Mobile learning is definitely expanding further and further in the part of the andragogical learning in which I personally work.

My employer gives a large number of employees access to LinkedIn Learning for both personal and occupational development, and one of the most interesting advantages to this platform is the ability to interact with it on a smart phone. In essence, this naturally means that development has now been opened up to whenever and wherever is most convenient for the employee.

This is something we’re (distantly) looking toward as well for the more proprietary and company-specific types of training I and my fellow designers currently work on, but the possibilities definitely extend far out for what mobile learning can represent in terms of additional capacity.

It’s not an uncommon piece of feedback from our new hires and our learners that they wish they could take something home with them to either review or practice, but we haven’t received a ton of (visible) support from leadership about this area of innovation. Part of that is no doubt because of limited time and resources. We’re currently working, as always, on improving the in-house and on-site learning that our employees go through, but there’s always going to be that desire for additional material, so it’ll be interesting seeing if, how, and when that may actually come to pass.

One of the reasons mobile learning is continually placed on the back burner is due to learner burnout, and to be fair, a large number of our courses and curriculums can be very draining, but most of this, I feel, is due to how much information is crammed in to the classes. Learners need to feel tired when they go home because they can’t take everything with them.

Were we able to offload some of the more general information and processes to a platform that would enable learners to “fill in the gaps” on their own time, then the problem of “we don’t want already drained people going home and studying more” would solve itself because those people would be less drained when they did get home, providing a more staggered curriculum and a higher rate of retention and understanding.