Trends suggest that learners want to drive their own learning and have access to a variety of bite-sized materials in various media to learn what they want, when they want it. It’s not just the Millennials, and it is not because people have no attention span. It is because everything moves so quickly and we have become accustomed to making our own path ... quickly. Yet, corporate learning organizations are having trouble shifting fast enough.

Simulations are an important component of training in many healthcare verticals. Mannequins, simulation labs, and computer-based simulations are well-established parts of many healthcare professionals’ education. They are however also expensive and difficult to deliver online. What’s needed is a solution that combines the low-cost, distributed model of eLearning with the power of simulation.

Micro-learning has gotten huge over the last several years. Micro-learning, particularly video, offers huge benefits, including that it fits into available time slots in busy schedules and that it’s inherently mobile. From the organizational perspective, it can also be much faster to market, more focused, easier to maintain, and more scalable than its macro counterparts. The challenge, however, is for organizations to take advantage of this format. How can it be produced quickly and affordably, and how can it scale to engage the whole organization?

Building a native HTML5 mobile game could take very complex code to build, especially if you want to add elements like flex and responsive layouts, natural motion that interacts with user actions and the device’s accelerometer, accept user input, and more.

Engaging, professional-sounding voice recording is a key to maximizing the potential for eLearning. Voice acting should be professional, sound realistic, and be free of distractions that can disengage participants and limit knowledge retention. While hiring professional voice actors can provide an easy solution, budget constraints may limit or eliminate the option of outsourcing voiceover work. When this occurs, development teams must look to their own in-house talent, many of whom may be new to the idea of lending their voice.

Infographics powerfully convey content in a visual and readily understandable manner. However, as appealing as they often are, learners often spend only a brief time viewing them before moving on. Are there ways to increase an infographic’s “stickiness,” or its effectiveness to make the content better understood and retained by the learner?

Studies show that using audio narration in eLearning lessons is significantly more effective than using on-screen text. However, adding a human voice to lessons increases production time and makes updating lessons difficult. These obstacles might make you consider using text-to-speech or even cause you to forego the use of audio altogether.

Video can be a highly effective form of media for learning. However, adding video to an eLearning course has historically been expensive and something that required a large amount of time and skill to create. That’s not the case today, with the tools for creating and editing video becoming both easier to use and less expensive.

Most often an eLearning program will suffer from poor graphics and design, regardless of how well written it is. Poor design reflects negatively on your company, your products, and your professionalism. Design can impact how content is received and how information is trusted. And many times an organization does not have a professionally trained designer on hand to tackle these issues.

From CIOs to instructional designers, to faculty, trainers, and students, organizations and universities are considering adding video-making or “visual literacy” as a core skill to the three Rs—reading, writing, and ’rithmetic—in order to prepare learners for a highly visual communication landscape that requires critical thinking to offset consumerism. Evidence shows there is a need for multi-modal learning and cognitive skills. Researching, creating, and sharing video playlists is one of the important additions to creating personalized learning pathways and engendering continuous post-diploma learning.

There are things that prevent us from making the great video learning content that we are capable of. Sometimes these things are technical, sometimes they are budgetary, but mostly they are due to our misconceptions about what is involved. While some blaze into situations making bigger promises than they can ever deliver, others scare themselves out of ever getting started in the first place. Most of us fall in between, perpetuating common video myths without even knowing it.