10 Best Practices When Creating Learning Courses for Mobiles.

Time and again, mobile learning has proved that it can stand up to its hype. And with the Millennial generation surging up in workplaces, m-learning has become indispensable. In fact, according to recent research, "71% of Millennials say they connect more with mobile learning than L&D activities delivered via desktop or formal methods."

Yes, the modern employee is so used to the smartphone and accessing information at his/her fingertips. Be it entertainment, banking, social networking, shopping, or training, mobile phones rule the globe. Now, since mobile learning is such a necessity, you must have given some thoughts to implementing it in your organisation. However, simply making your materials accessible on mobile gadgets won’t do the job. You need to consider multiple other factors. Hence, to help you out, here are our 10 hand-picked best practices to create learning courses for mobiles.

1. Remove Unnecessary Information

When it comes to mLearning, you need to keep your content short. Include only the necessary information and share additional notes as handouts. Lengthy sessions not only consume precious hours but do not appeal to the modern on-the-go learner as well.

2. Increase the Loading Speed

On a phone, learners are prone to abandoning a course if it takes too much time to load. Some tips to increase the loading time include cropping graphics, compressing image sizes, and replacing large images with image maps. The last option piques the trainee’s curiosity levels and adds an interactive element to a mobile lesson.

3. Chunk the Content

One uses his/her smartphone for brief time periods. Therefore, from a design POV, you should chunk your mobile lessons into bite-sized sessions. In other words, you should opt for microlearning. NOTE: Mobile learning lessons should range from five to ten minutes in length and never more than fifteen minutes.

4. Optimise the Layout

You must consider the value of the correct placement of your important content. You need to keep in mind that mobile learners do not expect to see all the critical content as soon as they land on the screen. You can start creating the course by first introducing the employee to the course and then, guiding him/her to take more actions.

5. Test Prior to Your Launch

It is a huge mistake to launch a mLearning course without having tested it on multiple devices to ensure proper function and deployment. Now, do not depend only on one person during the testing process. Test the program with different users — starting from tech-savvy individuals to freshers. Finally, keep a record of your tests, the results, and the optimisations, for improvising the course and even future ones.

6. Pick a Responsive Design

When you say responsive design, it means that the content layout can adapt to any device. The screen could be the size of an Android phone, iPhone, iPad, or laptop. In each case, a responsive layout can be optimised as per the screen size — automatically!

7. Consider Your Target Audience

To best understand the corporate learning habits of your staff, talk to your employees and their managers. Gauge their learning habits. Analyse commonly asked questions, learners’ approaches for gathering information, and peer-to-peer interactions. When you know your end audience, you can design impactful mlearning courses that meet their requirements and address their gap areas.

8. Simplification is Key

In mobile learning management system, you should refrain from using too many features and options. It will simply end up confusing the learner. When you add more buttons, graphics, and paragraphs, the screen appears cluttered and complex. Again, mobile users usually use their devices with one or two thumbs. Hence, you must design the course while considering this user behaviour.

9. Keep an Eye on the Design Aspects & Engagement/Interaction Elements

While creating mobile-friendly training modules, use simple menu styles, increase the spatial size of buttons, and enlarge interface elements like buttons. Again, if you wish to up the engagement factor, go for gamified learning modules — something that can be easily achieved with a platform like playablo.

10. Include Feedback

Mobile devices are accessible 24×7 to the learner. You can take advantage of this fact to send out quick messages and notification about new additions to mobile learning materials and segments. Learners can then know which modules are unfinished and which classes need more attention.

Conclusion

eLearning is constantly evolving with the use of mobile devices. Therefore, you need to be wary of the continual changes that are introduced in this methodology — so that your corporate training modules are up-to-date as per the latest trends. Or, you can seek the guidance of our experts at playablo, who will do all the hard work for you while you relax and concentrate on other important tasks!

PlayAblo is an award-winning cloud-based learning platform that offers multi-device support, microlearning modules, and analytics, gamification among other features.