What is Effective Mobile Learning?

Tom Kuhn and Juliette Denny from Growth Engineering invited me to a Q&A session about mobile learning for ATD Atlanta. Below are some of the questions and answers from that session. It was a blast and many thanks to ATD Atlanta.

What is the difference between a mobile first strategy and a web-based first strategy?

This goes to your overall content strategy, really. In most of my work, I’ve needed to deliver learning experiences across multiple modalities. It’s important to consider the structural changes required for your team to do this. The philosophy behind “mobile first” is far from new. In the 70’s, SGML was created to provide descriptions for a document’s structure and other attributes. Building on that came the idea to separate content from its display. By doing this the content becomes much more portable. In our work, we often need to support various devices all with different display mechanisms. So, you hope to create a content strategy that’s agnostic to a specific device and is easily optimized for multiple channels. This isn’t easy. Only about 8% of the average L&D’s design and development time is spent on curating existing content. We are, by default, content creators. And too often we are marrying the content to the display of that content. In today’s environments, many of us are still focused first on delivering through the traditional web and then “converting” to mobile after. So, realistically, we have about a generation of workflows and processes to update. It’s important to evolve your workflow away from what traditional systems dictate and move toward device agnostic processes. One of the biggest challenges you will face is determining the level of interoperability with your existing infrastructure and an overreliance on specific tools that your staff become fluent in.

Let’s start with the main reason we’re here: what are the primary advantages and benefits of mobile learning?

From my perspective, mobile learning can have the most significant impact on the workplace and workforce productivity. Everyone everywhere is mobile. Everyone has a mobile device. We’re moving to everyone on earth being connected and as the digital era unfolds more of us are traversing multiple devices a day to get their work done. Learning is less and less a separate activity from everything else we do. All L&D should have a focus on mobile.

What are the indicators that you look for to validate that mobile learning is working for your company - in other words, ‘what does good look like?’

Well, I would look at this question from two lenses. First, let’s understand that mobile is a delivery method. It should be a part of an overall learning strategy. In many contexts it’s best suited for performance support, in others it can be leveraged to provide deeper learning experiences. Second, we need to understand how our target audiences use mobile devices while working. There are specific behaviors we engage in during the day while using our mobile devices. One of those behaviors involves finding information. How do you think most people use their device to find information? They search. There are different methods people use to search.

The key to crafting a useful, relevant, and meaningful mobile learning experience is to deeply understand your target audience’s mobile behavior in the context of how they perform their work.

More companies seem to be embracing mobile learning as an effective way to deliver learning. But what are some of the challenges that prevent some companies from embracing it?

It’s easy to make assumptions about how and why people may access and use a mobile device and that’s the worst thing you can do. You need to do the empathy work to uncover how your workplace impacts how people can access and use these devices vs. the assumptions we make about how they should use them. I can guarantee you that there are systemic barriers and blockers to enabling your workforce’s ease of use with mobile. They may be small, or they may be significant, but you will more than likely need to partner with multiple business functions to break them down and try to either overcome them or make design affordances for them. At my prior company, we developed a product knowledge app we wanted to make available on a company device offered to employees. This was a work device that employees used to perform tasks. The OS was Android and there was a decent size screen on the device. It was internet connected, relying on Wi-Fi. We needed to work with IT, marketing, communications, and the company’s mobile products group to ensure our app’s interoperability with the IT infrastructure, the usability and corporate branding guidelines, and where on the device our app icon would be located. This last element is key: our app icon was placed on the 4th home screen on the device. Notifications are turned off on this device. And these employees don’t have email. So, 4th home screen means the employee will never see it and there’s no way to notify them.

What type and level of resources are required to launch a mobile learning platform?

The age-old question here is buy or build. If L&D decides to build the experience internally, then you become software developers. Are you OK with that? Do you have the expertise? Do you have the IT support? If you buy, then you have the interoperability question – will the platform integrate into your existing infrastructure efficiently and economically and what level of compromise must you make to fit within the platform’s functionality? How quick to market do you need to get? In a previous role, I contracted engineering and designers to come in and work with our learning designers to build iterations of the product. We were able to work out how we would scale if the app was successful. I would always encourage you to build iteratively with prototypes and leverage design thinking as your process.

