Whether you’re looking to showcase your work internally, seeking employment, or prospecting for clients, developing and maintaining an up-to-date portfolio will help you articulate what you do well. With a little forethought and planning, your portfolio can become one of your most valuable tools, opening up conversations and possibilities beyond your expectations.

Traditional eLearning can be dull and demotivating, a reality that runs counter to human nature. People eagerly consume and comprehend new ideas whenever they find the content engaging. They want eLearning that leverages learners’ innate desire for autonomy, mastery, and purpose.

Are your virtual classes stagnant? Do you find you’re using the same tools—polling, whiteboards, chat—that you've used for years? Are your participants multitasking, despite your efforts to draw them in? Do you want to find new ways to engage your audience? If you need to shake up your approach to virtual classrooms, then why not look to the future and consider how new technologies and new mindsets will influence your virtual training's effectiveness?

Many professionals in eLearning are attempting to use gamification and serious games to spark employee engagement and drive learning retention. Everyone is working to make the best serious game that will enhance the learning objectives and retain learning.

Your access to learning-related data has grown dramatically over recent years. But just because you have a large volume of data doesn’t mean it necessarily provides value. While tools like xAPI make it increasingly easy to acquire data about learners’ activities, this information provides little benefit if you don’t know how to design to acquire meaningful data, interpret that data, or improve your learning design based on what you’ve discovered.

Implementing a video strategy is always tricky when juggling budget line items. There’s the risk of throwing too much money at equipment, and the risk of not making the right choices that will produce the level of quality your team expects.

Do you know how to create an effective diagram? Can you create a graph that tells a story? Because visualizing abstractions can improve comprehension and facilitate learning, an important skill in L&D is the ability to convey abstract concepts and statistics in a meaningful way. But if you don’t know how to design the best type of graphic to meet your learning goal, how will your explanation be a success?

On time. Within budget. What they need (even if that changes!). These are moving targets, and yet you’re expected to deliver all three. The software development industry is embracing agile methods to address these issues, and there is much that the eLearning development world can learn from it. Agile provides a framework for adapting to change as it happens and working with the client to deliver content that learners need most.

Education and training departments work under tight budgets and deadlines. In this environment, the temptation to use images and media from the web increases, especially in light of the plethora of social spaces that are used to share such objects. But what can you use? Under what circumstances? And how do we give credit where credit is due?

Video can be a powerful tool in training, but many of the quality video tools are expensive and difficult to master. The average developer just does not have the budget, the skills, or (most importantly) the time to become proficient in a high-end video editing tool.

The Americans with Disability Act (ADA) requires that employers provide “reasonable accommodations to qualified applicants and employees.” But many instructional designers worry that accessible content will be less interactive and thus less effective. Others want to do more but don’t know where to begin. In the end, many often just create a printable text version of the content and call it good enough. You can and should do better than that for your learners.

For years, the learning and development field universally agreed on the value of a learning culture. L&D professionals believe that a learning culture will help people grow, develop, and support the transformational needs of the organization. However, people have traditionally spoken about learning culture in very binary terms: Either an organization has a learning culture or it has nothing at all. This is incorrect. Every organization has a learning culture at a varying level of maturity. Your responsibility is to identify where your organization is and where it needs to be, and to help evolve the culture to support the pace and direction of the business.

The term “bench strength” is frequently used in relation to leadership, so it isn’t surprising that many organizations are keen to create development programs for their future leaders. However, many of these programs fail to adequately prepare employees for the demands of assuming a leadership role.

Very often, training is created in isolation. Stakeholders may believe that “one and done” constitutes a solution; however, in reality, training needs to be reinforced and scaffolded. The eLearning you create is one piece of the puzzle, but it needs a bit more to really stick.

Too many eLearning courses are just data dumps full of facts, details, and nonessential content. These kinds of courses also often lack the necessary context to explain how all this information applies to the real world, making them both boring and ineffective. eLearning should be redesigned to better reach the audience and share content with them in a way that’s engaging and practical. And one simple but effective way to do that is through interactive stories.

Do you struggle with how to prioritize all of your training requests? Are you able to say no to some projects, or do you just take on every one that comes your way? Do you want to bring more rigor to the processes and strategies your team uses to accomplish your training goals? Then there’s a tool you’ll want to use to analyze your work and back up your decisions—data.

Going to RFP (request for proposal) for an LMS can be a daunting process. With all the special protocols, the nondisclosure agreements, and the thick cloud of secrecy that envelopes all parties involved, it can be frustrating and isolating. But once you accept that there’s no avoiding the pomp and circumstance of the process itself, you can begin to strategically position your company to choose the right LMS.

