What’s happening in mobile learning? Here’s what we were reading in February:

Lessons from Experts

Hear from mobile learning expert, Sarah Gilbert in this ATD podcast. She speaks about the evolution of mobile learning and the need to leverage it in Learning & Development. Using interesting analogies and examples, she reminds us of the increasingly mobile world we live in and how that is changing the way we work. She emphasizes the need for L&D to have an understanding of mobile’s implication and hints that it’s no longer about the access alone.

Best Practices

Here’s an excellent article about designing a UX rich mobile educational program for low-income female entrepreneurs in Tanzania. This voice and SMS based educational program was funded by GSMA and was developed by a mobile operator named Tigo.

Given technical limitations in the region, they make an impressive effort to evaluate the user expectations and understand the user experience of both the learning content and the experience of the solution itself. Alexandra Tyres shares highly useful points to consider when developing the mobile education content, and touches upon the essentials of UX design as well.

Trends

App Based Pedagogy is an evolving learning model that may not fit the bill with traditionalists who may be looking for answers to Reflection, Discussion and Assessment on mobile devices. This article casts light on this model and highlights possible sweet spots like gamification, onboarding, and other areas to integrate mobile apps with the larger picture of Learning and Performance support.

Extending the story, Mason Martin explores how performance supported has manifested in the workplace and explains the benefits of mobile performance support while subtly hinting the underlying use case.

At Qualcomm, we strongly advocate this approach and have created more than 50 apps that support just-in-time learning and performance support needs. What does your organization do with mobile learning? ATD and i4cp are running a survey to study the role of mobile technologies in organizational learning. Have your say and get free access to the final report!

House Favorite

Talking about mobile design, here’s a super useful and comprehensive article about mobile design trends prevailing in China.

Why China?

1. Their tech scene is pretty volatile, always exploring bleeding edge technologies,
2. their device ecosystem is significantly more varied,
3. mobile is massive, and has long ago overtaken other modes of connectivity, and
4. their consumer mobile market is growing faster than ever and attracting more attention from businesses.

The author does a great job of covering the “light app” revolution, mobile relevance to Chinese marketplace, and offers visuals of some of their cool apps that are otherwise lost in translation.

Did we miss anything? Let us know in the comments.