Compiled and written by Susan Jacobs, Sr. Editor, The eLearning Guild, the paper has contributions from key personnel in the eLearning, LMS, and mLearning domains, including Amit Gautam, Director of UpsideLMS.

For the past 16+ years, Amit Gautam has been helping organizations worldwide to manage their learning and training initiatives smoothly and successfully. He distills this experience, knowledge, and learning as he shares insights into the future, the value, the benefits, and the key requirements of mLearning, sharing some beneficial examples.

Speaking specifically on the "offline" aspect of mobile learning-management systems, Gautam says: "While there is an all-around development and technological advancements happening in the fields of mobile hardware, software, and the telecom infrastructure, now and in foreseeable future the internet connectivity is still going to a challenge in many parts of the world. In addition, there will always be organizations in which part of the workforce, large or small, will be working in situations in which mobile devices will not be allowed at all times for various reasons.

"For all these reasons, there is always a need for learners to be able to download learning content once on their devices in a secure manner, go through it, and when ready, sync it back with the primary learning environment. This solves a number of problems for the users: consuming internet bandwidth only once to access the learning content, as opposed to being forced to do it repeatedly; having the material available when there is time to learn; and having contenct in a suitable format for a mobile device. For the companies, the biggest benefit is that it allows and enables learning to reach every last person in the chain, irrespective of their internet connectivity and work environment. This can only mean good for the company."

It is this thinking that reflects in UpsideLMS's newest offering and Amit's latest brainchild - UpsideLMS Mobile, an app-based mobile-learning and training platform that can work with or without the Internet.

The five must-haves covered in the "Five Must-Haves in an LMS to Get Mobile Learning Right" paper include
            1. the ability to sync with a smartphone or other mobile device
            2. support for offline learning
            3. job aids for just-in-time learning
            4. push notifications for the mobile workforce
            5. QR code capabilities

Speaking of the industry paper and Amit in specific, Susan Jacobs says, "It was a pleasure working with Amit, and I think the paper is really strong! I would love to work with Upside again!"