If a picture can convey a thousand words, imagine how much more a video can convey. Videos are fast becoming a standard means of sharing knowledge and training information in organizations, but using them effectively has a number of challenges. How can you ensure they’re searchable, archivable, and relevant for your audience? How can you easily organize and manage these dynamic training assets, including user-generated content? And once you’ve created videos, how can you drive traffic to your online video portal so this content is actually viewed by the people who need it?

During design and development, SMEs and stakeholders sometimes suggest ideas or practices that are antithetical to good instructional design. For example, a designer might have a stakeholder who believes it’s best to simply film a daylong stand-up training session and deliver it as one video. In this case, like so many others, it’s helpful for the designer to identify research findings to help them understand why learning should be designed differently.

Science fiction has always challenged people to see their world in new ways, from a glimpse at an imagined “long, long time ago in a galaxy far, far away” in Star Wars to envisioning a potential future centuries from now in Star Trek. Movies like The Matrix, Inception, Minority Report, Blade Runner, and so many others have proposed mind-blowing ideas like alternate realities, parallel universes, transporter beams, and time travel. One of the many reasons this genre is so popular is that it poses a wide range of “what-if” questions and allows its audience to play with possible answers. But these ideas can do more then just entertain you—they can also inspire your work in L&D.

3-D virtual simulations give you the opportunity to create an immersive learning environment with interactive and engaging experiences. Articulate Storyline has emerged in recent years as a popular eLearning authoring tool, but it lacks built-in tools or methods to create 3-D virtual simulations.

YouTube is the world’s biggest online video provider and second-largest search engine—and that presents some amazing opportunities for L&D. But selling this free tool to stakeholders and gatekeepers in your organization can be a challenge, particularly if they’re having trouble envisioning YouTube used for purposes beyond entertainment. Do they need to see a working sample first? Do you?

Finding ways to make learning “stick” with technology is always a challenge. Augmented reality (AR) is one of those “make it stick” technology options available for education and training. However, AR can seem overwhelming, expensive, time-consuming, and difficult to use in everyday learning development. These assumptions cause developers to overlook the potential this technology holds for their learners.

Workplaces are awash in email traffic, competing demands, and hard-to-maintain courseware, while businesses try to operate more responsively to the needs of both the marketplace and its stakeholders. To better work within this complexity and remain relevant to the business, L&D needs to rethink the methods it uses to support learners. While expensive, enterprise-weight solutions exist for this dilemma, there is a simpler approach you can consider that has shallower learning curves, stronger impact, and greater extensibility—Slack.

With the financial advantages of big data gaining global attention, business leaders are recognizing the need for better reporting and improved accountability across all organizational divisions. New innovations are enabling unprecedented analysis of deep data and measurement of training effectiveness, business impact, and training ROI. The advanced data enabled by next-generation training will allow businesses to make smarter decisions and formulate competitive strategies based on robust and timely insights.

In order to transform the learning organization into a center of excellence, learning leaders must consistently and deliberately deliver measurable business value. But in most organizations, learning is an afterthought to the strategic process, relegated to a reactive, execution-only role.

When was the last time you heard a term in your business but couldn’t really say what it meant? “Performance support” is popping up more and more, but can you really define it? Share the basic concepts underpinning it? Describe the business results other companies are experiencing?

Most learning programs have the goal of supporting behavior change, even a change as simple as getting people to do their jobs better. Organizational learning traditionally measures desired outcomes in terms of “learning objectives,” which are fairly straightforward to identify. In contrast, identifying the root cause of behavior change problems is considerably more complex.

eLearning professionals are expected to take on a wide variety of very different roles. Sometimes you’re the eLearning developer, graphics designer, narrator, or videographer. Other times you may act as the project manager, researcher, or even the department’s tech guru. It’s no surprise that this can be a daunting and sometimes scary prospect for those new to the industry, leaving them feeling insecure, overwhelmed, and unsure of where to begin.

In the customer training world, L&D professionals often have difficulty convincing their customers to complete coursework. This audience consists of busy professionals who increasingly want training they can take at their own pace, on their own time. While in theory this approach has benefits for both companies and customers, in practice there can be real challenges in trying to convince customers to prioritize this non-mandatory training over their other pressing work tasks and deadlines.

In order to provide top-notch customer service, call center agents are required to master an ever-growing number of knowledge and skill sets during training, including sales skills, enterprise tools, products, and policies and procedures. As traditional assessments are often limited to isolated application, facts, or memorized data at lower-level thinking skills, they tend to fall short of testing whether the agents can actually apply their learning and perform on the job.

Acquiring, onboarding, and retaining new and existing customers is critical to the success of any business. The challenge most organizations face in this is figuring out the most effective way to engage and educate their customers at key points in the relationship lifecycle. The ability to manage the tactical requirements such as timing, learning programs, and customer behavior is critical to its success.

