Speaker 1: Hi, welcome to eLearning Lane with Brady Lick. The question today is how do we make eLearning mobile? Well, first off, of course, we need to break down what mobile means, right? Well, mobile means doing something while doing other activities, while walking around, while you're not stationary, and, of course, while you're not attached to some type of larger device, right? When we build eLearning experiences, we often think of desktop first, typically because we're designing those experiences on desktop. But in reality, this bias leads to all sorts of issues when our learners actually go to take these experiences. You know, there's all sorts of different statistics out there, but I've seen one LMS where they said that about a third of their users were on mobile devices. Now, are all of your audience necessarily at that ratio? Not necessarily, but it's something to keep in mind, right? Can your learning take place on a mobile device? Can it work on a cell phone? Now, what this comes down to, first off, is making sure that the content itself can be dynamic, that it can readjust down to the size of a cell phone, right? So this means making sure that your text is based on the REM, that it's not set at too small of legibility, that images are able to readjust, that all of it still works on a small screen. The next part of that, however, is that activities, assignments, and quizzes still should be able to work on a mobile device. This is where a lot of people kind of miss the mark, where people will dive into kind of best practices around eLearning where they'll have all sorts of written assignments, where they'll have really engaging kind of hands-on simulations. And these are great. You know, these have their place. But if you have a large number of people accessing your training on mobile, well, guess what? They're probably not going to be able to do a lot of those on a mobile device, right? If you're asking people to do any type of long-form writing, that is simply not going to work on a mobile device. If you're asking people to create a slide deck or create a graphic, that is not going to work on a mobile device for most users. And so you can solve this a couple of ways. You can either, you know, really limit the types of assignments and activities that you're doing, right, down to multiple choice items, to matching, to drag and drop, the things that may work well on a mobile device, depending on the learning management system or platform that you're using. The other way you can go about it is you can also have alternatives. So if you're going to have kind of these bigger experiences that you create for people who are on desktop, well, there should be an option that people can select for a mobile device. Now, you want to make sure that it's an approximate activity as much as possible. You don't want to have something that's like very easy or very hard in comparison to the other alternative. Now, we've talked a lot about mobile devices so far, but this isn't the only way we make things mobile. One of the most common ways where training needs to be mobile is in the form of kind of a second screen experience or a second platform learning, right? A lot of people do learning through podcasts, such as this one, or through video or other things while they're doing other work. Now, this is great, but again, when we go back to actually our e-learning kind of best practices, we don't often build for people who are doing second screen activities. We kind of build with the assumption that we have their full attention. And so when we build training, another thing we can do, especially if we're working with working adults or people who may be having to manage kind of multiple tasks at once, you know, new parents, things like that, we really want to make sure that the training can be not only audio-friendly, so can I absorb most of the main information through an audio-only device or while doing other things, whether it's, you know, driving, whether it's cooking, anything like that, but also can I start and stop the learning experience at any time, right? So if I have a kind of chunk of content that's built out with the assumption that people are going to have 30 minutes to sit down and work on it, well, if you're a new parent, there's no guarantee you got 30 minutes free, right? Things happen all the time. And so another way we can make e-learning mobile is we can build it to be smaller, more bite-sized experiences and also make it so that there's a wider variety of ways in which we can absorb the content, where it's not just sitting down at a desktop. And there's all sorts of ways we can really design for this, right? So audio-only training platforms, yes, you can have a podcast, but is there a way you can also make it so that people can submit artifacts out loud? With a lot of the new generative AI tools and things like that, it's very feasible that learning management systems could have audio response options for training so that you can do entire training on the road and still have it be active so that, you know, it could pause at some point, ask the person to respond, have them respond, and then move on. In fact, you can already kind of approximate this a little bit if you use either ChatGPT's app or any of the kind of large language models that are currently available that have audio options in them. You can, of course, pop them open and talk to them, you know, while you're doing other devices, whether you're doing other tasks, again, like cooking or driving or something like that. And they will talk back to you and kind of respond in time, really making, again, an audio-friendly training option. So, again, the big question is, how do we make e-learning more mobile? Well, there's all sorts of ways you can go about it, but the first thing you need to think about is how does your audience need to engage with the training and can it be more mobile-friendly? Can you take small steps towards it in these ways? With that, thanks for listening. Again, if you have any questions that you want me to answer, feel free to go ahead and email me at my email in the description. And, of course, as always, I appreciate it if you leave a like and review. With that, thanks for listening. Appreciate it.