Look around your workplace. It’s not hard to locate an employee staring down at their mobile device. Today, everyone connects with friends, colleagues and even mentors outside of their immediate work space on a regular basis. As an instructional designer, you should leverage the learner’s affection for mobile devices to extend the learning space beyond a one-time online or classroom event.

Research from a variety of disciplines indicates that the traditional method of learning, which usually involves sitting down in a classroom or in front of a computer and learning for hours on end, is not effective for long-term retention. Think about it yourself: You’ve probably crammed for an exam the night before a test and gotten a really good result. The problem is that a day later, two days later or even a week later and the information is gone. Most likely if you crammed for an exam, you really didn’t learn the information; you just memorized the content. The problem with cramming is that it has little long-term impact on a person’s behavior or knowledge level.

To make a long-term impact, a better method of delivering instruction is to provide short bursts of information over a long period of time. Fortunately, a number of different tools have sprung up to help deliver instruction outside of traditional learning delivery formats. For example, one tool that has recently gained traction is the use of text messages to remind employees of specific pieces of information or desired behavior. The idea is that once or twice a day a text reminder such as, “Remember, ask open-ended questions when greeting a customer who enters the store,” appears on the learner’s mobile device. These short reminders can be helpful to reinforce learning from a webinar, e-learning module or a classroom event. Providing text-based reminders provides a great pull-through for the content and keeps it fresh in the learner’s mind for a long time after the original training event.

For content that is more visual, think about using an explainer video. The concept of an explainer is that it is a short, entertaining and informative video that can be animated or even look like a person writing on a whiteboard. The goal from an instructional perspective of an explainer video is to create something that the learner wants to view and provides a quick instructional lesson. There are a number of companies that now offer software designed specifically to create your own explainer videos. What used to take weeks or even months to create can now be done in a few hours with the explainer software.

As an example, create a learning campaign designed to send learners content twice a day via a text message. Or create a series of one-minute videos where executives reinforce key points over a period of a week or a month once a day.