In the past, we've discussed why mobile learning (or mLearning) is an important piece of a well-rounded L&D strategy. We've also pointed out that mobile learning may not be well-suited for everything – or even most of the training your learners need.
So where does that leave your mLearning initiative?
What is mobile learning well-suited for, and how do you make the most of what it can bring to the table?
Below, we'll dive into six examples of corporate training topics and approaches you should consider for mobile learning. We'll also lay out the reasons mLearning will enhance training in that area.
The first week on a new job involves a lot of hurry up and wait.
There's value in personal meetings, but the timing gets tricky. Established employees have to shoehorn introductions into their already busy schedules, which leads to a lot of lag time for the newbie.
You can turn those "I'll be with you in a minute" pauses into productive time with mobile microlearning. By building short units for onboarding and orientation topics that don't require personal guidance, you empower new employees to tackle those instead of twiddling their thumbs.
Aside from making dead time productive, mLearning can also ease concerns about retention for onboarding and orientation topics. Recall of these topics is notoriously poor as new employees spend their first few weeks drinking from a firehose of information (and often drowning).
By designing your onboarding courses as brief mobile learning units, you make it much easier for employees to refresh their memory at their time of need.
It's critical to the well-being of any company for employees to not only stay up to date on compliance knowledge but to remember and apply that knowledge correctly.
Unfortunately, compliance and safety training is also notoriously boring. No one wants to spend hours at a time ingesting the material, and that's not the best method for retention, either.
Mobile learning can be the solution to both challenges. A few minutes of compliance or safety training a day, during dead time, is much easier to focus on than a half-day seminar. And it can help keep the importance of compliance issues on your team’s mind throughout the year, rather than just once a year.
Plus, if you're leveraging the best practices for mobile learning by focusing on relevance and interactivity, the training is a lot more likely to be retained and applied properly.
An employee is "in the field" and runs into the need for information – a new skill, task, or solution to a problem.
Do you want them to ask the internet?
Or would you rather they ask the internal resources you've approved, vetted, and tailored to company policy?
It doesn't matter what you prefer if your internal resources aren't just as convenient as Google.
This makes mobile learning a vital piece of employee learning and development. Your employees are going to self-educate via their phones. Shouldn't you make sure they get the right info when they do?
Security and access in the field are a natural concern for some businesses, but both can be addressed by using a secure mobile app to deliver just-in-time learning. An app can also provide course access even if there's no internet signal.
Your biggest concern should be choosing topics that learners will find most helpful for off-site mobile learning. If employees can repeatedly find answers to their most pressing problems within your mLearning resources, they'll always start their search there first.
You'll need to conduct research with your target audience to make sure you're choosing the right topics. Consider methods like focus groups and surveys for collecting employee-driven data.
You can teach a man to fish, but if he goes six months between fishing trips? He's going to need a quick refresher on the best way to bait the hook.
Skills or procedures that employees only need a few times a year are terrible candidates for one-and-done training methods. Instead, you can support consistency and policy adherence by supplying performance support resources such as always-on-hand checklists and step-by-step references.
Hard copies can work for a handful of critical items if you can post them where they're most needed. However, you can only use that trick so many times before locating the right information becomes overwhelming.
Your secret weapons for robust, comprehensive performance support are searchable and browsable online resources that you optimize for mobile.
Mobile performance support empowers new employees with independence. And when existing employees need help with recall, they can self-serve. They avoid the embarrassment of asking "stupid" questions or the risk of making up their own answers.
So, your learners score an average of 90% in their formal learning courses. Great!
Now, what do they remember in a week?
In a month?
In a year?
You can reinforce your most important learning objectives with mobile refresher courses and/or mobile learning assessments.
Multiple exposures aid retention, as do multiple types of encoding – take the opportunity to mix it up a bit by pairing formal courses with mobile learning refreshers.
You can also use spaced assessments to analyze the effectiveness of your learning content, including data on retention over time.
We live in a rapidly changing world, and sometimes yearly refresher courses just don't cut it.
On the other hand, emails, memos, and newsletters are a risky option for critical knowledge updates – many employees won't read them at all, and those who do will skim them at best.
If you use mobile learning courses for your most important updates, you can track completion and comprehension of these policy or compliance changes.
This strategy has two built-in advantages.
First, you'll have hard data and a way to hold your learners accountable.
Second, your learners will come to understand that the updates you choose to emphasize with mobile learning are worth paying attention to. This will help them separate messages from background noise.
Adding mobile learning to your L&D toolbox may seem like a logistical headache, but it doesn't have to be. The right eLearning authoring tool can do the heavy lifting for you.
Maybe you're worried about your technical capacity for building eLearning that looks great across all devices and platforms. Maybe you're concerned that a mix of mLearning and traditional eLearning will lead to a lot of redundancy and wasted time.
dominKnow | ONE's got your back. Our Flow authoring mode empowers authors to create great-looking, interactive responsive content for all devices, even if they're a novice. At the same time, advanced users can easily create very customized experiences.
Still in love with fixed-pixel design? No problem. Our Claro authoring mode gives you a traditional eLearning look and feel that’s still accessible on a small screen. And our adaptable Claro theme player will adapt intelligently to screen size so the navigation never gets in the way.
dominKnow | ONE also makes concerns about redundancy…redundant. Both authoring modes allow you to reuse content – whether it's a single graphic, an entire module, or an assessment set. Update the common asset once to see changes in every project!
Reach out to us today to learn more about the possibilities – request a live demo with a dominKnow expert or try us out with a free 14-day trial.
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