Microlearning, News

3 Ways of using the MobieTrain Platform

You’ve seen what microlearning is all about and how MobieTrain fits into the mobile learning family. But how does this translate into a working and engaging learning platform? We’re about to tell you everything there is to know about our three learning formats. Fasten your seatbelt and keep your arms inside the vehicle at all times, because we’re taking you on a wild ride!

3 learning formats

In our experience, and that of our customers, a single training format just isn’t enough. Different content calls for different measures. Do you have a lot of info to get across to your team? Is a short training path enough? Or does one image say more than a thousand words? Either way, we’ve got you covered with one of our three options:

  • Learning path
  • Crash course
  • Newsfeed

1. Learning path

Let’s start off with our firstborn. We proudly present to you: the learning path. A track full of interesting knowledge, brought to you with a diversity of information and questions to keep that retention going.

This one is especially suited when you’ve got a lot to say. Your content can be divided into levels, topics and learning moments, giving a structure to the chaos.

Every level contains several topics. Those are the big dots you can see on the left. Each topic holds up to 5 learning moments, which carry all of the actual content. Through gamified features, a variety of question types and even some tips and tricks from time to time, the user will cut through your learning track like a knife through butter.

2. Crash course

When your content is a little more compact, you can use our crash course. By choosing this option, you can get your information across much quicker.

Let’s say you’ve got a new collection coming up. You want your team to know all about its benefits and features. With the use of one track, containing only learning moments, you can do just that!

There are no levels or topics here. All your users need to do is follow the linear path. The same gamified elements apply in the crash course, which makes it a joy for your employees to learn about everything new. As the learning path has a level quiz at, you’ve guessed it, the end of each level, the crash course has one end quiz at the end of the whole course. As you know, retention is a big part of microlearning. That’s why we value the test’s importance.

3. Newsfeed

Last, but definitely not least, we would like to introduce you to our newsfeed: a communication tool to easily captivate your employees’ attention. It’s enormously fun to work with for both sides of your team.

On our newsfeed, you can post short messages to keep your team in the loop at all times. Imagine, you have a spanking new collection: there’s no time like the present to push this knowledge towards your employees in a fun and engaging way. Text, images, videos: they’re all part of the newsfeed-parade. Your team members will undoubtedly share their appreciation with a like or two.

You can make it even more alluring by using the poll function. Not only will you be able to get a clear representation of your employees’ answers, but you can share the results on the newsfeed as well. We know what you’re thinking: what if I want to personalise my team’s newsfeed? Search no more! The newsfeed is fully customisable per user group. If you want your latest post to be visible for your store staff, but not for the managers, we’ve got you covered.

Conclusion

Whatever your content looks like, we have the right format to make it the most appealing version for your company. By the way, there are several ways for us to help you with your content writing. Intrigued? Take a look at one of our previous articles to stay on top of your content-game. If you would like a demonstration, we are more than happy to help.

Microlearning, News

10 Ways to improve your learning content

Writing is all about expressing your creative thoughts, wouldn’t you agree? Well, our goal is to boost this creative process! To help you write even better learning paths, we’ve came up witch some tips and tricks to boost your creative minds! Let’s Rock and Roll:

1. Appearance matters ✨

We believe that personalising your homepage, the colour of your tracks and your logo’s is very important to boost the engagement of your users! That’s why we never stop working on creating new ways to enhance the lay-out of our app.

Have you tried to adjust the following?

  • Colour of your path
  • Splash screen
  • Path-avatars
  • Path background
  • Personal image

2. Work with Text-Editor

We always say: “If you would need to study this content yourself, what would you do? Most people work with bullet-points and different colours to highlight the most important information. Help your users to remember the content by doing the same!

3. Introducing … 🥁

While we are all about ‘jumping right into it’, we do advice to always start a learning moment with a short introduction! Tell the users what this learning moment is about: What should they expect? What will they learn?

Encourage them to get started and make the most of it.

