What Is Mobile Learning? Benefits & mLearning Tools (2024)
- February 6, 2023
Mobile learning has been around since the early 2000s, but soared in popularity post-COVID when companies transitioned to remote work. Corporate mobile learning is now becoming an essential strategy in every organization’s learning & development strategy as it offers enhanced engagement, improves retention, and caters to remote teams.
What Is Mobile Learning?
Mobile learning (or mLearning) refers to the process of online learning via a personal mobile device such as smartphones, tablets, or laptops. This training method empowers learning on the go, enabling users to access content whenever and wherever they want. Mobile learning content comes in a variety of forms, such as podcasts, videos, quizzes, or eLearning courses that help increase engagement and boost learning retention.
Key Features of Mobile Learning
Some of the major features of mobile learning include:
1. Microlearning content
Mobile learning is often used to deliver microlearning content, where learning sessions are broken into small, bite-sized information modules. Small bursts of relevant information helps maintain learners’ attention and bolster knowledge retention.
2. Social learning
With the aim of replicating online behaviors, mobile learning often utilizes social learning by incorporating a forum, newsfeed, or chat function for learners to ask each other questions, connect with colleagues and share their insights. This encourages peer-to-peer learning among cohorts of employees, students, or any type of learner.
3. Easy access
Mobile learning makes training content accessible for employees at all times which increases engagement and makes training conveniently available on the go.
4. Dynamic learning
People learn better when they are taught using formats they are comfortable with. For example, some are visual learners, while others are auditory learners. Classroom teaching seldom considers different learning preferences, but mobile learning helps resolve this issue. Mobile learning supports all media types, such as images, presentations, audio files, videos, and eLearning features, to create a dynamic and engaging learning experience.
Advantages of Mobile Learning in the Workplace
Here are a few benefits of mobile learning.
1. Reaches the modern learner
Millennials, who now make up over half of the global workforce, don’t just use their mobile phones; they are attached to them. This is why it makes sense that the easiest way to reach the modern learner is through the device that they use and rely on the most – mobile phones.
2. Availability
With mobile learning, learners get easy access to helpful materials wherever and whenever required.
3. More engaging
Having learning at their fingertips makes it more engaging for learners. Also, the interactive elements and different types of learning formats add to the learning experience.
4. Cost-effective
Conducting in-person classroom training can be expensive for businesses considering the costs of renting a space, hiring an instructor, printing out training materials, covering travel and food expenses, and even taking into account lost productivity from time spent in the training.
Switching to mobile learning eliminates these costs immediately. Moreover, the increased engagement with mobile learning also means higher completion rates and higher ROI.
Challenges of Mobile Learning
Let’s discuss some of the disadvantages of mobile learning.
1. Distractions
Mobile devices can be a distraction because of the constant text messages and notifications popping up. Therefore, it requires self-discipline and focus from the learner to make the most of mobile learning programs.
Having said that, if you put in the extra effort to make your training interactive, engaging, and fun, learners could easily ignore the distractions.
2. Smaller screen
Mobile learning might only work well for some types of content. For instance, technical topics with detailed images may not be visible on a small screen. A bigger screen may work better for some tasks requiring more visualization and details.
3. Network issues
Remote places often have insufficient network coverage and thus poor internet access which can disrupt the mobile learning experience.
Reasons to Use Mobile Learning in Corporate Education
Here are some of the most important reasons for you to use mobile learning for corporate training programs.
1. Real-time feedback
Getting instant results encourages and engages learners, and mobile learning can deliver it. With mobile learning, quizzes or assessments can be instantly scored, and mistakes can be addressed immediately.
Furthermore, if learners have any queries or concerns regarding the training content or mobile learning application, they can easily send their feedback, query, or suggestion to the IT support team.
2. Effective for remote teams
Mobile learning is effective for remote training as it takes advantage of the fact that most people already have their smartphones and can quickly engage in short bursts of learning at their convenient time and place. For instance, parents working from home may not find time to sit at their computer to complete an hour-long course – or perhaps their children may use the computer for their learning activities. In these cases, it’s much easier to engage with a quick lecture or practice activity they can complete on their phone.
3. Saves time
Mobile learning is easy to create and disseminate. Training managers can update and deliver courses to their dispersed teams within minutes, saving valuable time.
4. Better knowledge retention
Delivering training via mobile can improve knowledge retention by 55% compared to traditional training methods.
This is because mobile learning often includes content such as small-scale animations, videos, and gamification broken down into small bite-size chunks or brief paragraphs. Short-form content increases information retention, resulting in a more informed workforce and better ROI on your training investment.
5. Enables learning on the go
The days when employees had to sit back and attend an hour-long training lecture every day are long gone. With mLearning, people can learn from anywhere as they get instant access to relevant content at all times.
Mobile learning encourages continuous learning as employees can make the most of their free time by completing training lessons on the go. Continuous learning is key to fostering a highly productive, engaged, and motivated workforce empowered to perform at their best.
Tips for Optimizing Your Mobile Learning Programs for Your Organization
Create effective mobile learning programs for your workforce by following these simple tips.
