Publications
Three books, one through-line: learning technology is only worth what it changes in the real world. Chad Udell has spent his career at the intersection of design, technology, and how people actually learn on the job — running SparkLearn and Float, and writing the strategy, the craft, and the horizon scan for teams doing the same work.
Books by SparkLearn CEO, Chad Udell
How Mobile Content Strategies Are Transforming Training
Your learners stopped waiting for the LMS a long time ago. They're looking things up on the floor, in the truck, at the bedside, between meetings — on whatever screen is closest. Learning Everywhere is about meeting them there on purpose instead of by accident.
Chad Udell wrote this for the person who has to convince someone else. Not a technology tour, and not a list of apps that will be dead in two years — a durable strategy framework for deciding what belongs on mobile, what doesn't, and how to build content that survives the move.
Inside, you'll work through
The business case
How to frame mobile learning in terms executives actually fund — performance, time-to-competence, and reach — rather than novelty.Content strategy first, platform second
Why the content model, not the device, determines whether a mobile learning program lives or dies.Design for the real context of use
Short sessions, split attention, bad connectivity, one thumb. What that means for how you structure informationDelivery decisions
Native, web, hybrid, responsive — the tradeoffs, in plain language, with the questions to ask before you commit.Rollout and adoption
Governance, security, device strategy, and the organizational friction nobody puts in the proposal.
The result is a plan you can defend in a budget meeting and hand to a team on Monday.
Who it's for:
L&D leaders, instructional designers, training managers, and performance consultants building — or defending — a mobile learning initiative.
Pairs with:
Mastering Mobile Learning, the hands-on companion for teams past the strategy stage.
Tips and Techniques for Success
Most mobile learning projects don't fail at the idea stage. They fail somewhere between the kickoff deck and the second release, on decisions nobody flagged as important: how the content is chunked, who owns updates, what happens offline, how you'll know it worked.
Mastering Mobile Learning is built to prevent exactly that. Chad Udell and Gary Woodill assembled a working reference of tips and techniques across the full lifecycle of a mobile learning program — short, self-contained, and organized so you can go straight to the decision in front of you.
Coverage spans
Design
Interaction patterns, information architecture, and interface decisions that fit small screens and short attention windows.
Development
Platform choices, toolchains, standards, and the technical tradeoffs that quietly determine your maintenance cost.
Content
Chunking, reuse, media, and how to build once without shipping something mediocre everywhere.
Deployment
Device strategy, security, distribution, and the IT conversations you'd rather have early than late.
Measurement
What to track when learning happens in two-minute bursts outside the LMS, and how to report it credibly.
Emerging approaches
Performance support, context-aware delivery, and where mobile stops being a channel and starts being an environment.
It reads the way experienced practitioners actually work: skim for the problem you have, take the technique, get back to building.
Who it's for:
Instructional designers, developers, project managers, and L&D teams actively designing, building, or running mobile learning.
Pairs with:
Learning Everywhere for the strategy and business case behind the work.
The Challenge and Promise of Emerging Technology
The pitch never changes, only the acronym. Artificial intelligence, augmented and virtual reality, wearables, voice, sensors, adaptive systems — each arrives with a vendor promise, a conference keynote, and a board member forwarding an article.
Shock of the New is the antidote to reacting to all of it. Chad Udell and Gary Woodill take emerging learning technology seriously without taking the hype at face value, and give you something more useful than a trend list: a repeatable way to evaluate what's in front of you.
The book works through
What's actually emerging
A grounded survey of AI and machine learning, AR and VR, wearables and sensors, voice interfaces, adaptive and data-driven learning — what each is genuinely good at right now.
Separating signal from hype
How to read a maturity curve, a vendor demo, and a pilot result without fooling yourself.
The human side
Why organizations resist new learning technology, and what actually moves people past "we've always done it this way."
Evaluation and piloting
How to design a small experiment that produces a real answer instead of an anecdote.
Building capacity for the next one
The point isn't mastering today's technology. It's becoming the kind of organization that can absorb whatever lands next.
Written for leaders who have to make calls with incomplete information — and then defend them.
Who it's for:
LOs, L&D and innovation leaders, learning technologists, and anyone responsible for deciding what their organization adopts, pilots, or ignores.
Pairs with:
Learning Everywhere and Mastering Mobile Learning — the strategy and the craft behind putting any of it into practice.