4. Variation is the spice of life 🧂

You know this, I know this, everyone knows this, but still, many people seem to forget to variate between different question formats! The more variation, the more engaging it will be for the users!

5. An image says more than a thousand words 📸

We believe that images, videos and GIFs (Yes Gifs!) are crucial to make an engaging track. We truly think that there is no such thing as ‘too many images’, so try to add an image with every text format, question formats, etc.

If you have a fun video that explains what you want to say within a minute or less, why would you write it all down? Don’t, because we tend to remember what we saw better than what we read. Don’t have any videos yourself? Let us introduce you to our good friend YouTube!

6. Create some space 🧘🏽‍♀️

Creating engaging content is not only about the content itself, but also about the way you ‘display’ it. What?

Yes! Imagine how you would feel if you open your textbook and all you see is pages and pages filled with nothing but continues text … 🤢

It doesn’t really encourage you to read it, does it? Well, by using white spaces, bullet point, images etc., you divide the text into different parts which makes it much more appealing to read. Have a look yourself:

7. TITLES make a difference         

We strongly advise you to use titles (step titles) in every text screen! It catches the attention of the reader and it simply looks so much better in the application.

8. Feedback please 🙏🏼

Every question is linked to a feedback screen, thank goodness, but it’s up to you to write the feedback and add the titles! A simple, ‘well done!’ or ‘Try again!’ can make a huge difference!

9. Work with scenarios 👀

One type of question can be used in many different ways. Instead of asking, ‘Which option is correct’, try to create a scenario instead. For example: ‘A customer walks in and he looks quite angry. What could you do? Choose between the following options:’

This way the user will learn how to translate theory into real-life situations.

10. End on a high note 🎶

Every beginning has an ending. While it all sounds very philosophical, the same rules apply for a learning moment. You start with an intro and you end with an outro, or as we call it, a ‘congratulations’ screen. Use this opportunity to motivate the user but also summarise the most important information from that learning moment. Make knowledge stick!

Encourage them to keep going, get the best score and complete the tests.

You can do this!

content writing 2 pencils
Microlearning, News

The world is your content oyster: how to get started

The MobieTrain platform is all yours! Great! But now what? Where do you start? Well, before we are even going to explain our different content creation options, we would like to just take a minute and say: we’re so excited to have you on board! You’re about to empower your employees with a fantastic training method, that’s already a great start on its own!

 

 

Whichever option you decide to choose, know that we are always here to support you. We have got your back, and together we will set you up for success. High-five!

 

3 options

There are basically 3 options to create content and the good news is that you can mix and match as much as you want! So, let’s get this party started, shall we?

 

Option 1. You create your own content

 

In this case, we give you all the tools and instructions so that you can go ahead and build a fantastic learning track. This basically means that we will grant you access to our content management system (CMS) and you will be able to create your very own learning paths in no time.

Just like that?

Yes, that’s how easy it is. After an in-depth onboarding session with our very own CMS specialists and Customer Success Manager, you can go ahead and start writing or transforming your existing content straight away. After all, who knows your company’s history, mission, and goals better than your own people? Don’t worry about figuring out how to start or what to write, because or team will always be there to help you determine the goals of your training and advise you on what and how to write.

Ok great, but who’s going to write the content?

That’s completely up to you, of course! The good news is that it doesn’t take that much time or that many people to write some amazing learning moments! We’ve seen that all our clients have their own, unique approach. Some companies have their own L&D department who are working on creating learning paths for the app. Others ask their interns or students to work on this as a project, where they use your existing content and turn it into microlearning moments.

The bottom line is, you don’t need expert content writers or a lot of time to write your own content. With our CMS, anyone can do it.

 

Not only do we love the very intuitive interface of the platform, we are also a big fan of MobieTrain’s customer support. They’ve always got our back.

Bruno Pinto Coelhoe, Training Leader at Decathlon.

Let’s have a closer look at how some of our clients, like Decathlon, create their own content.

