Performance Support …#4 of the top 5 articles of 2013
/Rounding up our list of the top five Performance Support articles in 2013, here’s article #4…
The Round-Up: #4
eLearning Guild Research: Mobile Learning for Supporting Workers' Performance By: Patti Shank May 16, 2013
Interestingly, none of the performance support articles we’ve already posted mention the role of mobile learning in augmenting performance support; this article is a great introduction to the concept. Patti Shank, internationally recognized information and instructional designer and the Director of Research at The eLearning Guild, opens with a great example for performance support “when you don’t remember how to change the toner on your printer and the printer display window shows you how to do it, that’s performance support.”
Shank stresses how the use of mobile technology in performance support is a natural next step. The 
majority of us have smartphones or tablets and have them on our person most of the time anyway, so it makes sense to integrate mobile performance support. She lists examples of what it could take the form of: PDFs, audio, video, chat apps, SMS (text messages), mobile webpages, and native applications. Shank draws on other examples from case studies with Sonic and the International Red Cross that put the concept into real-life context. You can see more here:
Casebourne, Imogen. How Mobile Learning Is Done: Nine Case Studies from Around the World. The eLearning Guild. 4 April 2013.
Has your organization or your clients adopted mobile learning for performance support? We’d love to hear your thoughts on how performance has improved.
Stay tuned for one more upcoming blog post for the remaining top five performance support article of 2013 … and be sure to check out the first three articles of five in this series:
