FocusOn Learning Mobile

Economic stress, learning technologies, global competition, and the learning sciences present opportunities and threats to learning and performance professionals. How will you respond as we move to more mobile, performance support, and video?

With the combination of highly engaging content and on-the-go availability through mobile, eLearning is now reaching wider audiences. This reflects the power of mobile learning, but its combination with the xAPI is still evolving and is in its infancy. At the same time, mobile learning capabilities like collaboration, messaging, and offline use have yet to be harnessed by many learning platforms. Moreover, the analytical data collected using the xAPI are also underutilized.

Formal online learning doesn’t work like it used to. Attention spans are decreasing, and mobile access is more critical than ever. So how do you create mobile learning without hiring experts or spending a fortune? And how do you get part-time employees to care about making shakes and smoothies?

The prerequisite to effective training retention is gaining the attention of students once they have left the training environment. This is not a trivial challenge! Employees ignore emails, never visit web portals, and forget about apps installed on their phones. How can you gain access to their attention to reinforce important training?

Technology continues to advance rapidly, changing how people live and interact with the world around them. Today’s learning professionals face the challenge of staying ahead of this curve and tracking the technologies that are shaping the future of organizational learning, while at the same time recognizing technologies that may be more of a passing fad.

There are so many authoring tools on the market, and so many promise that they’ll let you create stellar mobile learning solutions. How can any organization make sense of which will serve it best? Is one enough, or do you need two? Are two enough, or do you need eight? You don’t randomly choose which car to buy. You don’t throw a dart at a map to decide where to live. Research is key, and consulting an unbiased expert can save a lot of time and cost. Choosing an authoring tool that you can use to create mobile lessons is no different.

The Experience API is an eLearning software specification that allows learning content and learning systems to communicate with each other. The xAPI is appealing to mLearning developers who seek accessible solutions for learner activity tracking. At the same time, considering how diversified the mLearning and training ecosystem is, solutions such as PhoneGap can enable cross-platform delivery. Combining both tools allows for the delivery of a cross-platform solution with the ability to track learners’ experience.

Interviewing is a common way to gather information and a widely used approach in learning and development, HR, and marketing research. Capturing this information on video for analysis and reuse is a good way to extend the life of captured content. However, many people don’t know what makes one interview more effective than another in what they capture and the questions being asked.

Subject matter experts (SMEs) have expert knowledge to share. For rapid development situations or just-in-time training, SMEs can contribute good, solid content videos that can be shared with learners—and they can create the videos when they have the time or when a situation arises that would be a great video example, such as demonstrating a process or recalling a dangerous situation.

Two of the most popular technologies used to engage learners today are video and mobile. Videos are becoming increasingly interactive, even on mobile devices, but developing these videos can be complex. Where does an organization start?

The explosion of mobile devices has revolutionized the web design world, which has shed approaches based on centuries-old printing methods to embrace a new grammar of design, responsive web design (RWD). But the world of learning has not caught up. Like learning any new language, working in RWD means learning to think differently. Thinking differently, though, gives you an opportunity to change how you design learning experiences for the better.

For many organizations, the front-line staff would most benefit from mLearning, yet challenges arise when this audience has different levels of technological adoption and is geographically dispersed. For all learners, mLearning needs to be intuitive, effective, and simple. How can L&D professionals make the best possible mLearning solutions that truly deliver on the learning objectives?

As training audiences are deployed with mobile devices to use for training and performance support, performance technologists often face challenging logistical and infrastructure constraints when building performance solutions.

The convergence of mobile delivery, micro-learning, and new authoring tools provides great opportunities to innovate where limited time and budget are available. Much mobile-delivered micro-learning focuses on spaced repetition and memorization. Micro-sims go beyond knowledge and comprehension and require learners to synthesize and apply concepts in realistic contexts.

Incorporating gaming techniques (serious games, social games, and gamification) within educational programs and corporate training experiences is one of the hottest topics in the learning and development field today. If your organization isn’t already leveraging the power of gaming, then this session is the perfect way to quickly assess whether and where mobile gaming and gamification techniques are right for your organization.

Let’s face it: Learning content is getting out of control. Designers and developers can’t find anything and end up reinventing the wheel. This is a symptom of content overload, a condition as organizations try to make content more bite-sized, modular, and mobile to meet the needs of modern learners. Learners are experiencing it, too. As organizations adapt learning strategies, content strategy must follow.

Mobile first is the standard in today’s learning and development industry. Companies need ways to be able to reach their sales reps wherever they are. Many companies do not have the means to develop device-agnostic mobile applications for learning in the time frame needed to provide just-in-time learning. Mobile messaging can offer a just-in-time learning solution without the development time.