Decathlon uses MobieTrain to train their in-store employees about their products and newest releases. They brainstorm with the head of each sports department about which trainings they would need and what it should entail. During these brainstorming sessions they create a mood board with different ideas for topics, questions, images, and videos for each learning track. Once they have a solid plan, they ask their writers to create a learning path covering these ideas. This way, each learning path includes the ideas of the experts and the writers can use their creative minds to turn it into a fun and engaging training method.

Don’t worry, you don’t have to be a multinational with countless departments and employees to be able to write your own content! We work with plenty of SME’s, like Raes Logistics, who successfully create their own engaging content.

 

Option 2. We create the content for you

 

 

Want us to create the content for you? No problem! Our team of creative content writers is already on it. Maybe you already have all the content you need for a training (think of handbooks, PowerPoint presentations, … you name it). Our content writers can help you to transform that existing content into microlearning moments.

In this case, we have an in-depth conversation about what you expect of this training and what you want your users to achieve after completing it. We want to get to know you and your company, so that our writers can reflect your company’s identity and mission in the training.

We write the content for some of our biggest clients, like Vans, Timberland and Azadea.

Let’s have a closer look at Vans: They wanted to be more effective in delivering a consistent brand and product message through their +1,000 store assistants in EMEA. That is why they introduced MobieTrain as a training method for onboarding, product training, sales and servicing techniques. They already had all the training content they needed in the form of presentations and brand books, but they needed to transform that content into fun and engaging learning moments which they could share with all their frontend employees. That’s where we came in!

You give us everything you have; you tell is who you are as a brand and what you want to reflect (from your main message to the tone of voice), and we will rock that content for you! Remember that our creative content writers can create content in both Dutch and English!

 

Option 3: Content support sessions

 

Want to mix our first two options? You absolutely can. In this case we co-write the training content with you. What this entails, depends on your wishes. We organise different sessions where we show how we would approach writing the content and we give you tips and tricks on how to get started. Once you’re all set, we review what you have written and give you suggestions where needed. In some cases, we divide the content and decide who’s going to write what, depending on our expertise. In this case we have a closer look at each other’s knowledge and discuss which topics will be written by you and which topic will be written by our own writers.

Let’s take our client P&V as an example: we wrote their very first learning path for them to show them how we approached our content creation process. This way we could show them the different possibilities, different question formats, and our creative ideas. They used that learning moment to create their paths in our CMS while we reviewed and supported what they have made.

Our client Diesel for example tried a mix of different content options. First, they asked our team to write the content for them. After we had created an onboarding learning path for them, they used our ideas, style and approach to switch methods and started creating their own content.

The possibilities are endless, and it all depends on what you prefer! No matter what you choose, you’ll never be alone. Our team of experts has got your back!

Want to know more about these options? We’re happy to answer all your questions! Contact us at hello@mobietrain.com

 

Blended learning
Employee Engagement, L&D Approach, News

The Future of Work is now: are you prepared?

We can’t avoid it anymore. After talking about ‘the future of work’ for the past couple of years, it is finally here. Forced upon is in an unprecedented way, with a speed that none of us could have predicted.

But how ready are you and your employees for the ‘new normal’?

The situation worldwide is changing daily. None of us can really be sure of what the ‘new normal’ will look like yet. But there are a few things that we’ve been made certain of, especially when we consider training and engaging our increasingly remote workforce.

Traditional training and comms is no longer enough

  1. The need for speed: we can no longer afford 3-4 month content creation cycles. We need to get relevant information to our employees instantly, and at scale, especially when this information and regulations are continually changing.
  2. Reducing time away from our roles: face-2-face training and e-learning takes a lot of time to consume and takes our employees away from their roles. We need to streamline training so that it aligns with our busy days and can be digested “on-the-go” in short, effective bursts.
  3. We need to retain this knowledge: When training is concerned with important topics such as the health and welfare of our employees and customers, we need to make sure the knowledge sticks. 80% of the knowledge from traditional training is forgotten after 30 days. Our brains are simply not wired to focus for such a long time and retain so much information at once.
  4. Communicating with remote workforce: we need to reach our remote, sometimes multi-national, workforce quickly and consistently.
  5. It needs to be cost effective: In-person training and e-learning requires dedicated infrastructure, such as classrooms or desktops/laptops. Almost all employees have smartphones, but what about laptops? We often need to rent and maintain this equipment for our employees, which can come at high costs.
  6. Lack of engagement & difficult software: Creating simple, engaging training that can be followed by all employees, with different roles and backgrounds, can be a real challenge with traditional tools. Often those traditional tools are complex, targeted at HQ employees and desktop-focused

