Mobile is proving to be a technological tsunami that is sweeping all before it at a great speed and magnitude. Smartphones, tablets, the internet (“the cloud”), “always on”, global connectivity, and social communities. These bring with them new ways of working, playing and collaborating and are infiltrating our habits, behaviours, working practices and new ways of learning. New ideas can travel faster than ever before.
As a result, the structure of mLearning has moved from a focus on mobile devices to one that recognises learner behaviour, enhanced by:
- Devices – regardless of size and capability
- Connectivity – access to visit sources of information
- Social – support from peers, learning via work and external groups.
Mobile provides trainers and people who want to share knowledge the ability to connect with trainees and Customers. Mobile can deliver what people need, when they need it, wherever they are. It offers just-in-time solutions to immediate challenges via an on-line delivery system.
Recognition of this power and potential is moving more and more training providers to embrace a “mobile-first” strategy. They are re-framing what they offer to employees, starting not from the classroom, nor from the desk top PC, but rather from the learner first, supporting access to just what they need at their moment of need, wherever they are.
This approach appeals to “guerrilla learners”, self-motivated team members driven to improve their skills via on-line channels whether organisation supported or not. Guerrilla learners are competent in using internet and social networks as key resources, and a mobile-first strategy helps draw them back into the organisation’s own learning system as well as communicating the power and impact of mobile on the business.
Mobile is already a major part of employee’s lives. This embeddedness makes it the perfect means for enhancing learning and fostering sustained, continuous performance improvement in the workplace. Gottfredson’s and Mosher’s “Five Moments of Learning Need’ is a useful framework to understand how embedding learning can optimise performance.