting the challenge of producing AMA-compliant education and training that leverages the mobile technology of today.

Nonprofit organizations often have many thousands of volunteers. While mobile learning and performance support have a great deal of potential, they also come with some hurdles. Most nonprofits shy away from digital engagement because of the need for huge amounts of dynamic content and the requirement for volunteers to bring their own devices.

The process of getting newly hired salespeople trained and actively selling products is a key concern for most businesses. Organizations typically throw new hires into a classroom for a week or two, and then send them on their way with a couple of three-ring binders with little or no follow-up. Grainger was seeking faster and more innovative ways to make our new hires successful while recognizing that people learn better over time.

Truck drivers are trained and tested on inspecting the exterior of the truck as well as driving techniques. Where full-size sit-down simulators are effective for driving training and assessment, it is impractical to simulate an exterior inspection with a life-size simulator. In addition, it is challenging to incorporate assessment of exterior inspections with driving techniques when they use different media. This issue is also analogous to airline pilots and other professions where training requirements include inspection of a large vehicle.

In our field, mobile learning is the present and the future. However, implementing mobile learning in a secure environment is an ever-growing concern. It seems there are stories in the news every day describing a data breach and the damage such situations cause. Many organizations are facing this issue as demand becomes higher for mobile learning and they balance the desire to have an edge in an increasingly competitive market with the need to minimize risk.

The IEEE Actionable Data Book project is currently investigating open technologies compatible with the Open Stand Initiative. The goal is to define an open platform for mobile learning that is personalized, activity-based, and that has the potential for low-cost global adoption. The technical foundation for the project is the new EPUB 3 format for digital publications developed by the IDPF. It provides a framework for the structuring, packaging and mobile delivery of accessible HTML5 content.

Mobile policy doesn’t sound like an exciting topic, but it’s an essential component to a mobile learning strategy. You can have jaw-droppingly cool apps, context-sensitivity, video, alternate reality games, or all of the above, but you’ll end up failing if you’re not on top of your mobile policy. Quite simply, policy is strategy, and without strategy, you’re just stumbling around in the dark.

More and more learning professionals are realizing that training and courses are only one piece of the overall puzzle. Organizations are increasingly looking to incorporate performance support to provide workers with the support they need, when they need it. What most instructional designers fail to realize is that that the tools they use to develop courses can often be used to develop mobile performance support solutions.

Adobe Captivate is a great tool for creating eLearning, but how well can you use it to create mobile learning? There is some debate as to whether or not a designer can create learning programs for desktop and mobile at the same time. It’s definitely possible, but there are design issues and crucial development issues that you must address before you start.

Mobile devices have opened up new avenues to deliver training to employees, especially those who are constantly on the go. The challenge is to provide training that is effective, engaging, and, ideally, uniquely mobile. Many organizations are introducing game elements as a way to reach learners and hold their interest. Combining game elements and game design with the training content can do just that if properly designed and delivered.

Access to relevant information in a timely manner is a growing need of people in both their professional and personal lives. Leveraging augmented reality technologies on mobile platforms provides quick and easy access of information required to complete a job at hand more efficiently or simply to enhance a learning process.

While most organization see mLearning as something new, it’s actualy been in existsnece in some form for well over a decade. Just as mobile technology has advanced and evolved during that time, so to have the strategies we use to leverge these technologues for learning and performance. Understanding where we have been, and the lessons we learned getting to this point, will help better prepare us for the continued evolution of mLearning in the future.

mLearning programming is often needlessly repetitive, which makes the work inefficient and increases project costs. In other cases, the programming leads to undesirable design tradeoffs because engaging interactions can be difficult and time consuming to develop. A cursory investigation into ways to reduce programming repetitiveness and improve engagement level might lead one to think this problem could be easily resolved through tools or templates. However, it’s not that simple.