Video is all the rage, but what constitutes good video? In the YouTube era, many developers have been taught to point their iPhone and shoot with little thought to aspects like visual composition, lighting, and editing. When you’re shooting video, a number of small, easily adjusted factors often make the difference between a quality video and one that’s unwatchable.

With so much of your design work focused on smooth navigation, creating engaging content, and crafting complex interactions, you may overlook a basic issue: Can people actually be successful with the course? Design flaws such as overload, ineffective use of multimedia (especially narration), and poor assessment items are just some of the ways an “engaging” course can still cause people to stumble.

PowerPoint is often the basis for much of the training material you use and the eLearning and mLearning content you create, and yet it’s text-heavy, dull, and boring. This is not effective; it results in disengaged students and click-through eLearning.

Searching for new and innovative ways to present content is an ongoing challenge for most instructional designers. If you’re stuggling with this yourself, you may want to consider using an inconventional option—comics and comic-style art. Comics are a great way to share content in an engaging and effective way, and their growing popularity has helped them grow in acceptance within L&D. That said, if you’ve never created comic-style content, it’s hard to know where to begin—particularly if you need assistance acquiring or creating your visuals.

Mobile learning is rapidly becoming a must-have for organizations big and small. For most designers, getting started is a huge hurdle they have yet to overcome. Considering all the new technology, platforms, authoring tools, and skills required to make it all work can paralyze even the best learning pros.

With the frequent releases of eLearning products, it can be hard to keep up with all the new features introduced with every version. But if you don’t look into these updates, you could miss great new features that can make your course creation easier or even allow you to do brand-new things with the tool.

Every organization is a complex ecosystem with a multitude of elements. Unfortunately, many L&D teams fail to take a holistic approach—or even recognize that L&D doesn’t own workplace learning on its own. Instead, they focus on their sphere of influence, which often revolves around formal training. Employees are left to struggle with mixed messages and contradictory priorities, which lessens the perceived value of L&D, stifles employee potential, and hinders long-term business growth.

Rapid responses to “Code Blue” resuscitation events are critical to patient outcomes. MedStar Health has developed several training interventions over time to improve performance, but data from these activities were captured in disparate tools or not collected at all. Without a centralized method for analyzing data, understanding the impacts of different elements of the training program was not possible. This illustrates a common problem in blended learning approaches.

The National Park Service (NPS) had a milestone year in 2016. That centennial year didn’t just kick off a second century of stewardship of America's national parks—it also catalyzed a renewed focus for the NPS on employees. To better address the challenges this group faced, the NPS decided to shift its L&D paradigm to a broader learning and performance ecosystem approach.

All too often, new learning theories and technologies come along with little or no vision for how they complement existing approaches and strategies. As each emerges, learning leaders are left holding the bag, trying to make these new approaches work. 70:20:10 is a great math formula to throw around, with few disagreeing with its premise. The problem is taking it from theory to reality and integrating it into your existing ecosystem. 

By creating a learner profile, you will be better able to avoid building training that is ineffective, undesirable, and lacking relevance for your learners. By doing research up front about all aspects of your learners, you will be able to leverage those details to create impactful training that will capture their attention.

Since the 1970s, waterfall methodologies such as ADDIE have been accepted as the standard development approach for eLearning. Today, many organizations are required to keep up with rapidly changing content while also decreasing the time to deliver new courses. Traditional waterfall methodologies have become inefficient, and eLearning professionals have started looking to incorporate agile concepts into their processes to keep up with this new rate of change.

You asked your voice-over artist for a natural, conversational recording, but what you got back is stiff and formal. You waste time going back and forth with voice-over talent about pronunciation or rewording. Too often, you need to re-record voice-over due to errors or confusion. You need a process to make your script writing more efficient and effective.

To support development of a graduate course on serious games at DePaul University, a yearlong study examined the questions to be addressed by this new mode of learning and assessments. Can you encourage people to experience failure in the spirit of learning? Can you build reflection and feedback loops into the learning process? Can you help people further develop their capacities for social interaction and collaborative problem-solving?

All groups within an organization need some way to demonstrate their value. However, unlike sales, L&D generally doesn’t have hard data to measure results. In the past, most learning departments have been limited to measuring only whether their users had accessed their programs—not the strongest metric of how their work contributed to the organization. But L&D isn’t the only group that faces these measurement challenges. Marketing also has similar barriers to finding data that shows its value, but some have found creative solutions to this issue. What can L&D learn from marketing when it comes to measurement?

Having an educated team isn’t just a best practice; it’s a requirement. The more educated the team, the healthier the bottom line. The challenge lies in keeping teams informed and wanting to learn more about their roles in the industry. With dry content centered around policies and procedures, how do you create a story that engages a learner and makes an impact? By using animated videos that are relatable and fun!

