Training employees is a necessity for every organization to ensure lower employee turnover rates. Not just that, it also helps ensure employees advance positively in the career. When employers invest in providing their employees training for necessary skills, employees feel valued and are bound to perform better.
Creating eLearning courses is the most popular way of delivering training to employees digitally. This ensures employees are upskilling regardless of their work location. To give employees the flexibility to learn on-the-go, it is crucial to develop mobile-friendly eLearning courses.
There are various mobile elearning authoring tools that can be utilized for a responsive design. Since content developed for computer viewing may fail to look good on a mobile screen, a responsive design strategy ensures that the course is designed right from the beginning to be accessible on all kinds of mobile devices.
There are various eLearning courses that are designed to scale on mobile devices. There is a huge difference between a course that scales and one that is responsive as scaling cannot be deemed effective for all kinds of devices. Scaling can lead to multimedia elements being unreadable as opposed to a responsive design that ensures the content size remains effective for viewing.
Let’s look at why it is important to have a mobile focused eLearning course:
- Higher accessibility:
With smartphones becoming an indispensable part of our lives, it is obvious that learning from mobile phones is highly convenient. It provides flexibility and employees can learn even while travelling to work.
Responsive design in mobile learning provides higher audience reach as everyone is always carrying a smartphone. Having the option to learn from their phone will not only increase employee engagement but also ensure higher rate of course completion.
- Clear and easy navigation:
When employees have to manoeuvre through a series of unnecessary pages or tabs to find the exact module they are looking for, it can get frustrating. It should be easy to operate the eLearning software on the mobile to quickly access whatever they are looking for.
A mobile focused design provides clear navigation aids that allows them to quickly find whatever they are looking for, tap on it and start learning. This saves a lot of time which can otherwise get wasted on a complicated design and they may end up just exiting the course.
- Cost effective:
It can get really difficult to create different eLearning courses for various platforms. It is time consuming and increases course development costs substantially. Instead, creating an online course with a responsive design will help you produce one effective deliverable without creating multiple versions.
Creating multiple versions will require you to redesign and resize multimedia elements along with other online content for viewing on mobile devices. A responsive design completely eliminates that extra effort and optimizes the mobile viewing experience.
- Higher learner engagement:
If given the option, most learners will prefer to use their phones to access an eLearning course rather than log in to their computer. They can gain new knowledge any time, anywhere by just tapping and swiping their mobile screens. This increases the level of engagement with the eLearning content.
Mobile focused design also allows you to create functionality for offline viewing. This makes it easy to access course content even without an internet connection by downloading the module. Employees can view them at their convenience which highly increases their rate of participation.
Conclusion:
If you want to provide your employees with a smooth and productive learning experience, then you must ensure your eLearning courses are built using a responsive design strategy. It gives them the freedom to decide how they want to learn and full control over their pace of learning.