Multiple Devices In Corporate Training

This is a guest post by Competentum

With the world changing by the hour, education keeps progressing too. The current generation of learners already live in a world of 3D models, easy internet access, and mobile devices. It is exciting to imagine what the 2030's employee will be like.

Children who are toddlers today are developing their technological fluency before they start to speak. They form a digital generation of future employees and will certainly have a different view on education and learning in both academic and corporate world.

So how does this affect corporate training?

A desktop version for the lesson is a given. What are the other devices we would like to see the corporate training course on? All kinds of mobile devices!

In the old days, delivering e-learning content on a mobile device meant designing a specific interface for each device. Now new devices are much more compatible with being included in the educational environment. It is important to understand how great it is for the learners when educators pay attention to their specific needs and proximate environment.

If you like numbers, come closer, because according to Cisco, by the end of 2014, the number of mobile-connected devices exceeded the number of people on earth, and by 2021, there were nearly 1.4 mobile devices per capita. Google, on the other hand found out that 90% of users use multiple screens sequentially to accomplish a task over time.

There are a number of benefits to including mobile devices in your learning and development plan:

1. Employees can assess the information literally whenever they want, and wherever they are
2. Mobile devices can create a new, exciting interaction mode
3. Such devices are personalized and provide a more suitable experience (such as including accessibility features for students with special needs or special reading fonts for learners with dyslexia)
4. Extending the reach of face-to-face events by providing a companion or community like environment
5. Delivering e-learning materials to the devices that are now more affordable compared to a desktop computer

In other words, we need to design learning that is intelligent, flexible, and fluid to work everywhere and on any device. We need to provide content that is device-agnostic, if you will.

One important step is to make sure that the content does not require specific applications, and is accessible with a single URL. This is why Responsive Web Design (RWD) makes perfect sense as the future of Learning Design because it takes all of these trends into consideration.

EdTech companies like Competentum, make multi-device e-learning possible using technologies like HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. These tools help allow for the development of platform-independent content and refined interactivities which can be packaged as web-based courses or native apps.

With features that detect the device's screen size, the application adjusts the interface to display the content appropriately for the screen size. This way the experience is not limited by the device size and shape.

This responsive adaptation eliminates the need to maintain different versions of the same content for different devices. Which is great news for anyone bothering with the platform maintenance. This technology is also being used to build native apps for smartphone platforms, web apps, or even traditional e-learning modules.

When creating a course for multiple screen sizes, make sure that:

• It includes dynamic layouts which helps elements to make the most of the space available
• It automatically detects the features of the device being used and applies an appropriate style to all on screen elements
• All images can be scaled to complement the device being used at the time
• Links, buttons, and characters are large enough to touch with a finger
• All of the elements are responsive to the device-friendly motions. For example, drag and drop activity is great for an iPad
• Content is distributed within the usable spaces on the screen. For instance, we are intentionally placing the dialogue choices at the bottom so that learners have easy access, regardless of if they are left or right-handed.

This represents an innovative approach to design and course navigation. Pages are constructed by combining a wide range of interactive components in any number and mix. A scrolling page layout, which comes with this innovation, leverages much of the latest technology in web design, while adjusting for a more web-savvy audience. However, if something does not feel right, more traditional linear layouts are just as easy to implement.

While we do not know exactly what the future of technology holds for us, one thing is for sure, we will continue to see more and more mobile smartphones, tablets, touch-enabled computers, and wearables too.

The number of different screen sizes between all of these devices will continue to increase, and the only way to future-proof our learning design is by creating fluid content that can scale intelligently across all of these screens.

When you design learning that is intelligent, regardless of the device and the size of the screen, the result is happy employees who are keen to devote their best efforts to learning.