Creating effective learning experiences is not a job for a novice, although many novices are thrown into the role of instructional designer or developer. If beginners turn to the field’s expansive literature, which ranges from cookbook-style guides and blogs to scientific research, they are easily overwhelmed and typically turn to overly simplistic approaches. But even experienced professionals can come to feel they’re never able to do the job that should be done.

With the business world changing at an ever-increasing pace, even L&D strategies that have served you well in the past may not be as effective in the present. At Aflac, one challenge was a traditional ILT approach to training that just wasn’t the right fit for the company anymore. The team knew that by aligning learning strategies and solutions to emerging technologies, they could not only make a bigger impact on the people taking their training, but also make an overwhelming impact on the company’s bottom line. And the change they made to do this was a shift to virtual.

Organizations implement new software all the time, especially with the constantly changing technology landscape. A healthcare organization was tasked with training thousands of non-clinical associates, nurses, and physicians when it implemented a new electronic health record. The burning question was: How do you teach people new software in a way that sticks? How do you provide learners with authentic context to practice what they’ll actually do on the job?

You’ve put hours and hours into analyzing content, spent days painstakingly storyboarding your product and drafting the scripts, carefully thought about the navigation choices—and yet you’re still met with “Great, but can you make it look nicer/better/modern/pretty?” when you show it to your client or stakeholders. What more can you do when you’ve utilized sound learning theory and development strategies, but you’re still expected to be a graphic designer on top of it all?

In recent years, learning has moved closer to the workplace. Classrooms have moved out of corporate learning centers and into training rooms co-located with offices. Providers are delivering online learning directly to the desktop more than ever before. The next challenge is to move learning directly into the workflow. To do this, you need to move beyond course delivery and into a broader, more comprehensive and strategic approach that focuses not just on learning, but on performance and productivity.

When one employee joined Purch, she was tasked with “mission impossible”: to build a learning organization from scratch for an extremely diverse workforce with limited manpower. After extensive analysis, she realized employees were learning much more from informal resources than conventional means. By transforming their mindsets and making smart investments in technology, Purch was able to create a learning organization that boosts engagement and contributes to a healthy learning culture.

You’re excited about the promise of an xAPI-enabled world, but you have a learning management system (LMS) and a host of SCORM-based courses that you need. You’ll need to make some strategic decisions, stay flexible, and manage the transition over time. What if you could get the most out of both an LMS and a learning record store (LRS) at the same time as you move to your next-generation learning and performance infrastructure?

Explore the results of a yearlong benchmarking study done with eight leading learning departments who have been implementing workflow learning for many years. If you’re struggling with the technologies, methodologies, change management, and approaches needed to grow your learning organization into an ecosystem that not only includes workflow learning, but places it front and center in your design, you’ll not want to miss this session.

Convincing sales professionals to take the time for career development is an age-old challenge. They just want to sell! However, for them to be most effective at their job they need development—especially at the beginning of their careers. So how do you provide the in-depth sales development content that they need in a way they’ll actually engage with?                                

eLearning and instructional professionals constantly crave new approaches to design, and they regularly grapple with how best to incorporate design thinking into their workflows. Many experienced designers find themselves struggling to enhance usability, influence perception, and make better design decisions. For the instructional designer, the ability to add techniques that “teach through design” can validate creative prowess and yield enhanced interactive and visual solutions in learning materials.

While instructional design and effective learning approaches are paramount in eLearning, aesthetics can’t be ignored either. That’s because the page layouts and overall design of your projects influence both your client’s feelings about the quality of your work and your audience’s confidence in the course. But most instructional designers and developers aren’t trained graphic designers, leaving them at a disadvantage when it comes to building professional, modern eLearning projects.

Many L&D professionals have found that the traditional approach to online courses doesn’t always generate consistent quality when it comes to learning outcomes. Because of this, it’s tempting to try new approaches to solve this dilemma, such as gamification and other strategies. But without a deeper understanding of how to apply these new approaches in a meaningful way, you could end up just using superficial applications of them and miss out on their ability to increase knowledge transfer.

Social and informal learning are happening in your organization. The degree to which they happen varies due to context, tools, and culture. Regardless, each is a significant factor in individual, and therefore organizational, performance—too much so to ignore. The 70:20:10 principle and framework approach addresses these issues, but making this vision a reality has been a difficult undertaking due to traditional views about learning.

Video is rapidly becoming a much more common method of learning delivery than it was even a few years ago. But when you get started with video, it’s important to recognize that you can’t just use the exact same approaches you used in the past for creating eLearning or ILT—this medium has its own unique design rules. To use video as effectively as possible in L&D, you need to look at how this medium really works—from a neurological and a practical point of view—and how that affects the way you design content for it.