Do the people who most need your mobile learning reside internationally, although you are apprehensive of taking on a global launch? Do you want to learn more about the considerations that impact your global mobile learning success? Maybe you have a solid plan, or maybe you are ready to take the jump and want to validate your strategy with a global organization on the same journey.

The 70:20:10 model holds that 70 percent of learning happens informally on the job. However, there are a lot of distractions at work that inhibit the amount of learning that can be achieved—deadlines, coworker interruptions, meetings, etc. Also, since learning is an afterthought when performing your job, it’s a fairly inefficient process, especially when compared to the other 30 percent, where learning is typically the overarching theme.

Adobe Captivate is a widely used authoring tool for eLearning courseware and mobile learning experiences. Now Adobe offers developers the opportunity to create responsive animations to their mobile learning projects.

Learning and development professionals strive to meet on-the-job performance support needs in a typical work environment. Now, imagine the needs of a laboratory where employees are responsible for manufacturing radiopharmaceuticals (radioactive drugs). Cardinal Health technicians operate in a highly regulated lab environment with ever-changing operating procedures that affect a manufacturing process in which one misstep could impact a patient.

Years of momentum have resulted in a collection of use cases for teams seeking to leverage the xAPI to better track, measure, and manage their learning efforts. The time is now; the xAPI can improve the ways you create and deliver content and classes, track interactions, communicate, and measure performance. Armed with knowledge and the proverbial “Swiss Army knife” of xAPI functions, you can begin to “slice, saw, tweeze, and pick” your way through training obstacles.

Learning practitioners strive to understand the real-life environment of experts as much as possible. But getting access to really see how people do their jobs when they are in a more technical or hands-on role (e.g., construction, refinery, or factory work) is difficult. Often, learning practitioners can’t use video or real-life images because of safety or clearance constraints. This poses a challenge as they try to create impactful learning materials.

Binders. One-sheets. Printouts. For salespeople and those who work on the road, the backseat is full of them. They are used not only for collateral but also for training customers on products and services. But are these the right tools? What if the customer has only five minutes? How can an individual quickly and efficiently discuss a topic in an engaging way and avoid the paper clutter?

The current state of mobility and the demand it has created for shorter content lengths, collaborative environments, and personalized experiences are the primary drivers of a renaissance that sees learning seeding itself in practically every environment encountered by today’s worker. Learning has propagated beyond the LMS, beyond the classroom, beyond performance support tools. Organizations must come up with new eLearning strategies and archetypes to work within this evolving learning ecosystem.

Desktop platforms are giving way to mobile in many contexts. Opportunities abound. But eLearning designers and developers are used to a different set of paradigms undergirded by different competencies than those they need to design and develop mobile solutions.

It has always been tricky to track experiences and results when learning happens outside the LMS. Using the xAPI, you can track a huge amount of activity with a robust and flexible specification. The next challenge is to identify learners and capture what they do in the real world in digital format, then put that data to use for learners, their leadership, and the learning and development organization.

With the proliferation of mobile deployment to training audiences and rapidly emerging technology, training and development professionals often struggle with keeping their mobile knowledge and skills current. Sprint University confronted this problem head-on by implementing a mobile learning program.

Employees learn many of their job competencies from one another. But it’s hard for a manager to know what they’re learning, from whom, and how well they’ve learned it. These informal interactions are almost impossible to track, and it’s hard to keep bad habits from spreading. If managers had a way to track and guide this informal learning, it would become a powerful part of employee development.

Mobile learning has tremendous value, but for many organizations, going mobile is a big step. That’s why, when trying to develop a mobile learning culture within your organization, often the hardest part is convincing internal stakeholders. Amid budget constraints, complex infrastructures, IT restrictions, and philosophical misalignment, how do you make a compelling case for mLearning within your organization?

Optical character recognition (OCR) technology can take your magazine article, brochure, or PDF, single out letters on the image, and put them into words, enabling you to access and edit the content. Similarly, facial recognition software breaks down an image and can provide data related to gender, age, and ethnicity. Couple these with interior location technology, and you have the potential for powerful organizational learning opportunities.

Increasingly, companies must use innovate ways to add to the bottom line. Unlike previous disrupters in mobile and eLearning, Gear VR, powered by Oculus, takes video experiences to the next level. Where does virtual reality fit into an organizational learning strategy? How does an organization effectively move forward to maximize its capability?

Performance on leadership development competencies, like coaching, influencing, and speaking skills, has an ineffable quality difficult to capture in words. If you want to explain what’s great and what to work on while evaluating participants, you or they will miss something in the translation from behavior to observation to words on a page.

