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Learning Solutions: Reporting & Analysis of Mobile Learning: Is It Worth It?

November 07, 2011

By Skip Marshall, Intelladon VP of Professional Services

Technology allows us to do some amazing things with learning. Today, everyone wants to mobilize his or her content. It’s almost impossible to attend a learning and performance event without feeling inundated with presentations on mobile strategy, or the latest in mobile authoring solutions.

The challenge remains … is the effort worth it? Most stakeholders can’t explain (at least in concrete terms) why they need to create mobile learning for their audience, let alone why they need a plan to track and report on those efforts. In order to get the most out of your mobile learning strategy, here are some questions to get you started on reporting and analyzing this content.

What are you tracking?

To begin with, you have to determine what information you will need to track. As with all training, there are standard components you want to track. Those may include course attempts, completions, scores, etc. However, mobile learning opens up a number of other opportunities. For example, how do you account for level of interaction, reuse as performance support, and social learning?

Informal and/or social-based learning is rapidly becoming a mainstay of all learning activities. Some research suggests informal learning may account for as much as 70 percent of all corporate learning. Given the nature of mobile device integration with social media (including both smartphones and tablets), informal learning will continue to take on a larger role in corporate training. It’s important to identify the specific touch points within social learning that we need to track and report on. In addition to traditional learning, we need to give focus to frequency of interactions, type of interactions, and level of contribution.

How do you track it?

Tracking learning events has long been measured around AICC and SCORM standards. Most major learning platforms and authoring tools tout their support for these standards. However when it comes to mobile learning, you need to make sure your chosen platform supports these standards within a mobile context.

The first step is to review your authoring solution. If you’re creating your own content, there are a number of solutions that claim to author for mobile consumption. Test several out and pilot them with a variety of end users. Keep in mind that tools leveraging plugins are problematic for mobile devices, particularly as pertaining to tracking and reporting. The key is to focus on native HTML- and JavaScript-based authoring tools.

Learning Solutions Magazine