Support for Flash continues to erode. Mobile browsers stopped playing Flash years ago, and reports suggest the end of full support for Flash in Google’s Chrome browser is imminent. More and more, it’s becoming obvious that Flash is not a long-term solution. But if you have Flash content in your online training materials, what can you do about it other than completely rebuild?

Virtual classrooms are increasingly popular due to the ability for learners from any location to access education in real time with a teacher, and to participate in an environment that simulates a face-to-face classroom. However, a major area of concern has emerged: the tendency for learners to multitask, rather than remain attentive and focus on the content being delivered.

L&D personnel, from learning leaders to instructional designers to technology innovators, all face a common challenge: how to secure executive buy-in for the tools and resources necessary to create powerful learning experiences.

L&D practitioners have always struggled with extending the learning experience to help make workplace learning less of a one-time event and more of a long-term process. Social tools are one way to shift this approach, offering great opportunities for increasing our reach before, during, and after formal training. But sometimes when using social tools in the same ways we use them in our personal lives, we miss opportunities to leverage them differently to support extended learning and engagement with our audience. There's so much more that these tools have to offer than just asking people to join discussion groups!

In today’s device-rich world, it’s absolutely essential to make your eLearning courses available on all devices, irrespective of their varying screen sizes, in the best possible manner. Creating responsive courses helps you achieve this goal.

The Internet is a terrific knowledge repository. The sheer size of the content stored on the web is unimaginable. Within organizational intranets, the amount of content that is available is also impressive, but is it good content? Is it the right content for the right purpose? Is it up to date? Is it understandable? The more you have to ask these questions about online content, the less efficient your search for the right information will be. Even more of a concern is that you might be more likely to find bad content, act on it (believing it is correct), and suffer the consequences

When a new LMS administrator joined Whole Foods Market, she found herself in a decentralized organization right in the middle of scoping out a new LMS implementation. In only six months she would need to take this project from the early stages all the way to a systems launch. While not everyone may face this exact situation, if you’re considering implementing a new LMS, chances are you’ll experience many of the same pain points and challenges she had to face to make the launch happen.

Knowledge retention for traditional training events is often low. Don’t worry about it. Instead, invest where all learning and performance support really happens—the classroom (10 percent), from colleagues (20 percent), and on the job (70 percent). The magic happens when you can develop and maintain all content in one effort and use it everywhere; that includes at your fingertips—when, where, and how you need it. 

“If you taught them this, why don’t they do it?” Educational services staff at Saint Vincent Hospital got tired of hearing this question and started looking for a new learning paradigm for the institution. They found a solution in performance support. By blending learning opportunities and performance support for associates before a class, during a class, and on the job, organizations are able to significantly impact job performance.

With tight timelines and rapid development tools, people on your team often find themselves on the hamster wheel of endless production. Out of context, this production machine seems very much alive and in sync with corporate needs. But is it? A six-word story experiment asked people to share their experience with corporate training—and not a single one of these stories offered a happy ending. Even with only six words, stories can weave an intricate web of emotions and events. What if you could capitalize on the power of story to redirect the efforts of your team and bring out everything human about your organization?

Storyboarding an eLearning project is a process. There is no right or wrong way to document the design of eLearning, and there is no rule that a project even needs to use the storyboarding process in some circumstances. Because of this, the choices for storyboarding techniques and procedures can be overwhelming if you’re new to the process, and it’s no surprise that some people decide to skip it entirely. But storyboarding can, in the long run, help your project development run smoother, encourage buy-in from your stakeholders or clients, and allow you to create projects you’re more satisfied with—it’s just a matter of determining a storyboarding process that works for you.

In retail banking, like many regulated industries, the entry-level customer service employees have complicated jobs combining relationship skills, compliance with complex regulations, and adherence to frequently changing policies and procedures. Conventional wisdom still says these skills are difficult to learn effectively with online learning technology, particularly if the learning is self-directed.

eLearning authoring tools like Articulate Storyline 2 and Presenter are powerful applications to enrich eLearning experiences. Yet most companies suffer from “PowerPoint Conversion Syndrome.” Therefore, learning experiences continue to be “death sentences” of boredom because courses are just PowerPoint decks full of text and bullets, driving engagement way down.

LMS rollouts are never easy, but add a global implementation and a tight timeline, and this challenge could seem insurmountable. But Intuit didn’t want to just meet the basic requirements of this LMS rollout—the company also wanted to see how a more user-centered design approach could make this system more approachable and enjoyable for its audience.

In a world of fragmented content consumption and constant distraction, how do you get your audience’s attention and keep it? To open the door to learning, you have to put them in the driver’s seat and create an emotional connection with authentic dialogue. Behavior beyond surface-level content engagement requires emotional investment.

What do you do when your organization goes from doing just a handful of webinars here and there to an average of more than one virtual event a day, spanning over a dozen project teams—in just a few months? How do you acquire the platform, find the people, and build the processes to meet rapidly growing demand? A team at Advocates for Human Potential figured it out along the way.

