Mobile Learning, or mLearning for short, is not the newest trend to hit the LMS market: the “fall of personal computing” has been a topic of discussion on this blog for a long time. But mLearning continues to make the top industry trends as the expectation of mobile access to Learning Management System platforms becomes ever more engrained among learners. Smartphones and tablets are in the homes and offices of most people. According to eLearning Industry, from 2014-2015 2.6 billion smartphones were sold worldwide and sales are continuing to grow. With growing reliance on smartphones for almost everything in our life, from our alarms, fitness tracker, email and calendars, it’s no surprise that smartphones would be incorporated into our learning.
For Performance Improvement (PI) in health care, using mobile learning can be a tool to aid in the quality of CME and CE. The ability to have your education be accessible 24/7 as well as portable allows learners to learn when they want, where they want. This means medical professionals can take their learning on the go, allowing their continued education to be integrated seamlessly in their already busy lives.
A great example of an organization that is integrating mobile learning into healthcare professionals’ CE is the American Association of Nurse Anesthetists (AANA). AANA reported that over 60% of their 50,000 members use mobile devices to access the content including when accessing AANALearn.com CourseStage Health, their LMS platform provided by Web Courseworks. This shows that professionals in the healthcare field want to use their smartphones or tablets to receive their CE credits. We had a chance to speak with Lisa Cohen, Director of Education and Professional Development of AANA, who speaks on how their members are currently using AANALearn.com and the importance of selecting CourseStage Health as its new LMS. Lisa characterized CourseStage Health as a “one-stop shop” for nurse anesthetists (CRNAs) seeking to find high-quality online continuing education and track credits they have earned to maintain their certification.
One of the unique aspects of Course Stage Health is its mobile-responsive Self-Reported Learning Module. Beginning in August of 2016 all Certified Registered Nurse Anesthetists (CRNA) will be entering a new re-certification process (similar to the MOC process) and it is critical for AANA’s members to be able to use a self-reporting type tool to report CE credit earned outside of the LMS itself to AANA’s AMS, then to its National Board. Credits earned within the LMS are also reported to the AMS and National Board, allowing the LMS to serve as the lifelong learning portfolio for CRNAs.
AANA also utilizes the CourseStage Health catalog, an eCommerce module called BoxOffice. One of the main reasons why AANA switched LMS vendors was because the old LMS required members and non-members to sign in prior to viewing the full catalog of courses. AANA wanted all users to be able to freely browse all offerings and have a purchasing experience similar to Amazon. All of this was possible with BoxOffice which is built on an Amazon platform.
Mobile learning is making continued education easier for professionals because it gives them the power to take their education into their own hands through having the flexibility of learning anywhere at any time. For healthcare professionals this is key to ensuring that their CME and CE can fit into their schedules. Associations like AANA are showing, by utilizing the right tools, how continued education can become integrated more and more seamlessly into busy professional’s lives.
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