Smartphones, tablets and other devices have taken over our everyday life. For the past 8 years, since the arrival of the 1st iPhone on the market, their uses have changed the world and how we do things. New practices appeared, brought by the evolution of new mobile technologies and a evenly shared broadband, which deeply changed our behaviors. Welcome to the Mobile learning revolution!
Whether it is professional training, personal development or everyday life, today’s adults get their information and learn far differently than in the past. Boundaries between professional and personal modes are not as watertight as they used to be. In this age of the BYOD (Bring Your Own Device), Human Resource departments and training leaders gradually measure the reality of the mobile learning revolution and the major impacts they bring about in the conception of an eLearning strategy within a company.
In the United States, where learning strategies are being heavily invested in, the mobile learning revolution is already widely deployed by larger companies.
According to a Brandon Hall Group study, an influential US analysis firm, 100% of the highest performing companies practice mobile learning.
Mobile Learning Interests In Professional Training
If you are hesitating to buy in or if you are looking for arguments against, this is a quick overview of the mobile learning interests in professional training.
- Making training accessible to the majority in the BYOD era. If eLearning opens the door to a company’s capability to mass train one’s employees, mobile learning eliminates any and all training accessibility issues. Being able to access knowledge wherever you are is one of the greatest strengths of mobile learning.
- Enhancing learners’ skills by assessing one’s improvement before, during and after the training. By its very nature, mobile training is always within easy reach. By including the many assessment formats afforded one, (quiz, fill-in-the-blank exercises, etc...) the employee can train at their leisure, anywhere and at any time. Training managers can organize and plan their post-training assessments by utilizing the various training tools available, for example, the push function on smartphones to communicate with employees on their results.
- The ability to personalize and measure training content: mobile learning allows the tracking of the learner’s behavior. This data can supply a predictive algorithm which can adapt the training as close as possible to the learner’s needs. All these metrics allow not only an optimization of the training content but also skill improvements for a more qualitative learning.
- Motivating and enjoyable training: the pleasure to learn is at the heart of all training achievements. Getting inspiration from the best applications to create motivating and social applications made easy for mobile use facilitates ownership by the employees.
- “Just in time learning” training content. The employee should be able to quickly access information, receiving in minutes an applicable base of knowledge to prepare for a client appointment, or simply refreshing a skill.
- Provide reliable technology, with a global capacity for deployment. Statistics have proven this with over 85% of users preferring to use an app rather than a web browser. The advantages are obvious: fluidity of the interfaces, “offline” use, and operational speed.
- Agile and economical projects. The managing of training content reuse, adaptable and updated in real time, represents a considerable economy of scale.
- The enhanced reality promise. It is one of the main points facing us in the foreseeable future of mobile learning. It is a superposition of 3D information, with an immersion effect which increases the reality perceived by the user on visual and sound backgrounds. The learner will be able to evolve in a particular universe, as in video games, by acting on objects and commands. With a present solid base of powerful technical progression and strong technological expansions, the mobile learning revolution promises new learning approaches which are more personalized, fluid, and simplified. With it, a new age for professional training is in sight!
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