Concise visual metaphors facilitate the best learning. Think back to high school, college, or a meeting where you experienced that “aha” moment while someone was drawing on a whiteboard. How can you reproduce this learning experience online with a small budget and without an art degree? Whiteboard-style recordings can be just as effective as the fancy Flash or HTML5 videos you might produce with more expensive software.

With the release of the “granite” version of cmi5, the next generation of SCORM has finally arrived. To take advantage of cmi5, you will need a new tool set in your development kit. First, you need to know how to send xAPI statements that conform to the cmi5 specification. Then you need to know how to read and write to the xAPI State and Agent services following the cmi5 rules.

Mobile learning is one component in a whole learning ecosystem. Many organizations have discovered what does not work: simply pushing existing content out to mobile as though it were merely an infrastructure. To design and deliver effective mobile learning requires a new design mindset: a mindset for mobile. This will help the organization adapt its approach to truly unlock the power of mobile learning.

mLearning has been on the radar for a few years now, but many organizations are still getting started. And that’s a vulnerable position; there are a number of mistakes that are easy to repeat if you haven’t been paying attention and really gotten steeped in the possibilities. Further, the field is changing rapidly. Yet with some basic models that help you “think different,” you’re ready to take advantage.

Most instructional designers have experience creating storyboards prior to developing eLearning solutions. The storyboarding process enables the designer to work through a concept and test various ways of structuring content. Storyboards are also used to communicate design concepts to eLearning developers when working in teams to build training solutions.

Skill training in first aid had changed little since the Knights of St. John formalized the process in the 11^th century. The focus had been on in-class demonstrations, in-class practice, and paper-based exams, and students updated their skills only every three years. Fast forward to 2016; people aren’t learning that way anymore. So how do you transform hundreds of years of subject matter expertise into a 21^st-century learning solution? Follow St. John Ambulance’s journey from inspiration at mLearnCon 2014 to leaping forward to embrace evolution through mobile learning.

Finding ways to make learning “stick” with technology is always a challenge. Augmented reality (AR) is one of those “make it stick” technologies. With AR, you enable students to interact with the world using their mobile devices. This can improve their understanding of lessons through direct interaction with the objects around them. Now add video to AR projects, and you’ve combined a popular medium of instruction with cutting-edge tech.

Most performance support systems assume an environment where Internet and a tablet or laptop are available. However, there are situations in which access to Internet devices is not possible, like in remote education or when sales agents work in remote areas. In such places, SMS is the only channel for delivering performance support.

Including media in the training you create can be a fantastic way to make your content easier to understand and remember. But you don’t always have the time and budget to hire someone to create these design assets for you, and sometimes stock media just won’t cut it. There is another option, however: creating media yourself. And you likely already have two tools that can help you out—your smartphone and tablet. By knowing more about the apps and tools that can help you create some of the media needed, and by using a device you already own, you can be more efficient and keep project budgets down.

While technology has transformed people’s lives, L&D has primarily stayed the same. Sure, the industry has evolved by utilizing technology to access and track content, but it is still focused on the traditional course mentality. Should you be going down the same path with mobile learning? What are the opportunities for mobile to help promote a fundamental change in how and when you provide education?

Incorporating video in a responsive performance support project can be daunting. Video done for vertical delivery comes with specific dos and don’ts. This session shows how to use vertical video, the new Adobe Animate CC, and Adobe Captivate to make cost-effective, rapid mobile performance support modules.

Creating a mobile app for training can be hard. Tracking user progress and completion in your mobile app? Harder. There is a lot to consider when looking to create and leverage mobile applications for training purposes, but the tools and techniques are available.

As organizations realize the value of mobile learning, an increased number are jumping at the opportunity to offer their employees mobile training opportunities. Currently, many mobile learning applications focus on delivering content. However, the most effective learning comes from applying information, especially with peers. How can you create mobile learning opportunities for learners to practice new concepts and receive real-time feedback from peers?

JLG, a leading manufacturer of lift equipment for various industries, needed a way for site supervisors to verify whether an operator had the proper certifications to operate any given piece of equipment, down to the specific model. The company struggled with providing immediate compliance instructions.

There’s no question that video is trending upward and becoming more viable as a workplace learning and development (L&D) solution. Still, one significant barrier is focusing on the video itself—the videography and/or animation and editing that leads to the final product. Like all solutions from an L&D perspective, it still needs design. For video, that design document is a script, and it’s one of the most vital and most often ignored steps in the video production process. But how does someone with an L&D background learn to write better scripts?