It’s increasingly difficult for administrators and developers to cope with the speed at which technological devices enter the market and the pockets of learners. eLearning professionals are faced with the challenge of finding the best response to internal or external demands for content delivery in the latest device, while still demonstrating sound pedagogy/andragogy, learning outcomes, and fiscal responsibility. And it’s only going to get more challenging in the future.

Being able to develop learning that works on multiple devices is very relevant in the learning industry today. Organizations are under increasing amounts of pressure to meet tight deadlines and to keep budgets down. Learning professionals are going to need tools that help them keep up with the growing demands of the multi-device workplace.

The widespread adoption of mobile devices has created many opportunities to enhance learning programs, but it has also brought new challenges. 20th Century Fox, a leader in the film, television, and entertainment industry, was able to successfully meet those challenges in its combined online and offline learning solution for managing courseware and critical training data through mobile devices for its employees worldwide.

Too many guidelines for mobile eLearning are based on opinion, not empirical research. This can really derail the effectiveness of learning programs. In addition, in an environment where every budget dollar is critical, organizations can not afford to waste time and money on poor mobile instructional design. There are now examples and case studies that enable us to take a more credible and research-supported path to mobile learning.

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.

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. At the same time, organizations must develop new knowledge and skills to support this expanded scope of learning.

Sometimes you have to capture video but don’t have access to your video camera, DSLR, or point-and-shoot camera. However, you do have something in your pocket, backpack, or purse that can capture exceptional video: your smartphone. These days, almost all smartphones are capable of recording high quality video. The trick is understanding how to use your smartphone camera effectively.

There’s a growing interest in creating interactive digital books for learning. The challenge is that there are several publication formats and many different vendor applications to use to build an interactive book. Knowing which format and/or tool to use, when to use it, and what’s involved in creating your content in the format provided by the vendor can seem overwhelming.

Have you ever tested spaghetti to see if it’s cooked by throwing it against a wall? That’s how too many organizations now approach their training programs—throwing standalone eLearning or face-to-face courses at their staff, hoping the learning will stick. There are things we can do to increase the odds of making learning stick by augmenting standalone courses. Many of these strategies are easy to implement and are very suited to mLearning approaches, giving us a whole new set of tools to improve the effectiveness of learning events.

Unlike instructor led training or eLearning, there are no industry-accepted standards for designing mobile learning. While some instructional designers have tried to adapt course-based teaching and exam-based assessment methods to mobile learning, they are often less than successful because they are not aligned with the unique performances of mobile devices, and the way people use them. Design thinking offers a way of solving this problem.

Instructional designers are increasingly faced with the challenge of building learning programs that are being accessed on different types of devices. Exporting a course in a way that makes it accessible on a mobile phone isn’t good enough. Our learning programs should adapt their content to work on the different types of devices being used to access it: PCs, tablets, and smartphones. That’s where responsive design comes in.

To enable a more “on-demand” (or “just-in-time”) approach to performance improvement, organizations are moving away from relying completely on formal learning models to an informal approach, where people can quickly access information when, where, and how they need it. Learning strategies are evolving, with a focus on opportunities to move away from traditional LMS-centric, push, methodologies toward smaller learning modules and flexible pull approaches.

Determining if and how mLearning fits into a learning strategy is complicated. The temptation is to adopt mLearning because it’s the latest and greatest panacea to solve all learning woes. Much like eLearning was positioned as displacing classroom learning at its height, so mLearning is viewed by many as the golden child. Learning professionals also face the pressure of having to establish return on investment for an unproven strategy with significant up-front investments.

Mobile removes the barriers that historically have bound learning to prescribed times and places. The need to learn has become more urgent and opportunities for learners to interact with content often materialize in unexpected, uncontrolled, and unstructured environments. The burden of technology is to deliver content in a manner that meets contemporary learning requirements.

Many large enterprise and government customers use Motorola mobile devices for their employees, and they require the security to control any internet access or application downloads. We wanted to give the end-users access to their documentation in the field when they required it at the moment of need. Off the shelf reader products could not be adjusted to meet our needs or integrated with other software with the flexibility for these requirements.