So what can we do?

The good news is that our current climate is encouraging us to foster innovation. With regulations changing daily, we have to accept that what may have worked pre-pandemic may no longer work. The future of work is now, and we need to find solutions that match.

One such solution is the inclusion of mobile microlearning, a trend that has been evolving rapidly prior to the pandemic, and is gathering even more relevance now.

By adding mobile microlearning into the mix, we can consume content remotely, intuitively and on demand. We transform the long classroom and e-learning training into bite-sized pieces of content that we can actually remember. We add gamification so that your employees are self-motivated to engage and learn.

If we do this the right way, we can see adoption rates increase to over 90%, engagement numbers which are 4x higher than traditional e-learning, and 50% higher retention rates.

The power of blended learning

But we don’t have to start again from scratch. Traditional training still has benefits, but these benefits are amplified by a blended learning approach that combines existing training with microlearning.

How can we do this?

  • As a standalone learning method for specific topics and user groups that are suited for this, especially non-desk employees who can only be reached on their mobiles.
  • Before in person training or e-learning, or while preparing those in order to make the traditional training more efficient, for example by identifying specific knowledge gaps. This way, we can optimise in person training or e-learning by length or volume.
  • After in-person training or e-learning. Continuous reinforcement significantly increases knowledge retention, and avoids the new information being forgotten soon after lessons.

Mobile microlearning can be adapted to tackle different challenges for different companies, depending on the industry, topic and target audience. Whether used as a standalone solution, or combined with existing programmes in a blended learning approach, we can use this technology to move quickly and ensure our employees are ready for the future of work.

transitions learning industry
L&D Approach, News

4 Transitions that shake up The Learning Industry

Since the moment that countries have gone in (semi-)lockdown due to COVID-19, I have seen many articles been published about how this will change the learning industry. People are forced to search for new ways to transfer knowledge. They discover technology which they didn’t know that existed a few week ago.

No alt text provided for this image

Crisis and opportunities go hand in hand and John F. Kennedy summarized it: “When written in Chinese, the word “crisis” is composed of two characters. One represents danger and the other represents opportunity.”

One of the biggest opportunities most likely is to rethink the way we educate our children as well as all people in their journey of continuous learning. Too often we don’t take the time to reflect and jump straight into short term solutions.

I spoke with business leaders of many organizations where currently the L&D departments are working over-time as they need to digitalize their learning offerings at high speed. This results, in many cases, to a solution in which classroom trainings get replaced by live webinars. So yes, we use technology to change the way we transfer knowledge. But, we miss a big opportunity. The opportunity to enhance the old learning experience into a new one. One that is much more engaging for the learner and with much better knowledge retention results.

That’s why I want to highlight 4 transitions in learning (covered by Danny Iny in his great book Leveraged Learning) which will truly disrupt the way we learn and teach:

1. From real-time to semi-synchronous

In the past, we experienced only one format in which the trainee knew perfectly up-front where to be at which time to get a class from a teacher or trainer. Due to the fact that we need much more knowledge than ever before and have less and less time to consume learnings, such traditional training methods are not sufficient anymore.

Nowadays we are familiar with blended learning approaches, although many are still struggling to turn 1 + 1 into 3.