Today’s technology promises access to learning content to everyone, everywhere, but can your content really deliver on this promise? Stuck in inflexible pages, much of today’s learning material is trapped in traditional formal-learning vehicles like courses or presentations. Your content—and the budget, time, and effort you spend creating it—needs to do more to be as effective as possible.

The increasing technical demands of eLearning development are putting pressure on instructional designers. Gig artists (such as Fiverr.com) seem like the perfect solution to get work done.

You need images for your eLessons, and you can’t find exactly what you want. Or if you do find the right one, it costs money that you don’t have in the budget. Or you want to create the images yourself but don’t think you have the artistic talent to do so.

Want to create highly effective and engaging eLearning content, but have a limited budget? A wide variety of high-end digital learning design tools have features that promise to produce visually stimulating experiences, but they come complete with an equally high price tag.

Whether for an individual or an organization, learning is fundamentally about change—change in knowledge, in understanding, in wisdom, or in behavior. And change is challenging. It’s hard to change and to grow, and people often resist it. Anyone, therefore, who is in a learning leadership position and seeks to help their people and their organization grow must understand the dynamics of change.

Today, all learning is a blend, whether by design or because the individual learners have made decisions to pursue and develop personalized learning paths. While that’s great for them, it can be problematic for designers of the learning experience. Designers aren’t always as successful as they can be because they try to implement new tools and design techniques without understanding how to integrate them into the larger blend or support personalized learning paths.

Modern learning and development strategies often seek to leverage peer-to-peer learning in one form or another; strategies include workplace collaboration, social media-based learning, personal networks, peer mentoring, and communities of practice, among others. L&D professionals may find, however, that promoting peer-to-peer learning is not as easy as enabling communication technologies and assigning roles. Learning leaders are sometimes surprised by inactive enterprise social networks and weak peer-to-peer support for learning.

Real-life examples of using xAPI in practice are hard to find, making the move from concept to practice very difficult. As the conversation around xAPI shifts from “just imagine” to “just do it,” designers and developers need more practical examples to build upon.

Neuroscience is one of the hottest topics in training and education, so it’s no surprise if you’re drawn to this research as a source of wisdom for your learning designs. Yet despite its promise, neuroscience is a fairly young field. Questions remain. Are neuroscience findings valid? Are they relevant to learning design? Are they useful?

Outsourcing of T&D is becoming more frequent, providing a large gap for freelancers to fill. But deciding to move to freelancing means you’ll need to find answers to a wide range of business concerns that you likely never had to worry about as an employee. What kind of business should you establish? How can you thrive in a competitive landscape? What do you need to put in place to protect both your new business and yourself?

Imagine leading a national division that’s hiring hundreds of people a year. You have a structured onboarding program and the jobs are attractive, but there are high levels of attrition and the onboarding program is being applied inconsistently. Local managers are also inconsistent in how they take responsibility for onboarding their new hires and say they’re too busy to change. How do you shift what you’re doing to make your onboarding more effective and help retain new employees?

Building an effective and efficient learning strategy for your organization is a complex undertaking. That’s why it can be extremely difficult to know where to start, particularly if you’re creating a brand-new approach. What resources do you need, and how should you prioritize which goals and challenges to go after first?

As technology changes day-to-day life, it is fascinating to imagine what the future will bring. For L&D professionals, however, it’s very hard to keep up the pace. What technology will be trending and will change the way people live and learn, and what technology will be nothing but hype? Has augmented reality really disrupted learning? And how about virtual reality and wearable tech?

Web video is seeing massive growth, and learners are not only consuming video but also making it. The literature indicates that there is an abundance of both underuse and overuse of videos in learning environments. Long, not engaging, and ill-prepared videos are very common.

It is every company’s goal to have an onboarding experience that gets new employees up to speed quickly and helps them truly understand the company’s brand. When a team at Coca-Cola Beverages Florida looked at what they could do to innovate their onboarding and make it more effective, one new technology came to mind: augmented reality (AR). AR can create immersive experiences and let people add new layers of content to the world around them. Could it also work to help new hires become contributing team members as quickly as possible?

Last year, the US National Park Service (NPS) gave a presentation at Learning Solutions Conference regarding its newly designed Common Learning Portal (CLP), which provides integrated access to formal learning, informal learning, and social learning materials via an intuitive interface. The CLP has now been deployed.

Animation and movement can be key features that help the learner pay attention to what’s important on the screen. When done well, motion and animation can be effective tools to leverage; but when done poorly, they are a waste of development time and a distraction to the learner.

Virtual training participants notoriously multitask during live online sessions, which means they miss out on learning opportunities. In addition, there is a common misconception that an online presentation is the same thing as virtual training—it’s not. So virtual classroom designers and facilitators struggle to capture the attention of their audience and keep participants engaged throughout a session so that learning transfer can occur.