There are many different considerations that contribute to mobile learning design. Even the strongest designer of desktop learning programs can struggle with a transition to building mobile solutions. Too often, organizations struggle with trying to find their own way during their early mLearning projects.

Training and content development departments are tasked with developing mobile learning content very rapidly and very cost effectively. This makes mobile projects challenging and represents a problem that will only get worse as technology continues to advance. Many people have not thought about how to utilize off-shore vendors to augment their process and team to assist in creating mobile courses.

How often has someone approached you and asked something like, “How much would it cost to build an online course?” or “How much does it cost to build a mobile app?” These questions are very hard to answer and change based on each project, client, and scenario. However, there are some guidelines that can help lead you through this process.

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.

iPads are used in schools, universities, and businesses all over the world. Despite being a mainstream device, many individuals and organizations are still reluctant to use iPads for learning and performance support. Most of the hesitancy comes from ignorance and the belief that developing learning content for iPads is extremely challenging and expensive.

The way consumers buy cars is changing. Customers are now far better informed prior to entering a dealership, and the rise of the use of the Internet and mobile browsing is a major factor in this change. There is often a disconnect between the high-tech customer’s online browsing experience and the traditional in-dealership buying experience in which sales occur right by the vehicle itself. Jaguar Land Rover decided to leverage mobile technology as a means to address this challenge.

In order to develop a learning strategy that responds to the rapidly evolving world, learning professionals need to look at the business environment differently. On the one hand, the traditional business needs of the organization will continue to be critical and must be served. On the other hand, the next generation of learning strategies must place equal importance on the actual performance and learning needs of employees. Future learning strategies will look different, be delivered differently, and be led by a new breed of learning professional.

The space restrictions on mobile devices and the increasing demand for translated content by global users makes every word we put on a screen count. Choosing the wrong words can define the difference between a successful product and a failure.

mLearning is about much more than just mobile technology. mLearning is a different experience than desktop-based eLearning, coming with its own unique set of design considerations and challenges. Organizations considering making the move to mobile need to understand the challenges of creating content for mobile devices if they want their mobile learning strategy to be successful.

Citrix leverages a DITA-based solution for mobile learning that rapidly adapts to changing business, technology, and customer requirements. We want to ensure our source content is future-proofed against changes in delivery technologies in order to avoid vendor lock-in and retain tight control of the types of activities we include in training and how we present them to learners. It was also important that we minimize code maintenance and automate aspects of quality assurance by mining our content as data for metrics related to language and engagement.

There’s a great deal of discussion about HTML5 and how it is changing the future of the web. While there is tremendous potential in place, there is still much confusion about what its impact is on technology-based learning, and what steps learning professionals should be taking to develop specifically for HTML5.

Learning from the lessons of the past is critical in order to make the future better. This truth of life also applies to the world of mobile learning. There have been a large number of organizations that have gone down the mLearning path and an enormous amount of resources generated from lessons learned. There’s great potential to learn from the lessons shared in this mountain of data, if we have the tools and capabilities with which to analyze it.

One of TELUS’ key goals is to have a majority of its workforce work in a flexible mobile work environment. Learning strategies had to adapt to this goal. Learning could no longer simply be available on one’s laptop or in a face-to-face class. Our learning strategy had to be enhanced and updated to accommodate our growing mobile workforce.

In today’s fast-moving world it is increasingly difficult for individuals to allocate time to a long-duration learning event. In fact, the amount of time learners can allocate and maintain attention to a single learning event seems to shrink all the time. More and more, learning professionals are expected to deliver solutions that are minimally disruptive to work while still providing the support needed for performance.

Mobile learning is about more than technology. Too often organizations simply move bad practice to new technology. Before we step forward and look at the next best-technology or coolest new gadget in our field we need to step back to basics and consider our design. Before organizations can make the move to mobile, they need to ensure they have strong visual-design practices that work for myriad devices and audiences.

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 is blazing the path is Google Glass.

