How ready are you for mobile learning or mLearning? A little bit or not at all? We’ve put together key considerations for you to consider when designing your mobile learning strategy.
Corporate training is making a huge push towards ensuring that learning is available to staff anytime and anywhere. While this is good news for professional development and increase job performance, it is important to ensure that L&D professionals create the right elearning environments for their learners.
Key considerations
- Develop a mobile learning strategy. Talk to your business and identify what mobile learning looks like to them.
- Consider the platforms you might be designing for: tablets or mobiles?
- Before you begin designing, make sure mobile delivery is the best solution.
- Don’t forget about the offline mobile user.
- Understand learning theory and how to design for mobile learning. You still have to take into account the learner, so understanding learning theory and which to appropriate for delivery of mobile learning is important.
- Know the content you wish to present. When designing content for mobile learning, chunking learning is crucial. Content tailored to smartphones should be short; consider using it for job aids, short videos such as podcasts to complete training modules.
- Explore multimedia solutions such as HTML 5 and discover how you can add interactivity to engage with the learner.
- Keep the user experience at the forefront of your mind when designing content. Consider how the device you are designing for is used; for example, if designing for smart phone, avoid scrolling because it is harder to manage on the small screen.
Mobile learning is trending fast and L&D professionals must understand and acquire the skills needed for developing mobile learning.
L&D designers should develop the following competencies to help them with their transition.
- Be knowledgeable about instructional approaches, technology tools, software applications that will help you design and develop content for mobile delivery.
- Familiarise yourself with best practice on mobile learning content. Read widely and connect with the instructional design community.
- Develop your technology skills. Take out trials for new software applications, consider their effectiveness and what you could do with them.
- Don’t be afraid to explore this new area of instructional design. Developing your skills and applying new technology to your learning material demonstrates your own passion for learning.
These considerations will help you meet the challenge of developing a mobile learning strategy. It is important to make mobile learning simple, and fit for purpose in order for it to be effective for the learner. By having these conversations with your stakeholder, and developing your own skills you’ll be ready to take on mobile learning successfully.