Don’t worry about scale when you start, but always have scale in mind.

For one app we needed to eventually scale broadly to support over 100,000 users, but we built the first several iterations with less than 200 users.

How do companies leverage their existing learning content libraries to take advantage of new mobile delivery capabilities?

Great question. We are de facto content creators. That is what we excel at. Mobile is a terrific opportunity to increase that percentage from the 8% curation number. Look at providers like Zoomi (zoom.ai) that leverage artificial intelligence to optimize your existing content and make it available for learning contexts. Algorithms can help you build perfectly adaptable content to increase hyper-individualized learning experiences without having to create more content manually. It’s a wake-up call for how L&D does what it does.

What does the future hold for mobile learning?

Technology is rapidly changing and evolving, but there’s one constant: work itself is not going to get less complex. We are expecting workers at every level to leverage technology to get their jobs done now, and that rabbit is forever out of the hat. We do have somewhat of a stable technology ecosystem now. I always design for operating systems, not hardware, and there are two primary OS’s and have been for quite some time. We are past the disruptive period where we had Windows Mobile, Blackberry, Android and what has become iOS. The caveat here is to understand device capabilities as it applies to cameras, sensors, and other hardware specific functionality. It’s easier to scale when you control the ecosystem rather than the open world of personal devices. But is your company ready to supply devices to employees if they don’t already? And what is the management process of those devices and how often will they be updated? An even more significant transition was from laptops to smartphones themselves. One area we have not done well in is designing mobile learning on mobile devices. There are still opportunities there and that area is still developing.

Do you have any design rules or best practices you follow when creating mobile learning experiences?

I love this description of mobile that Tom King provided for my book, "Well, first it’s important to realize that mobile is filled with contradictions. It’s pervasive and fleeting, it’s engrossing and distracting. It is cheap and costly at the same time. It’s easy to do and hard to get right." So, when preparing to design and delivery mobile learning, accepting compromises based on your expertise, your tools, and your systems is critical. Is it smart for you to deliver unique learning experiences on mobile, or should mobile be in the blend of an overall experience? Understanding how people spend time on their devices is key. Contrary to popular belief, people will spend time reading on their device. They will read long pieces of content if it’s relevant and meaningful to them. However, they will also hop app to app: get the notification, check their schedule, jump to Uber, send a text. The typical ID knows how to design content for knowledge transfer, so for mobile, that ID will need to know which trade-offs are necessary to meet the desired outcomes of the experience.

In the face of unforeseeable events like the coronavirus, can a mobile learning solution play a key role in a crisis situation? Or How are L&D leaders leading from the front in a time of crisis?

A global network of over 7.5 billion hyperconnected individuals created the pandemic. And this same network will solve it. Our world has turned upside down. One thing that’s become apparent is the criticality of the L&D function. L&D often in partnership with HR has a unique role to play in ensuring the humanity of work is preserved, recognized, and rewarded in these challenging times. Building deeper relationships, empathy, and healthier habits that help the workforce be their best is truly a key aspect being successful at work in general, but that’s amplified in times like these. Concerted efforts in well-being (including physical and mental), help keep the workforce motivated, healthy, and engaged in times of crisis and L&D should and can help with that. Technology can deliver more collaboration and communication for the workforce but it’s important to be cognizant of your corporate culture when integrating technology. Is transparency valued? Is there already an environment of communication and collaboration in the company? Technology can affect the culture in both positive and negative ways. Be sure to know how to facilitate the integration of technology in a positive manner. In some ways, our paradox is one of exponential growth vs severe regression. Our global hyper connectivity has rapidly expanded knowledge acquisition at an accelerating pace. We are continuously inundated with serendipitous connections that couldn’t have been anticipated just a few decades ago. Even with ubiquitous technology, we are urbanizing at a rate unheard of in human history – because we believe that being closer will increase efficiency and knowledge, all while we build digital infrastructures that do not require us to be close to one another. Mobile is a perfect communication channel for this crisis: get information to as many people as possible in a format that is saturated. 3.5 billion people on earth today carry a smartphone – that’s 45% of our population.