When building web or native applications, it can be daunting trying to learn new coding languages for various platforms. Even if you are just targeting web applications, there is still a lot of CSS to get the HTML to look good on both phones and tablets. To get the effect you want you may have to spend hours learning CSS, JavaScript, and HTML. The integration with jQuery Mobile has been a lifesaver for the non-techie or even the techie that wants to get the task done quickly and efficiently.

Managing your mLearning development efforts is challenging. It’s easier to do so with project management software or tools, but they can be very expensive. Understanding which tools are available and which features are needed to manage your mLearning projects can help you pick the right project management tool at the right price.

In a fast-paced environment with lots of information flying at learners, it’s difficult to retain information. Forgetting often begins as soon as learning ends, leaving you hoping that the learner retains as much as they can. Learning professionals need to find ways to bridge this gap, and mobile technology provides us with an opportunity to do so.

A common business problem is that employees want to advance their career, but they often build a plan that is focused on promotions. They want to move up but do not consider lateral moves or moves outside their profession or outside their function. Beyond that, employees need the knowledge, tools, and resources to prepare for career change opportunities. Cisco has addressed this problem by constructing a mobile solution that enables employees to explore careers based on a career lattice approach.

It hasn’t been that long since we only worried about testing online training lessons on Internet Explorer and Netscape. Those days are long gone. Today we face a myriad of testing challenges due to the vast number of devices and operating systems that are being used by our learners. Developing and testing our applications to ensure that they will work for everyone is an increasingly challenging part of an organizational learning strategy.

The Arizona Center for Integrative Medicine has a custom LMS to deliver our online medical education offerings. This platform has been mostly adequate for about five years, but our offerings have expanded to new programs with many more learners in many different contexts. These learners want and often need to use tablets and other mobile devices to access and complete curriculum. The Arizona Center for Integrative Medicine learning platform needed a more flexible mobile strategy that could scale to multiple devices.

Instructional designers are increasingly faced with projects that have a mobile component. In many cases the projects are presented before the design team has the requisite knowledge and skills to design mobile learning. In situations like this, it’s challenging for organizations and professionals to know where to begin.

Learning is often built on technology, taking place in different forms and locations such as eLearning, mLearning, and social media. What if learning, resources, mentorship, and performance support strategies could all be found in one place, when your employees needed them? That is the ideal scenario, and one that would provide specific measurements for observable data outcomes.

The increase in mobile usage has led to an expectation in consumers to have a seamless experience across all devices. This creates challenges for designers, who now need to design content that works not only on desktops, smartphones, and tablets, but on devices with varying screen sizes within each category. Responsive design is a great solution to the fragmentation of devices across smartphones, tablet, desktop, and more.

Mobile is the new way of learning. Learners want it, and companies want to provide it. However, app development can be expensive, especially if you are starting from a mostly print or standard eLearning model of training. Finding a way to give learners and organizations the mobile learning they want without breaking the bank is a must in today’s training market, especially for companies with populations of mobile learners (e.g., sales).

Like many organizations, Goodwill is facing the challenge of supporting a large mobile workforce. It has over 2,700 retail stores staffed with sales associates and processing staff. There is usually no more than one computer in any single location that is available for training. Due to the premium placed upon retail floor space, expanding the desktop-based PCs that are available is prohibitive. This created a difficult challenge to provide training, share knowledge, and disseminate/gather information for the workforce.

There are a great number of tools available to use for building mobile learning. The challenge with many of these tools is that they use legacy functionalities and a fixed canvas that do not effectively support the ultimate goal of designing device-agnostic experiences. These tools often trap us in PC-based paradigms that have been used for decades to design static content and now fall short of designing more flexible content that can better respond to the end-users needs on and beyond the desktop.

Most instructional designers found their way to their role by accident, via a combination of circumstance and subject matter expertise. This is why many IDs share the challenge of “learning as we go” rather than receiving formal training and education before starting a job. This challenge is further complicated by the need to add mobile learning design to our skill sets.