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Mobile Is The Future — Are Your Online TrainingCourses Ready?

Computing power has doubled every two yearssince 1959. Your laptop today is roughly f our billiontimes more powerful than Eniac - the f irst mainf ramecomputer, built in 1949! Every smartphone and tabletis equipped with a camera, phone, or voice-over-internet access. Gone are the days when you had toyell at someone across the house to “get of f thephone” so you could use your very slow dial-upinternet. At its current evolutionary pace, computerswill have the processing power of the human brain by2030. So f asten your seatbelts!

With the enormous strides in technology that touchesonline training — graphics and display devices, artif icial intelligence, internet access — how do youkeep up? More importantly, what does this mean f or your organization? We know thattechnology continues to evolve exponentially and, despite Hollywood’s claims to thecontrary, continues to serve our needs — not us theirs!

Mobile Training On Your Doorstep

Stop what you’re doing right now and take a look aroundyour office. Take note of the amount of mobile computing thatyour co-workers are using right now. Some of the devicesmight be assigned by your organization; more of ten than notthey’re the mobile devices are ones that employees alreadyown.

Not too long ago the primary means to access the internet wasthrough a laptop or desktop computer. Mobile computing is agame changer and will af f ect the way an organization willdeliver training to its employees. As a result, corporate trainingdepartments have no choice but to consider tablet support in their business requirements.The good news is that the technology is already here — and works! Developing onlinetraining that both looks and works well on any device your staf f happen to use is something

that can happen right now. There are ways to do it wrong though. When developing acourse that you expect to be taken on a device with a smaller screen like a smartphone ortablet, it ’s not just a matter of taking existing online training and shrinking it to f it thescreen, the course has to adapt to make the best use of the screen. Let me explain.

Have a look at our website vantagepath.com

on your desktop or laptop and take note of how it looks. Now have a look at our website onyour smartphone. You’ll notice while the content is still there, elements have shif ted so thatit makes the best use of the screen. Online training should do this as well if you know that itmay be taken on a smartphone. An example of how this could work is our mobile coursedemo. By clicking on the dif f erent icons that represent screen sizes, you can see how thecourse responds to the new screen size. The f act of the matter is that your employees willbe the ones driving change. As more of them have access to an always-connected mobiledevice, that will be how they want their training delivered.

But what lies ahead….

Mobile Training Down The Road

As graphics and display technologies evolve, onlinetraining needs to keep pace, especially in the area ofmobile learning. Learners are expecting their onlinelearning to support multiple platf orms because,increasingly, that’s where they’re spending most of theirtime online.

In ef f ect, online training courses must f ollow the learnerand be immediately available on whichever device theyhappen to be using at the time. Online courses that canbe played on smartphones and tablets as seamlessly asit can on a desktop are quickly becoming an expectedfeature. However, just when you start to get comfortable,something new comes on the horizon. New developments in consumer level mobiletechnology such as wearable screens will mean that online training will be extended tosmart watches like Samsung’s Galaxy Gear and eyeglass screens like Google Glass. Whilethere’s still a lot of buzz surrounding wearable computing, there are still some importantquestions to be asked other than “Does this go with my shirt?” There are technicalconsiderations f rom both a course development and a hardware standpoint. Just becauseyou can use HTML5 to squeeze an interactive course into a 320 x 320 pixel display on asmartwatch doesn’t necessarily mean you should. Your most important goal is to providesan optimal learning experience to the user. While exciting, wearable computing still has away to go before it ’s an ef f icient, ef f ective course delivery medium.

Conclusion

It ’s an exciting time to be involved in training employees. Technology has opened up doorsthat allow your knowledge to reach f urther and more ef f ectively than ever before.Deploying training across branches and to employees on site or in the f ield is as easy asclicking a mouse.

Our f ree ebook entit led “

Navigating the Training Industry in 2013” continues the discussion on the elearninglandscape in 2013. You can download it here. In addition, here is another post you mightenjoy, “Why the Next 10 Years of Online Training Will Smash the Last 10”

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