How can organizations better leverage their existing mobile learning capabilities to help them stay better connected to their employees during the coronavirus isolation underway?

Smartphones are the most advanced real-time collective content and learning mechanism ever created and we are heading to full global connectivity. We at almost half the world connected now. Using apps such as Slack. Teams, Messaging and others, mobile is the best way to keep up to date. We’re using Teams at Delta and we are in meetings and chats constantly. You must be careful about over-communicating and becoming a distraction in some respect, but what was normal in our communication channels before the pandemic is gone forever. Our companies and work teams are creating new ways of getting their work done through this crisis and a lot of that will stick. The vigorous debates about distributed work teams, security and privacy as it applies to technology, and team collaboration are being reframed. We will see what remains once we get into recovery.

Some companies are concerned that offering mobile learning exposes them to concerns about violating wage and hour guidelines that require employees to be paid when working after business hours. What is your guidance here?

My recommendation is to know what policies and procedures apply to your workforce. Can you support the use of personal devices? Can formal training only occur during scheduled work hours? And sometimes this can be regulated state by state. It’s more than likely different for salaried workers versus hourly workers. Too often organizations look at mobile learning first through the lens of the devices. This is not where to start. I’d recommend never starting with the technology.

Mobile learning is a confluence of people, culture and technology. Too often we let the technology drive the decisions.

Yes, we NEED the tech, but the tech needs to bend to the needs of the business outcomes. But it does beg a bigger conversation about the org’s culture. Do you have a true learning culture? Is learning looked at as a separate activity done outside of work? Your question is interesting because it proposes that learning is something that can only occur during scheduled work hours. That’s just not how we operate as a species – we still exist because we learn all the time. The fundamental question is how do you move from a transactional approach to training to one that is embedded into the work itself? Too often L&D is not in the conversation when work environments and systems are being designed and this is the burden we must carry. However, we must begin having a different type of conversation with our stakeholders and the deciders in our business to think about reorienting the L&D function to be more relevant in the digital age. Our skillsets approaches and even where we sit in the org structure needs to be reevaluated.

What role can gamification play in mobile learning?

I don’t see the integration of game mechanics to be unique to mobile learning. Again, mobile is a delivery method. Game mechanics can be integrated into multiple training methods. Context is important and quite frankly applicability of game mechanics relies on several factors: subject matter, audience demographics, desired performance outcomes. In a recent app, we integrated several game mechanics into the overall experience with some of the elements being more successful than others. We were interested in looking at game mechanics to drive motivation to engage. To some degree that worked. However, one mechanic, digital badges, were not well received by the audience. They didn’t see value in them, and they were a cultural anomaly. This is where your culture matters when you’re looking to integrate game mechanics into an experience. Should you have a reward mechanism? What do rewards mean to employees? How do they align to the company values? Another area to examine are the metaphors. I would recommend a metaphorical alignment to the game mechanics: does time and speed matter to the worker’s performance? Then a race car metaphor doesn’t apply. To successfully integrate game mechanics, make sure your designers are aware of how to design a game that leads to a learning outcome. Too much game and the play overcomes the learning and not enough game and the experience becomes confusing and potentially frustrating.

What are some of the most common reasons mobile learning fails to meet the expectations of learning leaders?

I made one assumption when creating a mobile solution for frontline retail workers -- that they’d mostly leverage a search function to find product information. And we built that functionality into the app. In user testing we discovered that search was not a primary way people wanted to get to the information. Through more comprehensive ethnography we’d have known that before we made that functionality a primary part of the experience.

Read more about mobile learning in my book (and enjoy the insights Tom King added about mobile learning), Learning in the Age of Immediacy: 5 Factors for How We Connect, Communicate, and Get Work Done.