Beginners guide to mlearning: How do you know when to go mobile?

The mobile education explosion has led to many organisations trying to make everything available on mobile devices. In the same way that early efforts at elearning simply put PowerPoint slide decks, perhaps with notes cut and pasted out of an associated manual, on to web pages, we now see training organisations repeating the mistakes of the past. Some of this may be the result of pressure from a CEO who has fallen in love with his or her Christmas present iPad or iPhone and wants “everything available on my mobile. NOW!” Others are jumping to mlearning because of the “Me Too” attitude so prevalent during the .COM boom of the nineties. It is easy(ish) to migrate the lot and say, “We have an extensive mobile training environment”, even if it is not appropriate training. The flexibility of responsive content development options, such as HTML5, means that a training group can build content once and then have it available on all platforms pretty much automatically. This does offer platform choice, but it does not necessarily make for good training. It can even taint the experience of mobile users, such that they have the same unsatisfactory learning experience that they had with the early elearning.

I have come up with four key categories that should affect your decision to go mlearning and your design strategy. I have put these in alphabetical order, because they are all important and interdependent. You may note that I have not included an educational reasons section, but I think that education excellence already permeates all out thinking.

Audience

Find out what your people want and need. This should be meat and drink to everyone in training, but it is remarkable how much training is pushed out to users rather than requested by them. 

You need to know:

• How consumers work with mobiles. Your target training audience needs to buy into the whole mlearning and mobile strategy. Make sure that you know whether they want or are ready for mlearning. If the majority of your audience does not use mobile devices or only uses tablets, then your will need to do a good deal of preparatory work, probably with a very targeted pilot.
• How consumers want to consume. Find out how open your users are to mlearning. This may be a case of gathering some basic usage information, such as do you use a mobile device, what do you use it for, and so forth. With this information you could try publishing a proof of concept and getting feedback. This may sound like a lot of effort, but without it this basic ground-work you are guessing.
• What the attitude is to training. You need to understand what the users’ attitudes are to training in general. Mlearning is often done in personal time, rather than in the office or in a formal setting. Does this appeal to your users, or will they regard it as an imposition or training on the cheap? You need to find out whether life-long learning is a concept with which they are familiar and to which they are attracted. If the responses are generally negative to learning outside a formal setting, you will need to sell the personal value of life-long learning.
• What consumers want to consume. Find out what your users would find useful to have available to them on their mobile devices. There is always an element of top-down imposition of training, but you must include content that will be attractive and useful for your target audience. This will give you a far greater chance of achieving a successful deployment. Make sure that you identify what is new training content and what is performance support content.
• Generational differences in your workforce. Marc Prensky (Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants, 2001) stirred up a hornets’ nest of debate in the educational world. His much discussed premise is loosely that people born in around the 1980s are digital natives and those born before are digital immigrants; the former feel instinctively comfortable with digital technologies and the latter have to work at it. I can, and have, argued about the validity of this, but you should be aware that Generation Y staff are not only more used to using Web 2.0 technologies but also expect to use them in all aspects of their lives, including training.

Business

Good old-fashioned training needs analysis is still the single most important step in developing training. For mlearning it is possibly even more important. Make sure that you involve users as well as sponsors in your decision-making processes.

You need to know

• The business goals. As always, make sure that you understand the business goals, but now you have to make a specific review of these as they pertain to users who are likely to want or need to learn using a mobile device. It may sound a little brutal, but you should start with easy wins. Mobile support or sales staff are far more likely to use mlearning, because they are more used to working independently and remotely.
• The budget. You need to use your budget wisely. Spending a fortune on designing a snazzy front end and then only having enough to publish a set of PDFs behind it is a bad idea. You are better to use your initial budget to deliver a small but successful pilot, as this can breed more budget.
• The success criteria. This is tightly linked to budget. I am not suggesting a full return on investment study here, though you can if you wish. You need to look at addressing the goals that will make a business impact and understand how that impact will be measured. You may deliver the best mlearning in the world, but if it does not deliver change that the board regard as proof of success it will be regarded as a failure. Make this a tick list of must deliver points and make sure that everyone involved in the project has identified how they can contribute to fulfilling the success criteria.
• The training scope. Make sure that you have a training scope. Moving everything to mlearning is almost certainly unrealistic; don’t promise to do it. Make the scope challenging but achievable; if it is not challenging, no one will be impressed by the results and if it is not achievable you will fail.

Current training

Your mlearning is just a part of your overall training and learning strategy, so don’t regarded it a unique or separate. You need to be sure that it fits with existing training, rather than replacing or duplicating it. Bear in mind that learners who take your current training will expect continuity of message and approach, even if the format and delivery medium are new. You should review your current offering to identify how mlearning will integrate, extend, or even replace parts of your training curricula.

• Review current training for mlearning opportunities. You probably review your training curricula regularly, but now you have to review curricula, courses, lessons and topics to see which could be more appropriate as mlearning items of which could benefit from mobile performance support content. You need to identify elements that are self-contained, directed to an audience who are remote or appear to be more receptive to mlearning usage.
• Review learner comments. You and the board may not be the only people who feel that mlearning is a good idea. If you have student comment data, you should surface and analyse any student comments regarding mobile-ready content.
• Identify training that may be suited to mlearning migration. As part of your review of learners’ comments, you should also identify any training content that they may have requested as being available outside the training environment or that should be updated regularly. It may be that some of you training—especially things like mandatory training that occurs annually—may be better suited to elearning or mlearning.

Technology

There are some basic traps to avoid, and the first goes back to your enthusiastic CEO. If your audience is primarily made up of Android users and you create iOS solutions because that is what the CEO wanted, you will have a problem on your hands.

You need to know:

• What devices your audience uses and how they like to use them. This sounds basic, but you must be sure that you understand the devices that your users use. There are lots of subtle differences which may require different design approaches. This is particularly the case if you need to ensure that your users can run mlearning content offline. You may be attracted by the flexibility of using responsive HTML5 so that all devices can run your training (well that’s the idea), but if your users want or need to run the training without being connected to the Internet, then you may need to develop app-based training solutions.
• What devices and browsers your IT department supports. Unless you have an organisational Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) standard you will need to understand what devices your IT department are happy to support. You may find issues with connectivity, authentication, content rendering, and many, many others, even if you adopt a “standard” development options such as HTML5. There is no point creating training and then finding that it is not available to lots of your users. Ask first and you will find that you get far more enthusiastic support from the IT bods.
  You will also need to test. Don’t assume that an “open” standard will work on every device. Your IT team will not be happy if they have to handle increased support call volumes because you didn’t test your training content.
• The potential for mobile integration with your LMS. This could have gone in several categories, but I have put it here because it is often a challenge that needs a technical solution. If you have an LMS and track user training to develop management information reports then you need to be sure that your mlearning can update your LMS tracking system. Issues with this particular area come in the form of problems with offline training; the LMS can record the progress of people who are connected, but not those who aren’t. You may have a SCORM-compliant LMS, but you may need to consider a solution that conforms to the Experience API/Tin Can API and can update a learning record store. (For a great review of the Experience API and what it offers, read Alex Mackman’s blog on the subject http://www.cm-group.co.uk/blog/scorm/thoughts-on-tin-can-and-the-future-of-elearning/).