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Nowadays having a desktop LMS is no longer enough. Employees are adopting learning on the go through mobile gadgets, so it’s essential that your LMS is mobile-friendly. What are mobile LMS applications?
Mobile learning management systems (LMS) allow employees to use mobile devices for learning on the go and tracking their training progress. With LMSs your employees can access training courses from anywhere without an internet connection. Let’s dive into how your organization can leverage it and why you should opt for custom mobile LMS software.
How Will Your Company Benefit from Mobile LMS Software?
Mobile LMS can refresh your corporate learning and training management. Since many surveys suggest that employees like learning on the go, it's a good idea to extend your LMS app to mobile. Here are a few key advantages your company will leverage from mobile training:
- Provide better flexibility to learners.
Your employees are free to choose when and where they can learn, which makes their learning process much more flexible. Since they are not bound by time and place, they don’t consider it as something they are being forced to do but rather as fun.
- Boost learner engagement.
If your LMS is mobile-friendly, it will appeal to your employees, especially millennials who have grown up on mobile gadgets. User-friendly functionality and flexibility contribute to learner engagement, making the learning process more exciting.
- Ensure better compliance with your internal policies.
Most companies have a lot of internal regulations and policies for employees to follow at the workplace. Mobile learning software makes it easier to access if your employee wants to check if they don’t violate any of these regulations or policies.
- Encourage better performance of learners.
Mobile learning applications help learners to be aware of their progress and track their performance. Thus, they know what they are good at and what they are lagging behind in. This capability will encourage them to perform better in the future.
Key Mobile LMS Features
Mobile learning platforms may include any functionality to satisfy the learning needs of your employees. However, in this section, we’ve compiled the list of must-have features that every mobile LMS should have if you want to ensure an excellent learner experience:
| Feature | Description |
| Course library | Handle a structured database of prescribed training courses for your organization. |
| Push notifications | Send your users messages to notify them about upcoming classes, courses, and events. |
| Social integration | Provide an opportunity for users to share and discuss ideas on social media, forums, or chats with topic experts. |
| Enhanced touch screen support | Make sure your mobile LMS supports such touch interactivities as pinch-and-zoom, drag and drop, double tap, etc. |
| Templates for uploading courses to the system | Create training courses with pre-built templates for textual, video, and graphic content. |
| Multi-format content support | Allow your users to access content from different types of mobile devices, including smartphones, iPads, tablets, etc. |
| Corporate compliance-related content | Allow your employees to access your corporate policies from anywhere to eliminate violations. |
| Progress bars | Provide your users with an opportunity to track their performance. |
| Security features | Protect user’s sensitive data from leakage with security features. |
What are the Market Trends in Mobile Learning?
Shift to Mobile-First Approach to LMS
Under the impact of growing mobile usage, companies choose a new approach to building LMS applications. They prefer developing mobile applications first and extend them to desktop versions if required. This approach allows them to provide more flexibility to their employees by accessing training courses from anywhere.
Gaming Elements Improve Productivity
According to a recent survey, over 80% of the respondents stated that gaming elements would increase their productivity. This would suggest that companies should gamify their corporate learning process by adding game-like tasks and functionality to their mobile LMS apps. You can add rewards, challenges, or simply create a game-like course to engage your employees even more.
Microlearning Results in Faster Learning
Microlearning is a better approach to mobile learning systems. It implies dividing a course into short chunks rather than long ones. The statistics show its effectiveness: users learn 17% faster if the course is designed according to a microlearning-based approach. Thus, it’s a good practice to keep in mind when designing your course you’re going to include in a mobile LMS application.
AR/VR Enhances Immersive Learning Experience
No matter if your employees are doctors, students, or other professionals, they would like to have a more immersive learning experience. With Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality, these trends can come true. By integrating extended reality into your LMS app, you allow your employees to improve their learning experience, making it more interactive.