2. From just-in-case to just-in-time

Learning used to be something that you did at the start of your career. But that just doesn’t work any longer in today’s world. It’s so much easier to access information and training when we need it, and conditions change so quickly that things you learned “just-in-case” are more likely to be outdated and irrelevant by the time you actually need them. Lawrence Summers, former president of Harvard University, went on record saying: “I think, increasingly, anything you learn is going to become obsolete within a decade, and so the morst important kind of learning is how to learn.”

No alt text provided for this image

So, if not a mass of education at the start of our careers, then what? The answer is education in smaller increments, spread over our entire lives. The Stanford 2025 project of reimagining the future of education predicts that the current four years during the ages from 18 to 22 will be replaced by six years spread over a lifetime.

This transition to lifelong just-in-time education is underway. But in a context of lifelong learning, taking a full-time semester for skill development is impractical, let alone taking one or more years. So courses are shortened and designed to be done on the side, while the rest of our life continues to go on.

Rohit Bhargava calls it “light-speed learning” in his book Non-Obvious. In his words: “The road to mastery on any topic gets faster through the help of bite-sized learning modules that make education more time efficient, engaging, useful and fun.”

3. From information to transformation

Pure knowledge is fairly easy to absorb. All it takes is a good explanation and possibly a bit of repetition, and you’ve got it. Developing a competence or skill can start with a good explanation and repetition. But there is more needed.

You also need the input and experience of real-world application. You need feedback that tells you whether you’re on the right track or need to correct your course. You need the opportunity to make those adjustments and see the results.

For learning to be truly transformative, then, it has to be customized around the unique strengths and opportunities available to the learner in question. Which has the added benefit of being more engaging to the learner, at a time when just holding a person’s attention is getting harder and harder.

4. From mandatory to voluntarily

During nearly every HR conference there is at least one keynote highlighting the importance of empowering employees to make their own choices in their development. The role of the organizations is rather to create a menu of different learnings and let the learners choose. Also in education there is more and more freedom for students to chose which courses they want to take in which semester and as such to create their personalized curriculum. I tend to agree and disagree with the statements above.

In the early days of offering more freedom to the learners, MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) were often created. But over time it became clear that those didn’t seem to work in a majority of the cases. A fair amount of investigation has shown that the completion rate of MOOCs across the board tends to max out at 15%.Why are MOOC completion rates so incredibly low? Do learners not want to learn? Are people fundamentally incapable of following through on ventures they set out to do?

Maybe the reason is a lot easier: perhaps MOOCs just offer too much freedom and choice. One thing is clear. We need a healthy balance between giving freedom and making some aspects of the journey mandatory.

No alt text provided for this image

Sometimes people explain the low learning engagement rates due to the fact that our attention spans are getting shorter and shorter. The statistic comes from the misreading of a 2015 study conducted by Microsoft. The study showed that it took about 8.5 seconds for the subjects’ attention to wander from whatever was put in front of them. What is really tells us is that it took 8.5 seconds for the participants’ minds to begin wondering if there might be something more interesting or worthy of their attention.

There are two approaches that course creators can take to overcome this challenge:

  1. Take away some choices: bring back start dates, end dates and deadlines that must be met to remain student/learner in good standing.
  2. Develop courses engaging enough for students to choose them over everything else vying for their attention.

The four transitions described above are all at work as we speak and will fundamentally change the way how we consume and deliver education.

I truly hope that all learning professionals as well as business leaders keep those transitions in mind and turn the current situation in an opportunity to get most out of those. Technology will play a vital role in supporting those transitions and enabling more people than ever in their continuous learning journey.

We will zoom in to each of the transitions in the next coming weeks and highlight how technology will play its role.


Guy Van Neck
Founder & CEO MobieTrain

 

Stronger Together MobieTrain
Microlearning, News

Stronger Together

Share important knowledge with your remote team for free

Due to the latest developments concerning COVID-19, we at MobieTrain are determined to support you in any way possible by offering our mobile training and communication platform for free until the end of May.

Now that most of the population is encouraged to work remotely, in some cases 100% of the time, our platform can help your organisation to keep on communicating effectively with your employees.

