Think about how often you look at your phone. Dozens if not hundreds of times a day for most people. Using your mobile device for learning purposes makes sense then. Mobile learning or otherwise known as mLearning allows learners to access a huge stream of online content via text, video, audio, and games on their mobile devices. It’s one of the easiest ways for students and employees to get assistance.
Advantages of Mobile Learning
Availability
As long as you have access to the internet or can get a signal on your cell phone, you’re able to use mobile learning anywhere at any time. It doesn’t matter if you’re in New Zealand, Canada, or Sri Lanka.
Endless Content
With K-12 education, colleges, and corporations around the world relying on mobile apps more and more, the variety of content available is endless. Have you ever heard someone say, “There’s an app for that”? That’s because it’s true. If you check your app store there are millions available. There are apps for social media, news outlets, communications, transportation, finance, travel, education, etc. The list never ends.
The Perfect Match
What’s Performance Support?
Mobile learning is the perfect match for performance support. Performance support refers to resources that are available to aid workers in their time of need. This could be something as simple as a podcast, presentation, document, or job-aid. These resources are meant to help remind the employee of what they need to do, or supply content that will help them to complete a task. Think of performance support as that little bit of extra assistance everyone needs.
Mobile apps can provide employees with answers to questions they may have, the next step in a process, or help solve a work-related problem. Let’s say a car salesman wants to compare their car model to a competitor’s. They can easily bring up the specs of the car on their phone to show the customer the differences. Or if an engineer has an HR question at his or her company, they could bring up the company’s handbook or simply email their HR rep.
Why Do I Need It?
As an organization, you want performance support for your employees. It will help to reduce errors and potentially save time and money. It will help improve productivity and hopefully reduce stress.
Just remember that mobile learning isn’t meant to replace training, only provide support. And everyone could use a helping hand once in a while. Mobile learning pairs perfectly with performance support to fulfill that need.
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