Voice Assistants Contribute to Learning on the Go
We get used to applying voice commands via Siri or Google Assistant. It’s really convenient when you need to google something with hands-free control. By integrating voice assistants into your corporate mobile LMS apps, you make learning on the go easier. For example, your employees can manage courses while driving a car.
Do Off-the-Shelf Mobile Learning Software Platforms Satisfy All Your Needs?
The LMS market offers many ready-made solutions that support mobile devices as well. As user reviews show, they all have their pros and cons. Let’s find out if an out-of-the-box solution will meet your specific needs.
We’ve analyzed the user reviews of three popular LMS applications with a high score on one of the software review platforms and found out that even top LMS applications lack customization capabilities and some trendy features.
1 Docebo 4.21 stars
The app cons reviewed by users on softwareadvice.com:
The thing I least like about Docebo is actually an asset to them. They offer additional modules including social learning and learning insights, but both at additional cost. Since we didn't purchase those when we first started with Docebo, now I'll have to get separate budget approval for them.
Their webinar integration functions caused massive headaches for our staff and users. Integrations would fail without warning, and Docebo support was never willing or able to help us find a permanent solution. Webinar failures caused a great deal of frustration among our users and discouraged repeated use. Additionally, there are quite a few bugs in their user management and notification management admin features. Our staff spent a massive amount of time opening tech support tickets for these issues and trying to get them "elevated" in order that they may actually be addressed. While most issues were relatively small, added together they played a large role in killing our team's momentum. Finally, the general intuitiveness of the admin menu and setup is below par. Numerous important functions are buried in sub-menus or require strange, unexplained box-checking. It doesn't help that their Knowledge Base only provides superficial introductions to these processes.
Would love more functionality when it comes to reporting, surveys, and rating/commenting on courses. We'd like more customizable and powerful reporting. We need the ability to send pre and post course surveys for many courses (same survey, but need to know which course it is filled out for). We also need the ability to see the number of ratings on courses and be notified when our users comment on a course. A couple of other things.... Response time can be frustrating. Our platform can be slow sometimes . There are a few other "wants" as far as functionality goes, but it is overall very powerful.
2 Canvas — 4.49 stars
The app cons reviewed by users on softwareadvice.com:
I hate that there is not an autosave feature, specially when building quizzes. More than once, I accidentally save the quiz without saving the individual question and loose a ton of work.
I have two complaints about the Canvas software. First of all, the mobile version does not work well. I never downloaded the Canvas app, but did try to go on the website on my phone. The text was so small and the menus on the left side of the screen did not load well, so I could never use my phone to get on Canvas without the app. My other complaint with the software is that whenever anything was graded for a course, even if it was an older assignment, I'd get a notification. Perhaps this is just the settings set by the instructor and not Canvas itself, however.
It can be tough to cope with at first when using the application, and it takes a long time to publish a post on the student page. Students occasionally carried assessments in the incorrect location and took time to get acquainted with the mobile phone application.
3 Learnworlds — 4.72 stars
The app cons reviewed by users on softwareadvice.com:
Need more copy/paste features for content. Cannot get users engaged on discussion forums.
There is no overview of student progress and activity. If you need to know when a course was completed you have to search through the activity log. So far the integration options are also very limited.
I think it needs a grouping directory to include a series of courses or course catalog or landing page
There are some features that I would have hoped to be even more customizable, but whenever I ask the Support team for assistance, they always do their best to give me an alternative option or a workaround which is always nice. I think it would be nice to have some customizable pop-up alerts in case there is anything we need to notify our users of when they first enter our site. Minor things such as being able to edit the footer on some pages or customizing the contact form to have more fields would be a great addition!
The platform offers gamification but it is not completely developed so it is not very useful. However, they stated it is in progress of being improved
As you can see, sometimes ready-made LMSs lack the specific features you may need to meet the expectations of your corporate learners. To be sure that your mobile LMS will work perfectly for you, we’d recommend you consider building custom e-learning software. At Emerline, we have a solid expertise in the e-learning industry and mobile technologies to design and develop an LMS app to satisfy your needs. Do you have any project ideas? Then drop us a line!
