I remember years ago being in Australia for the first time and being mystified by the sign ‘BYO’ outside restaurants. It meant Bring Your Own (bottle) of course but was an alien concept to someone brought up in Europe where restaurants are licensed and you wouldn’t dare ‘bring your own’!
In learning circles these days, we have BYOD. No that’s not Bring Your Own Dessert (ha-ha) but Bring Your Own Device (or also called bring your own technology (BYOT), bring your own phone (BYOP), and bring your own Personal Computer (BYOPC) but let’s not get too complicated!).
Basically it’s a strategy allowing employees, business partners and other users to utilize a personal device (smartphones, tablets and PCs) in their workplace to access data. That means people could be accessing a snippet of training or a webinar or an online learning platform or whatever from their own device whilst at work.
The use of multiple devices is a growing trend as these statistics show:
- According to a Google report of 2016, the number of mobile-only users has grown, and they now surpass desktop-only users. Multi-device usage too has increased, and people now effortlessly switch between smartphones, tablets, phablets, and laptop computers to manage their lives.
- According to comScore, 20 percent of the Millennials use ONLY their smartphones to communicate.
- According to the eLearning Guild research in 2014, about 59.9 % of people prefer the vertical orientation to consume training content on their mobile devices as opposed to 40.01% people who prefer the horizontal orientation.
This trend of course can mean a whole load of complication for companies so developing policies around BYOD has become more common. Compliance, security, sensitivity of corporate data, privacy and so on are all issues that need consideration. There are people out there to help you with this– IBM for example offer a Managed Mobility Service.
From the learning design side, there are some key aspects to remember:
- Make sure that all content is Smartphone and tablet enabled (and have a look for yourself to see how your content will look from a mobile)
- Keep the content short and clear
- Don’t clutter pages with too much text
- Use graphics
- Make links highly visible
If you’re interested in learning more from the design side you can get a great download from Kineo. It’s geared towards learning designers such as me but I know that many L&D professionals do their own design work doit will be useful to you too.
So…..what do you think of BYOD?
Does your company support BYOD? Do you have a specific policy around it? What concerns might you have about formally introducing BYOD?
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