Mobile Learning

The following statistics were generated by Future Workplace and IESE Business School.

1. By year end of 2011: nearly forty percent of executives plan to incorporate media tablets into learning and development initiatives and three-quarters of these learning executives plan to incorporate smartphones by the end of this year.
2. By 2015: Human Resource executives plan to leverage mobile devices not only for learning & performance support but also for coaching and mentoring employees (37%), micro-blogging (27%), augmented reality (14%), and mobile gaming (12%).

My colleague Jeanne Meister blogged about this and I’d like to add to the discussion, given the significance of this.  I have been predicting this kind of change in learning for the past five years. The days of classroom-style learning are being numbered and not so much because they are ineffective, though some might argue that.

It is more so because of the costs and logistics associated with the traditional models, and most importantly, the timing of these event-based models. Matching up a date in advance to the right learning moments of the audience (i.e., when a learner is not only ready to learn it but also ready to apply it) has always been troublesome for both the facilitators/instructors as well as the learners.

This is where the mobile devices come in. There were less than ½ a billion of them in 2000 and now over 12 billion exist. So there are more of them. Which manager or leader  doesn’t have one? In addition, they’ve become increasingly more user-friendly and diverse in their functionality. They are not just for making phone calls, doing emails, and housing your contacts.

Hundreds of business applications are now in full use that are allowing folks to have unprecedented accessibility to information in real-time anywhere and anytime, across the world and across business functions.  In fact, learning has actually lagged in this context. In others words, business functions on mobile devices are much further along than learning functions. This actually bodes well for learning functions as adoption has preceded learning, and will make it easier to integrate, as it will be more SOP.

Many experts have been saying for years that learning organizations, those constantly leveraging information to improve their condition (personally, professionally, or organizationally), are the ones that will survive and thrive in these times.

This week at work, conduct a personal assessment. How much of what you do outside of work, in your personal life, relies on some form of mobile technology? Compare that to your life at work. How big is the delta? What can you do to bridge the gap so you can be as efficient at work, as you are outside of work?