Mobile Learning: Buzzword or Training Accelerator?

You have been asked to make sure that everybody in your company has been trained on a new process for booking holidays. That seems simple enough, doesn’t it? A generic request for everybody in the company?

Okay, so let’s get started with a solution.  Assuming we choose to go down the route of eLearning, how would that look? We could have an eLearning program that shows this new process via simple, block-style animation. We could even verify learners’ understanding by asking them to reconstruct the correct process of booking a holiday with a drag-and-drop interaction.

“Mobile learning” is a buzzword which has quite a considerable amount of staying power. Your boss has asked you to “Make sure learners can do this training on their mobile device.” You check your LMS and right there in the sales literature, it says “Supports mobile learning.” Brilliant, you don’t have anything to worry about…. Right?

Let’s take a slight detour to discuss the fundamentals of mobile learning before we come back to our example. Our lives are far busier than they were 10 or 15 years ago, and the demands that modern society place upon us mean that we have very little time when we’re not actually doing something. So, mobile learning can be most effective when it makes productive use of the minor time gaps between the important tasks we do daily.

Okay - How do we do that?

There are some use cases where an audiobook format would be absolutely perfect. Let’s just say as an example, a 3-page PDF document that you would normally be asked to read could instead be read to you. You could be sitting on the 1706 to Glasgow Central and you could get all the necessary information from this PDF document delivered through your headphones - perfect.

But let’s go back to the holiday booking process complete with our animated diagram of the correct process. Do the animation blocks or text labels display with enough detail or clarity on a mobile device? This presents a big issue for mobile learning. When this course was designed, it was designed for people to complete it using a desktop or laptop.

So, going back to the 1706 to Glasgow Central (now approaching Livingston North) and learning on a mobile device, how does one complete a drag-and-drop process replication exercise on a smartphone which has a screen of about 5 inches, all while on a train which may, or may not, occasionally jolt unexpectedly?

If there were six parts to the process that were displayed on the screen and we asked the learner to drop each of the six parts of the process into the correct drop zone, then each of the process blocks would probably be somewhere in the region of 0.4 inches wide. Is it realistic to expect a user to be able to complete a drag-and-drop exercise on a smartphone in these conditions?

For a very simple drag and drop exercise, this might be realistic. However, for a more complicated drag and drop exercise, this would not be something that a user could realistically do on a mobile device. Drag and drop is one of only 12 or so standard e-learning interactions, but it is one of the most common. So how do we address this issue? Let’s start with the simplest solution: Offer the learning content in multiple formats. Most learning management systems can leverage at least two different activity types to suffice coursework needs.

How would this work in practice? If I have content to present to my learners, I may have to author it in different ways. If we stick with our Holiday Request Process as an example, the author may have to write an explanation of the process for transcription and audio recording, and let the learner listen to a narrator explain it. This option would make learning on a train or a bus much easier because, instead of having to interact with my device, I can put some headphones on and digest the information.

The Issue with this solution comes from the need for interactivity, engagement, and proof of learning and understanding. If someone is simply listening to an explanation of a process, how should we then go about checking that the learner got all the key learning points and that the training was successful?  In addition, we cannot expect all learners to be equally comfortable with receiving the material in an audio format as opposed to a visual/kinetic format.

With an audio-only course, this is very difficult. One way to solve for this is a 2-part course.  An audio portion in which the learner is fed the information and a second portion where the learner is asked simple questions to gauge comprehension. This course would have probably been originally envisaged as an eLearning course with a rich graphical interface. With limited real estate on mobile, it’s difficult to replicate this functionality.

Most mobile browsers allow for Pinch to zoom and two-finger page scrolling, so if we did nothing to our original eLearning course and just displayed it in a mobile browser then, technically, the user would be able to complete the course. This is the reason that I am skeptical about when people tell me yes, you can complete this e-learning course on your mobile device.

Learners need choice. Would the learner like to listen to the information that they are required to learn? If so, we can record an audio version of the course and then ask the learner to complete an exercise or assessment to confirm comprehension. Or would the learner prefer to complete a more traditional eLearning course, but with a design focus on small real estate? This would most likely take the shape of scrollable text boxes without the graphic elements like associated photographs or imagery. This would also apply to things like activities and animations. They would have to be very simple to be viewable on a very small screen.

Depending on the use case, you may need to build three separate versions of a single course. A standard eLearning course for PCs or laptops, a mobile friendly e-learning course which takes away all the graphical elements and makes decisions based on real estate over aesthetic properties, and the third option heavily focused on audio elements such as narration with simple validation after the learner has heard the content.

One might ask which of these three options is best. The answer largely depends on factors like depth of content, available resources, and desired flexibility of learning. These days, it’s common to get the learner in, give them the content they require, and get them “graduated” as soon as possible. The days of 30-minute eLearning courses are behind us, as learners want fast courses with no frills.

To that end, if told by management that we could only offer one version of this course, I would go with the narration and validation method. Even if your learner is not halfway to Glasgow by now, their lives are without a doubt very busy, and giving them the option to multitask would be helpful in terms of completion rates. Their learning preference might be frightening for us as learning professionals, but as humans, we understand that this is the life we live now. A lot of our learning will take place in between meetings or in the minuscule cracks in our schedule.

Making an LMS display “mobile” courses may be possible, but the trick is building courses that are optimized for mobile consumption from the start. To successfully build a course that is mobile-friendly, you need to think about managing resources. Everything in a mobile-friendly course is about making the most out of what you have available to you.

1. Screen Size: How can you maximize what you show without screen clutter? Remember, even in the smartphone market, there are huge variations in screen size and resolution.  It’s safer to work to the lowest common denominator so that you know everyone will be ok.
2. Data: How can you make the course as data-efficient as possible? Fancy HD graphics are all well and good in an office with brilliant Wi-Fi, but remember, your audience may well be next to me on the 1706 to Glasgow Central (Now approaching Armadale, mind the gap). They are probably paying for their own data usage and the signal strength will ebb and flow. A solid color vector background at 6kb against a full HD photo image background at 2.8mb is going to be necessary trade-off.
3. Session length: Mobile learning sessions need to be short and punchy. Let the user get in, get what they need, and get out. If your course content runs to 30 minutes, it might be a good idea to revisit the bare minimum requirements you have set and be honest with yourself and your stakeholders, or break the content down into several smaller sessions.
4. Easy = Happy: Make the course easy to consume and engage with. I am not suggesting making the content easy, but rather making the course easy to use. Nothing will lose your audience quicker than bugs, crashes, and confusion.
5. Test. Test. Test: Before you launch your course try and test it on as many devices as you have. My mum has a brand of smartphone I had never heard of before and I borrow it to check all my courses. Please don’t forget to check your course in the real world, the course might work perfectly on your office Wi-Fi, but what about sitting on a bench at the park on 4G…. if nothing else it gets you out of the office for 15 minutes, bring bread and feed the ducks.

In the future, we can anticipate a rise in demand of “at my convenience” training from learners. Mobile learning will definitely play a larger and larger role in how we all learn. If you need any proof of this, look at the YouTube shorts or TikTok learning trends… How do people consume content on these platforms? You got it - on their mobile.