Although this is my fifth pitfall it’s probably the most fundamental – it’s just that I was hoping that this time round the e-learning industry had got its heads round the idea that emerging technologies are not solutions that we need to find problems for. Ask the right questions and your business has several problems that L&D can solve and a few of those solutions will involve mobile learning. So how do you sort the wheat from the chaff?Does a partner saying “I’ve got an iPad and I want to see learning on it. What can you build me?” count as a business need? As ever it depends…will mobile give you higher reach, revenue from clients, faster speed to competence…?
To see what other companies have been using mobile for have a look at http://masie.com/Surveys/mobile-pulse-survey-2012.html. The section called ‘Factors causing concern about Mobile Learning’ is a good backgrounder for someone looking to implement mobile learning in their organisation for the first time. If you have all these issues covered off, you have an excellent chance of avoiding a major pitfall.