In order to do so, we will offer the following elements through our mobile app:

 

1. Newsfeed: Instantly create & push communication messages at large scale

Keep your team up to date by sharing messages about crucial new information.

newsfeed mobile learning
newsfeed mobile learning cms

2. Poll: Get structured feedback from your team

Ask your team what topics they would like to be informed about and what further information they need to receive the right support.

poll mobile learning
poll mobile learning app

3. Fast Learning Track: Instantly train your remote staff

Use our Fast Learning Track to quickly educate and inform all your remote employees, wherever they are. Create a track to focus on the most important topics and reach everyone through their mobile devices. Analyse the results through our dashboard to see if everyone has understood all the information.

fast learning track mobietrain

Furthermore, to do our part in helping to control the spread of the virus, we have created a Fast Learning Track with some key prevention tips that you can share with your team.

We truly hope that our support can help you to communicate crucial information with your team in the most effective and safe way.

Register via the button below and we will contact you as soon as possible to get you started. Our team will support you with the set-up and the creation of the necessary trainings.

The MobieTrain Team

Register here!
Unleash MobieTrain Win
News, Thought Leadership

The future of work: MobieTrain vs. the Robots

Let’s be honest. Are you concerned that robots or machines will steal your job? Artificial Intelligence was a key theme at Unleash, the world’s biggest HR event, when we attended last week. But we, for once, are not scared.

Want to know why? Well…IBM’s CEO, Ginni Rometty, phrases it perfectly…

“Some people call this artificial intelligence, but the reality is this technology will enhance us. So instead of artificial intelligence, I think we’ll augment our intelligence.” —

Ginni Rometty

The Human Factor

Humans are still at the core of our workforce. Everywhere we look, customer experience is every company’s key driver. It’s certainly at the core of MobieTrain, and that is why we were honoured with winning Unleash’s biggest ever startup competition last week. But more on that later…

What really matters is what us winning says about the future of work. Empowering your employees and ‘unleashing’ their potential was the theme of the conference, and this in itself is telling. We weren’t being told to retrain as coders, or pack up our laptops and head for the hills.

Instead, we were shown how more and more companies are, and should be, placing their emphasis on empowering their employees. On using technology, not to replace workers, but to help them…to ‘augment our intelligence’ as Rometty says, and in doing so, to drive real change and results that impact the bottom line.

Augmenting Our Intelligence

Intelligence. Knowledge. Empowerment.

Isn’t it great to see that, despite the doomsday predictions, the mobile and AI revolution still has these values at its core?

And that is why we won at Unleash. As in Rometty’s quote, our mobile-learning platform ‘augments our intelligence’ with technology. It empowers employees, not machines. 

Personalisation is key. And, through integrating Artificial Intelligence into our platform in the coming months, it will help us to improve the performance and job satisfaction of real employees, and improve the customer experience of real customers. We’ve known for a long time that data is our friend. So too is artificial intelligence, if harnessed correctly.

Why microlearning?

“Winning Unleash’s startup competition just reinforces our core idea-that knowledge is power. And micro-learning is the best way for the mobile workforce to not just learn, but use, that knowledge to make real impact.’

Guy Van Neck, Founder, MobieTrain

Unleash has given us even more incentive to keep pushing forwards with our product. Our vision is to set the global standard in mobile-learning, and with victories like this we are getting closer to empowering more and more workforces worldwide. But first, we focus…

‘It’s better to attack the market with a knife instead of a hammer.’  

Jerome Ternynck, Host at Unleash 18 Competition

Our focus on the retail sector, alongside our micro-learning approach, is what gave us the edge on the finale day. But from 2019 onwards, we’ll also be venturing into other industries including financial services, logistics and food and beverages.

The microlearning market is expected to reach USD +14 billion by the end of 2022 with +11 % CAGR during forecast period 2018-2022.

Microlearning is booming. It is driving the future of work, a future that still revolves around employees. And, as our success at Unleash shows, the future of work is now.