Growth, attrition, and change in the fast-paced, deadline-driven work environment all pose challenges for staff development, and relying solely on formal training efforts is no longer realistic. Given these challenges, how can an organization support development for staff in a fiscally responsible and effective manner? What technologies and strategies can help support this learning, as well as knowledge creation and transfer among staff?

Enterprise employees need critical information on the job at the time of need. How do today’s learning professionals leverage mobile technology and deliver the right content to the right users at the right time? They have to take into account the complete user experience, including user context, device capabilities and limitations, mobile interface design, and more. How do all of these variables translate into effective mobile performance support?

When Nielsen took on the task of investing in a learning ecosystem, the team wanted to do more than just launch it; they also wanted to know whether it was effective. But how would they measure the success of this new approach? User research told them the key was that people wanted to find what they needed quickly, and if they didn’t know what they needed, the system should direct them to the right content. So with the metric of success decided, the next challenge was how to measure it.

The world is at a tipping point: Technology connects people, social approaches build community, and the “social age” drives ever more change. But what if people can’t cope? Failure is seen at an individual, organizational, and technical level. How can people become resilient and truly socially dynamic, fully adapted to face the ever more diverse and disruptive challenges they face?

It has been a bit of an uphill battle for clients and learning professionals to make the shift from content creation to curation. You should always be looking to see what exists before you get into creating or customizing new instruction.

The benefits of collaboration are well known, and today the tools available to extend collaborative efforts across time and space (geography) are plentiful. However, merely having collaborative platforms doesn’t necessarily mean collaboration will happen.

Keeping employees engaged isn’t easy, especially in today’s easily distracted and multitasking workforce. And that’s where a solid gamification strategy comes in. Rather than approaching gamification by applying cookie-cutter, meaningless game mechanics to a program, you need to use a proven process to create cohesive, challenging, and collaborative gamification experiences.

L&D professionals often search for detailed, credible learning measurement coupled with an engaging and highly effective learning experience—a pairing that can be achieved only by revisiting L&D’s approach to creating content. By embracing the adaptive learning methodology, while continuing to leverage the sound instructional design principles and emerging technological innovations that have helped you succeed in the past, you can achieve a new level of training sophistication, intelligently adapting the learning experience to each learner based on their actions, decisions, and abilities.

Most eLearning designers and developers are starved for information about the efficacy of their solutions. Many of the existing models for evaluation and measurement aren’t easy enough to implement; and when they are implemented, they aren’t providing quality data.

Spurred both by the growing popularity of video among learners and the availability of the production tools, learning professionals are increasingly producing their own videos. Most, however, quickly learn that video is very different from eLearning. Creating videos that can have a real impact on the workplace requires building new skill sets, and that journey begins with learning more about video scripts. Scriptwriting is essential to creating effective media but is often where workplace videos stumble, with script missteps adding time to the filming and editing process or even preventing a video from making the full impact intended. That’s why, before you pick up a camera and start filming, it’s vital to understand how to create a script that works.

If you’re using Adobe Connect only as a glorified conference calling service, you are missing out on some of the coolest collaborative and customizable features available for live online sessions. Like all webinar software, Connect can handle the basics: application sharing and chat-style messaging. But this object-oriented platform blows away other webinar software in flexibility and clever setup, as well as providing outstanding communication resources behind the scenes.

Mobile learning has come of age to address the need for easy-to-access training on the go. Organizations face many challenges from app developers in meeting their specific needs and implementing a solution that meets learners’ needs in a large organization.

With custom development, you can break out of the box and do more than what your standard eLearning tools can do. This requires a new skill, though: knowing how to direct web developers to create custom eLearning. What do you need to know to speak their language without having to learn to code yourself?

Animation can enhance learner engagement, but who has the time to learn to animate? Storyline 2 has great illustrated characters with many poses and expressions, yet when you need your character to do something not in its lineup, what are you to do?

Are you looking for ways to improve your visuals but lacking the resources to splurge on expensive software? Have you tried Snagit? While many people have heard of this budget-friendly tool and know its basic functions for capturing screenshots, they often don’t know that Snagit also has powerful editing features that can allow you to easily create eye-catching visuals.

Content curation is all the rage, but what does it mean, really? There are different types of curation strategies that work differently in different organizations. The strategy you adopt affects scoping of your design and development work. It also affects the level of effort required to contextualize it to your learners so that it is relevant and meaningful to them and changes their performance, in their role, in your company.

You create and develop rich content for your organization, but learners often don't engage with learning and development unless it’s assigned in a specific learning plan. This lack of awareness can hinder cultivating and creating a culture of learning.