1. Make it easy to start
Most people are resistant to any form of change, be it adopting new technology or shifting from traditional classroom training to mobile training. In order to overcome resistance, it is vital to make the new mobile learning platform as easy as possible for users to adopt.
Learners will decide in the first 4-5 clicks whether the mobile learning platform is worth the effort. Therefore, keep the onboarding steps to the minimum to reduce friction and make it easy to resume learning once logged in. Giving learners direct access to learning content without needing to log in is also a great technique to engage and attract them to the mobile learning platform.
2. Design for mobile
Mobile learning is more complex than shrinking an existing desktop eLearning platform to fit into a smartphone screen. Think about how you and your learners use a mobile phone and then build on that to create an interactive and engaging mLearning experience. Here are a few things to consider while designing your mobile learning courses.
- Since mLearning content is manipulated with a finger, keep all clickable interface elements large to avoid any challenges for the user.
- Place the most important buttons and notifications in the center, so users can immediately see and easily access them.
- Remove unnecessary words and break down lengthy sentences. One line must only contain a maximum of 40 characters.
- It’s better to use sans-serif fonts such as Arial, Verdana, or Trebuchet, as they are more convenient to read from a phone.
- Avoid hyperlinks because users might unintentionally tap on a link when swiping between pages.
3. Use smaller chunks of content
Extensive courses are not meant for mobile devices. It’s better to break your training material into short consumable modules for learners to study on the go anytime and anywhere. Microlearning content that lasts about 2-5 minutes provides crisp and relevant information, maintains learners’ attention, and bolsters retention.
4. Use video content
According to Google, people are 3X times more likely to watch a YouTube video tutorial than to read a manual or instructional document for a product. This is because we are more likely to retain information presented in video format, as it’s easier for our brains to comprehend.
Try incorporating video content into mobile learning with the educational goal of teaching a skill or imparting knowledge to the learner. Whether it’s for onboarding, or a software how-to tutorial, a training video is dedicated to educating learners on a specific topic and engaging them in their learning experience.
5. Experiment with gamification
Adding gamification into your learning, with features such as rewards, leaderboards, and opportunities to ‘level up’ help intrigue your employees and stir their desire to earn more points or badges while unconsciously encouraging them to complete the assigned learning. It makes the overall learning experience more enjoyable for the users, increases engagement, and improves productivity.
Top 5 Mobile Learning Tools
Here are some mobile learning tools for you to choose from.
1. EdApp
EdApp microlearning tool allows you to easily create your courseware to train teams of all sizes. The tool has many features directly usable by mobile devices, such as using microlearning to deliver learning directly to learners’ devices and sending push notifications to learners for any updates on new lessons or reminders of deadlines.
EdApp’s mobile microlearning can significantly increase a trainee’s intrinsic motivation and course completion rates as learners can access micro lessons whenever their schedules allow in as little as 5 or 10 minutes.
2. Talent Cards
Talentcards is a mobile learning platform that utilizes a flashcard approach which qualifies as bite-sized learning modules. The tool helps create microlearning courses in just three steps:
- Create card sets with your training material
- Add users to the platform and invite them to download the app
- Share your card sets for everyone to access on their smartphones
3. iSpring Suite
iSpring Suite is an excellent mLearning development tool that helps convert your learning content into comprehensive online mobile courses. iSpringtool comes with various publishing options such as Flash, HTML5, ZIP archives, .exe formats, etc.
The tool offers powerful capabilities to build engaging and interactive learning material easily accessible from all devices such as smartphones, laptops or tablets. Furthermore, employees can learn in offline mode on their mobile devices.
4. Adobe Captivate
Captivate facilitates creating eLearning courses and publishing them as web apps with the help of HTML5. The tool offers excellent features to simplify the development of mobile eLearning courses. These include reducing the content creation time by introducing Fluid Boxes, using white space to align objects automatically, and providing flexibility to convert existing desktop courses into responsive mobile learning content.
The content development tool also integrates with various existing LMSs and HTML5 catalog animations.
5. ProProfs LMS
ProProfs is a mobile-ready and platform-independent solution that supports continuous learning through increased mobility, thereby improving retention.
The platform works on different operating systems and devices and supports multimedia such as docs, images, videos, presentations, recorded webinars, and podcasts.
You also get access to a premium library of 100+ ready-to-use courses and templates that are designed by experts, are fully editable, and display well on all screen sizes. Furthermore, AI-powered reports and stats help track progress, course completion rates, and gaps in real time.
Whatever mobile learning platform you choose, driving app adoption and helping users discover new and underutilized features is of utmost importance to make the most of your training efforts. Implementing a Digital Adoption Platform (DAP), such as Whatfix, for mobile applications empowers you to achieve adoption goals through interactive in-app guidance and tutorials that enable users to learn by doing. You can create structured onboarding and self-paced training checklists to guide users through complex processes and drive the discovery of new features and advanced mobile capabilities.
Schedule a free demo with us to learn how to unlock the full potential of your mobile applications with Whatfix’s mobile-first digital adoption platform.
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