As remote work becomes the standard in the post-COVID era, mobile learning for business has become more crucial than ever. Educational institutions and companies alike are adopting mobile solutions for employee upskilling, reskilling, coaching, and so on. These ensure their teams have easy access to knowledge and continue to learn and grow, no matter where they are.
Take our Salmon Thrust project as an example. We developed a custom training platform that enables financial professionals to conveniently enhance their skills, whether they’re in the workplace or working from home.
If you manage a school or business, your objective is clear: ensure learning is easy and accessible for all. This guide will highlight the importance of mobile learning for employees.
What is Mobile eLearning for Business Users?
Mobile learning, or M-learning, simplifies accessing educational content on mobile devices for anyone with internet access. Analytics from learning management systems (LMSs) reveal that most corporate users acquire knowledge via mobile devices, supporting their business productivity improvement and mobility through flexible learning options.
Yet, educational content creators and administrators prefer desktops. The use of mobile devices and desktops for exams and courses is nearly equal, reflecting a versatile approach to learning and working styles.
Mobile eLearning for business is perfect for employees on the go, working remotely, or training after hours, enabling learning anytime, anywhere. This flexibility supports compliance and boosts performance, ensuring teams stay skilled and informed regardless of location.
Mobile learning offers two main training delivery methods: sharing content for mobile consumption or integrating it into blended learning during face-to-face sessions. Let’s explore each method:
Sharing Business eLearning Content for Mobile Consumption
This method utilizes mobile learning in business to accelerate onboarding and ongoing training. Training materials are created on desktops and shared with employees via links for easy retrieval on their mobile devices. This process improves accessibility and enables flexible learning schedules for active professionals.
Blended Mobile eLearning Approach
This mobile learning strategy combines face-to-face coaching with portable device technology. Instructors send interactive surveys via text, email, or QR codes, which participants complete on their smartphones during or after sessions. This approach prioritizes live interaction and immediate feedback from trainers, which is proven to enhance performance and enrich the learning experience for students.
Now that you know what mobile learning technology in business is, let’s examine the importance of mobile-aided education in detail:
The Importance of Mobile Learning for Business
Here are the key benefits that have propelled mobile learning for employees to the forefront of the eLearning industry, including employee upskilling, reskilling, coaching, and more:
Better Learning Thanks to Mobile Social Interaction
Smartphones facilitate learning through swift vertical interactions between corporate learners and their trainers, as well as horizontally between students, which marks a clear benefit of mobile learning for business. This connectivity fosters a vibrant community that’s accessible 24/7, ensuring that corporate learners always have quick access to peer support and expert advice, ideal for continuous employee upskilling. Instant access helps employees solve problems quickly and stay engaged. Unlike isolated eLearning solutions, mobile learning thrives on interaction, making it an essential tool for modern corporate training environments where collaboration is key to effective learning.
Enhanced Accessibility and Flexibility in Learning
Understanding the importance of mobile learning for business reveals its unparalleled flexibility and accessibility. Traditional training programs often clash with crucial work hours and demand physical presence, posing challenges, especially when courses extend beyond regular office hours or into holidays.
Mobile learning eliminates these constraints by enabling employees to access and complete courses from anywhere, at any time—whether during a lunch break, on their commute, or from the comfort of their home. This adaptability ensures that training doesn’t interfere with critical work tasks, positioning it as a vital tool for ongoing professional development.
Improved Course Completion Rates
One of the benefits of mobile learning for business is the shift towards bite-sized training modules. In an era when people are overloaded with information and tasks, lengthy training courses are impractical. Mobile learning accommodates this with short, manageable learning segments that employees can complete quickly and efficiently, thereby increasing course completion rates. The minimal time requirement daily encourages consistent engagement and progress. Enhancing this experience with learning gamification elements like points, levels, and rewards further motivates learners to complete their upskill training, optimizing the effectiveness of mobile learning initiatives.
Deeply Personalized Learning
Mobile learning thrives under a learner-centric approach, recognized by L&D professionals as crucial for effective training. It provides personalized learning by tailoring content to individual needs, strengths, interests, and skills. Mobile programs collect precise data to create adaptive learning paths that align with each employee’s progress, quiz results, goals, and motivations. This customization ensures learners engage with relevant content on their devices, emphasizing the value of mobile learning in personal development.
Syncing with Fast-Paced Work Environments
The rapid pace of digital transformation has significantly accelerated business processes and tasks, demanding greater efficiency and adaptability in employee training. In this era of increased productivity and complex workloads, traditional, rigid training courses are inadequate. Employees require agile upskilling methods that align with their fast-paced professional lives, a key aspect underscoring the importance of mobile learning for business.
Social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube have conditioned us to consume information in short, engaging bursts on small screens. Mobile learning mimics this approach, using visually appealing and interactive content to maintain learner engagement—essential for effective skill development in today’s digital landscape.
