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Mobile Training: Don't Leave Home Without Your Blackberry
September 21, 2009
By Sarah Boehle
For retired U.S. Air Force brigadier general Allison Hickey, training and regimentation are second nature. Add to this the fact that human capital development is a passion of hers (Hickey served as a classroom trainer and curriculum developer earlier in her career), and there's no more disciplined candidate for tackling learning tasks with zeal, right?
Not so fast. Despite her background, Hickey admits that finding time to complete her company's catalog of mandatory compliance training often has proven difficult. "I'm a mom of three with a crazy calendar, and there are never enough clear, open blocks of time in my schedule to go online and complete training."
Which explains why her interest was piqued in 2007 when Hickey, the Reston, VA-based director and program manager of the national security services practice at Accenture, first heard about a new mobile learning initiative just getting started at the company. "As soon as they said I could take training on my BlackBerry, which I basically live with under my pillow every night, I knew it was the right solution for me. When I received the e-mail asking those who were interested to participate in a pilot, it took me all of two seconds to respond and say, 'Yes, I want to play.' I clicked on the link, immediately downloaded an application to my BlackBerry, and was sent my first Accenture mobile training course. I have not stopped since."
That's precisely the reaction the learning and strategy innovation team at Accenture, a global management consulting, technology services, and outsourcing company, hoped to elicit ever since it first considered moving a portion of its e-learning curriculum to a mobile platform more than two years ago. According to Learning Strategy Leader Daniel Bielenberg, the team had been interested in deploying mobile learning for some time, but was waiting to uncover a clearly identified need to justify the move. "We take a purposeful approach to learning innovation," he explains, "which entails tracking the emerging trends and solutions in the field while simultaneously checking and tracking for business and learning problems at Accenture that those innovations can help us to solve. Our job is to connect the dots between the two."
After amassing evidence indicating time-strapped executives in the company needed certain training at their fingertips, the team recognized a perfect opportunity to do what they do best. The most immediate need for training "on the go" was mandatory compliance training on topics such as data privacy, imports and exports, and financial regulations, says Dana Koch, a learning architect at Accenture. "Our target for those courses is 100 percent mastery and completion company-wide. But at the time, we were having a particular challenge reaching our senior executives. They know how important the training is, but they are so busy that it's difficult for many of them to squeeze out 40 or more minutes at a time to complete the courses."
The team's research revealed, however, that executives often do have shorter five- to 10-minute spans of availability here and there throughout their day. "We saw mobile learning as a secondary delivery channel that would provide them with the convenience they needed and allow them to take better advantage of those brief periods of downtime," says Koch.
Internal surveys conducted during the team's prototyping phase confirmed this suspicion, revealing 92 percent of those surveyed would jump at the chance to use their mobile devices for training. The same survey also indicated most executives would prefer to receive their mobile content in chunks ranging in length from 10 to 15 minutes. In addition, half of those surveyed said they would prefer a downloadable option for their mobile courses that would allow them to take training anywhere, without the need for Internet connectivity.
In response, Accenture's learning and strategy innovation team began adapting the company's existing compliance courseware for a mobile platform—in particular, for the BlackBerry, which was the predominant mobile platform used throughout the company at the time.
The design approach was simple: "We used the same content and mimicked the modules in our online courses, but in a way that was conducive to a smaller screen," says Koch. In addition, all course pages within the mobile versions of Accenture's compliance courseware are bookmarked—a design approach that allows learners to chunk content within modules in ways most convenient for them. "If a learner only has two minutes or 12 minutes to spend on the course, he can stop his learning session at a time that's convenient for him and then come back in later on and take up exactly where he left off. The timing of the 'chunks' is defined by learners." In fact, Koch notes there are only two times when mobile users need to connect to the Internet: when they first enroll in and download a mobile course, and when they complete a course by passing the final quiz. "At that time, the user's mobile device goes online and communicates all of the completion data to our learning management system."
To date, more than 1,000 completions of the seven courses featured in Accenture's mobile learning catalog have been tallied, with overall user satisfaction ratings averaging 4.4 on a 5.0 scale—compared to a 4.0 learner satisfaction rating, on average, for the computer-based versions of the same compliance courses. That said, Koch admits mobile delivery is such a new frontier that such measurements are difficult to quantify. "While there is a significant difference between the two ratings, we don't yet know if it's due to some kind of 'gee whiz' or 'wow' factor inflation, or whether it's something more. To find out, we'll continue to add courses on other topics [to our catalog] and monitor the trends over time."
For learners such as Hickey, word that Accenture is intent on further expanding the program comes as welcome news. "I am such a huge advocate of this approach. Wherever I am—whether it's eating lunch at Panera or waiting for a client meeting to begin—I can simply pull my BlackBerry out of my purse. There's no need to find a network or a Wi-Fi station, no need to connect and log in, and no need to deal with a bulky laptop."
Quick Tips
• Build a strong business case. Before approaching the C-suite to ask for the green light on a wide-scale mobile learning rollout, Accenture learning and strategy innovation team members conducted extensive prototyping and piloting. They also built a solid business case to support their recommendation, including a strongly identified business need (to increase the speed and uptake of compliance training firm-wide); the presence of enabling technology (at the time, the majority of Accenture's target audience of 4,500 senior executives already were using mobile devices); and a receptive audience.
• Keep it concise. When transitioning existing e-learning content to a mobile platform, it's important to remain mindful of the need to design for a smaller screen. "One big 'aha' I had as we designed content for the mobile space is a trick I picked up from David Metcalf, who teaches courses on mobile learning and recommends placing content on 3x5-inch index cards," says Koch. "Instead, I created a template in Microsoft Word with 3x5-inch columns. This makes it apparent you have limited space, forcing you to think more concisely."
• Choose the right interactions. "Drag-and-drop is pretty easy for learners to do on a computer screen, but unless your users have a touch screen on their mobile device, it won't work," Koch notes. Similarly, 'fill-in-the-blank' exercises are relatively easy to create for mobile platforms—"but don't ask for full sentences," he advises, "unless all of your learners are good at texting."
• Troubleshoot early on. Piloting is especially important from a technical perspective, notes Accenture Technical Manager Mike Gombar. "We targeted a small group of individuals—including 1,000 pilot learners segmented into two groups of 500—and worked closely with them to iron out all of the technical integration issues before rolling out the program firm-wide." Using a smaller test group kept initial workloads manageable for the IT team, which Gombar says did a lot of hand-holding for learners in the beginning.
• Design for the future. At Accenture, a variety of different mobile devices are used throughout the firm, which makes standardization difficult. The learning and strategy innovation team initially developed content exclusively for the most prominent model in use at the firm—the BlackBerry—and then ramped up slowly over time to support other mobile devices, as well, including Windows Mobile and the iPhone. "We listed the key players in the mobile device market and looked closely at screen resolutions for an array of devices, from the smallest to the largest," says Gombar. "Then, we designed the content to use as much screen real estate as possible on all models."
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