Take Your Mobile Learning To The Next Level With Creative Design Strategies

With growing popularity of smartphones and tablets, mobile learning is increasingly finding acceptance. Its unique features are changing the way we design, develop, and impart learning. In this article, I will focus on some design ideas that can create the right impact for a mobile learning implementation.

A Powerful Tool In Your Arsenal: Creative Design For Mobile Learning

I feel that companies investing in training to improve their human assets and reap benefits over the long run must consider mobile learning or mLearning. Almost everyone uses a smartphone or tablet for work and communication. The mobile platform also supports quality learning experiences. All this means that we can effectively deploy custom training programs to many people. In addition, we can harness the features of mobile learning to include games, location-based information, real-time support, and so on, to make learning much more engaging and personalized. The future belongs to mobile learning, and you don’t want to be left behind without this powerful tool in your arsenal!

A Revolution, Really?

Your three-year-old niece may be adept at handling your smartphone better than you; so, what’s the big deal, you may think. “How can a small hand-held device be revolutionizing the way we learn?”, you may think. But, the truth is that mobile learning is indeed revolutionizing the learning domain. Here’s how:

Learning Anytime, Anywhere

Don’t you agree that the original purpose of eLearning was anytime and anywhere learning at the comfortable pace? The question is, was this really accomplished? Most of the eLearning takes place on desktops or laptops. Desktop learning again is slightly restrictive as it makes learners take the learning only during the office hours and at specific times. Even with laptops, I wonder if learners feel comfortable opening laptops at home to finish a compliance course.

With the advent of mobile phones, we have seen an exponential rise in people using it as an extension of their body for many purposes. People do shopping, make payments, watch movies, play games, text and what not.

This is the reason why companies should look to harness learning through mobile phones. The great part is that mobile learning can be taken at home or during commuting. Learners are in a comfortable zone if you ask me. This learning content is still trackable as the content is hosted on an LMS. People are more hooked to their phones than laptops and that is the advantage that learning professionals should take. I feel mobile learning is still being underutilized.

Mobile Learning Can Still Be Very Creative

Where there is a will, there’s a way goes the adage. Just because the real estate is smaller, does not mean that you can’t be creative with your designs for mobile learning. There are a variety of ways you can implement creative designs and make your mobile learning experience rich and immersive.

Let’s look at a couple of design ideas:

Course 1: Fully Responsive Course On Hospitality

In this course on hospitality sector, we designed the course to work as a fully responsive course that would work on multiple devices. It has a similar design for both the laptop and the mobile version.

The responsive framework allowed us to creatively align the pictures, text, and have right interactions.

The sample screenshot is given below:

Course 2: Fully Responsive Course On Active Listening

This course was developed for a customer to train their sales force on the importance of active listening as part of the soft skills training. This fully responsive course had interesting interactivities and scenarios helping learners to perform better on sales calls. The course worked seamlessly on multiple devices. Again, the designs were created in such a way that the experience on a laptop and a smartphone are similar.

The sample screenshot is also given below:

Some Ideas From The Classroom

The traditional classroom setup where the trainer teaches, and the learners listen and learn is also fast changing. With mobile learning, much of the “Teach” content or theoretical information is presented prior to the actual classroom session using mobile learning courses. Learners then use the classroom session to share their interpretations, debate, discuss, and build on what they have learned. This “flipped classroom” style of teaching improves the quality of the education imparted. Learners are better-skilled and equipped to transfer knowledge acquired to their jobs.

The Challenges Ahead

The success of mobile learning hinges on learners being comfortable with mobile devices to a certain extent. Mobile learning also relies extensively on the learner’s active participation. Questions that you need to ask are:

• What if you want to deploy mobile learning, but only some of your employees are comfortable with smartphones?
• What if your employees want to bring their own devices to learn; how can you deploy your mobile learning across different mobile platforms?
• How can you ensure your employees are motivated to learn through mobile learning?

Leave all these and other similar worries to our ID strategists. At Tesseract Learning, our ID strategists will walk you through each step of designing, developing, and deploying your custom mobile learning.

Source: https://www.tesseractlearning.com/blog/take-your-mobile-learning-to-the-next-level-with-creative-design-strategies.html