Embracing the just-in-time learning model from supply chain management, mobile learning delivers training exactly when needed, avoiding the downtime associated with traditional methods. This approach uses microlearning techniques, offering concise upskilling courses lasting no more than 5 minutes.
These sessions cover essential skills, such as customer service tactics or professional conduct, allowing employees to quickly apply what they’ve learned. Mobile access ensures that employees can learn or refresh skills on the go, making mobile learning a crucial tool for continuous professional upskilling in a fast-moving business environment.
Easy Way to Refresh Professional Memory
One significant benefit of mobile learning for business is that employees can access learning content from anywhere and refer back to it as needed, making it simpler to create online lessons for employees that are both accessible and practical.
This capability is crucial when employees face real-time challenges and need immediate solutions. Accessing important training content right when it’s needed not only helps solve problems quickly but also enhances the retention and application of knowledge.
Furthermore, unlike desktops or laptops, which are not always accessible, smartphones provide a continuous, portable means for accessing these online lessons. This ensures that employees always have the necessary resources in their pockets, ready to be utilized at any moment.
Now that the advantages are clear let’s explore how to effectively design and deploy a mobile learning strategy that maximizes these benefits:
How to Effectively Develop Mobile Learning Solutions for Business
Each step is crucial to developing an effective mobile learning solution that not only engages but also significantly benefits your team’s professional advancement, aligning perfectly with your business’s training goals and expectations.
Step 1: Develop a learning strategy for mobile learning for business operations that defines your target audience, their specific needs, and locations. This ensures the content is relevant and accessible.
Step 2: Account for the environments where employees will use the content. For example, in noise-sensitive areas, design the material to be effective without sound, utilizing visuals and interactive text.
Step 3: Select instructional methods suited for mobile learning. Use training applications that support active practice, have simple interfaces, and provide feedback, enhancing the learning process.
Step 4: Employ techniques such as the behavioral method of chaining for complex skills, where learners sequentially master each part of a task before advancing to the next. For more detailed procedures, use backward chaining to reinforce training effectively.
Step 5: Evaluate and select technology that fits your specific needs and budget. For a robust solution that enhances mobile learning, consider exploring Open edX® Mobile App Development Services by Raccoon Gang. We offer customized mobile applications that deliver excellent learning experiences, perfect for accessing courses on iOS and Android devices.
Now let’s check case studies that showcase how mobile learning effectively supports continuous professional development across different industries, enhancing both employee skills and operational efficiencies:
Case Studies: How Businesses Leverage Mobile Learning
Salmon Thrust’s Custom Corporate Training Platform for Financial Specialists
Salmon Thrust partnered with Raccoon Gang to roll out a mobile learning program aimed at enhancing financial training, allowing employees to learn at their own pace and on their schedule. This flexible approach not only made learning more accessible but also better suited to the busy lives of today’s corporate professionals, greatly improving their overall learning experience and satisfaction.
Key features and benefits:
- Targeted training modules for corporate clients
- Enhanced skills in various financial disciplines
- Improved completion rates and workforce efficiency
Cybint’s Custom Corporate Training Platform for Cybersecurity Education
Cybint teamed up with Raccoon Gang to develop a customized mobile training platform for cybersecurity, catering to over 55,000 learners with practical, real-world courses. This collaboration was pivotal in tackling the ever-evolving challenges of cybersecurity, offering up-to-date, impactful, and immediately usable content to professionals worldwide.
Key features and benefits:
- Custom UI/UX for improved user engagement
- Flexible access across devices and locations
- Custom metrics and dashboards for detailed monitoring
- Interactive features such as online Zoom classrooms and gamification
Final Word
Mobile learning has truly revolutionized eLearning. Now that organizations have embraced the importance of mobile learning for business operations, it’s time they adapt to this transformation by leveraging M-learning to set up effective L&D programs. Failing to respond to this change can cause them to go into oblivion.
Mobile learning solutions should directly address learners’ needs. If your training programs don’t adapt to the needs of the learners, they’ll no longer remain relevant to your target market. To be honest, it’s already happening to firms.
No doubt, developing and providing an eLearning program can be daunting in the beginning, especially for firms that haven’t stepped into eLearning yet. However, experienced and reliable eLearning agencies like Racoon Gang are there to create top-notch custom mobile learning solutions.
Racoon Gang’s Open edX mobile app sets up a convenient learning environment for students or employees on their smartphones. The platform currently offers native learning apps for Android and iOS devices, allowing students or employees to remotely access learning content.
We, at Racoon Gang, understand the importance of mobile learning, possess considerable experience in developing Open edX mobile applications, and are able to create highly customized mobile learning solutions. If you’re looking for highly engaging, easy-to-use mobile learning apps, contact us today or request a quote.
