Mobile platforms are no longer the future; it’s where we’re at today. Our on-the-go culture isn’t slowing down. Whether learners are waiting for their lunch in a line at the deli or for an appointment at the doctor’s office, they want the most up-to-date information readily available across all different platforms but, most particularly, on their smartphones and tablets. Your employees expect their workday to be as mobile as their lifestyle. Developing a mobile learning strategy will be imperative to have more engaged, efficient, and connected employees in 2022 and beyond. Creating mobile courses for workers to turn to any time, anywhere, will guarantee your training is part of the movement. The purpose of this blog post is to help you develop a framework on how to start implementing a mobile learning strategy for your company or your client's company. Take note! The ingredients and mindset to design a mobile course are VERY different (check out the differences here). It’s all about getting your toes in the mobile learning waters and start experimenting. Once you identify what works, scaling up will be a given.

Isn't it natural that eLearning courses should be designed around what the learners are expected to do? This is called backward design, where you keep the end in mind before developing the course. It is radically different from the traditional way in which eLearning courses are designed, which is to "dump" knowledge on the learners and hope they will find "some" use for it.

Students today expect courses to be designed to accommodate multiple devices; do your courses deliver? Long gone are the days when students would only use desktop computers to access a fixed eLearning course. Today’s students are using devices of all sizes and shapes — their mobile phones, tablets, laptops, and personal computers — and they’re often switching between them multiple times per day depending on their location. Nearly all millennials (87%) say they use two to three devices per day, and employees from all generations are expecting to receive training and learning on their mobile devices. Is your course meeting their needs? If you haven’t yet implemented Responsive eLearning, then it’s likely many students have, or will soon, move on to somewhere else.

Training is an essential part of any company’s success in the 21st century. That’s a fact. But instead of simply settling by training your employees and hoping for the best, you should aim higher. A well-planned training program will lead to higher retention rates among employees and faster results for your company. But what makes a successful training program in 2022 and beyond? Some companies are still a decade in past — relying only on long eLearning courses or even worse, depending on instructor-led courses to bring their employees up to speed. This is an ineffective, and time-consuming way to train your workforce.

Mobile learning is a popular (and effective) trend in today's learning realm. When it comes to the format and design of mobile learning, as a designer, you will have many elements to consider. Here are our top ten strategies for designing nuggets of mobile learning goodness:

Chief learning officers, learning leaders, and training coordinators everywhere are well aware of the need to increase mobile training programs. After all, 74% of employees say they access resources from their smartphones to do their jobs— and that number is expected to continue to grow.

Let’s be honest: your employees use smartphones and tablets every day, everywhere — including in your workplace.

When we think of the word, motivation, instantly two things come to mind. First, when we are young, many outside things motivate us, a desire to do something, the reality of punishment from our parents, positive and negative reinforcement of what we are doing, etc. All of these things help to motivate children, and in some cases, it has a positive effect, and in other cases, it does not. The more proactive the motivation, the more positive the response to that motivation, the more reactionary the motivation, the more negative the response. The second picture that comes to mind is a learned reaction to something. Like Pavlov and his dogs, which would salivate when he rang the bell, motivation can be at times subconscious. However, there are much more things that drive the motivation of human beings, and in the arena of learning, there are some critical pieces to the puzzle that have to be developed so that learners feel the value of what they are learning and how it will benefit them. The rewards of their success must be considered from a variety of sources and satisfy them on a variety of levels, and as instructional designers of e-learning programs, we must not only understand these factors but be skilled in utilizing them in the courses that we design.