The busy nature of the retail setting makes it a challenge to find ways to extend learning beyond formal training. While this time crunch is real, there’s also a real benefit in being able provide ongoing support for newly learned skills, as this practice and reinforcement can allow people to master new skills faster and with more accuracy. So how do you balance this with the constraints of a busy environment like retail? The solution is one that can seamlessly blend into people’s job responsibilities, providing the guidance they need at the moment they need it—performance support.

Sales employees are successful only if they have time to sell and, more importantly, can complete the process to close the deal. But it takes a long time to get a new salesperson up to speed on a company’s sales procedures, applications, forms, deadlines, and more, and during this process it can often feel to them like drinking from the information firehose. How can we help them quickly get the information they need to do their job well while also preventing them from being overwhelmed by content?

It’s estimated that 50 to 90 percent of training is “scrap learning”—content that is delivered but never actually applied back on the job. Scrap learning serves no practical purpose and is essentially a waste of everyone’s time. L&D professionals can’t help but be uncomfortable with those figures, but nothing in their traditional training bag of tricks has proven capable of eliminating that waste. It’s time to alter the training paradigm.

Training professionals typically fall along a continuum with varying levels of access to their target audience. That amount of access often influences, consciously or not, the techniques they use to analyze their audience. Without adequate awareness of this continuum and where they fall on it, designers risk depending on their own assumptions about their target audience and may end up overlooking more effective analysis strategies that can improve training.

Agile design processes are beginning to change the ways that people create training content. While agile design appeared in the L&D space only in the last few years, they took hold in the software industry much earlier, starting in the mid-1990s. Clearly there is overlap between L&D and the software industry, and if agile design works in both worlds, what other practices used by software development teams could help L&D create better training and work more effectively?

Serious games and simulations have the potential to bridge abstract concepts and real-world applications. But too often, simulations limit themselves to lower-level skills like memorization, resulting in glorified quizzes that are expensive to produce but feel disconnected from real decision-making. And when serious games try to engage higher-order skills, they often do so ineffectively. The decisions that are rewarded may be subjective and arbitrary, leaving learners frustrated and disempowered.

The Experience API (xAPI) can improve the ways you create and deliver content, track interactions, and measure performance—and not just in theory. Years of momentum have resulted in numerous use cases for teams seeking to leverage xAPI to better track, measure, and manage their learning efforts. The challenge now is not whether xAPI can be used in your learning environment, but which ways you will choose to use it out of the multitude of options available to you.

How many times have you had to redo a project because you thought you understood the challenge, goals, or requirements but the final product didn’t work as expected or fully solve the issue? As we start to build more complex interactions and applications, we need to improve our process to allow us to test a concept, measure its results, and iterate over and over until it meets the needs of our audience. Thankfully, software development already has a fantastic process for doing this that we can borrow from that field: prototyping.

Virtual reality (VR) is a hot topic in technology that offers potential for increased immersion, interactivity, and engagement for your learners.

Do you have a difficult time estimating how long a project should take? Do you typically go over your project time estimates, or have some projects that take a lot less time than you thought they would? Would you like to hold your team accountable to realistic time estimates, but don’t have the data to support it? If so, you need a new time-tracking approach so you can more accurately determine your time estimates for training projects.

Microlearning videos under one minute in length require rapid storyboarding and predefined video content structures. As the length of the video decreases, so does the optimal format of the video. Leaving out too many details will have a negative effect on your learning strategy. Every second counts for your learner!

Autodesk’s learning ecosystem is vast, extending far beyond the walls of the corporation to help customers use its tools most effectively. It’s no surprise, then, that driving this change internally at a company-wide scale has been a complex undertaking. There are lots of silos to bridge in order to serve customers well, holistically, and seamlessly.

Traditional training requires an event mindset and often stays in the learners’ brains just as long as the event. Hilti needed to find ways to transfer knowledge that builds skills, and then to retain that knowledge until the point of application.

In nature, an ecosystem refers to the combination of a community of living things, the non-living elements that make up their environment, and the many ways in which those individual elements interact. In order for an ecosystem to thrive, the individual components must connect and support one another, balancing each other so that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Ecosystems exist in the workplace as well. Understanding the structure and dependencies of an organizational ecosystem can help you build a better learning and performance strategy.

Responsive eLearning design is becoming less of a nice-to-have feature and more of an absolute must for many organizations. As a result, the most popular authoring tools, like Captivate, Storyline, and Lectora, have been adding more features for integrating responsive design, while some newer tools have been designed right from the start to accommodate the needs of this design concept. That said, these tools each take a different approach to making content responsive, so you’ll want to make sure you’re using the right one for your needs.

You’re faced with volumes of complicated content that you must translate into effective training. Your SMEs are pushing for delivering it through hours and hours of web-based training, which you know your audience will dread. You’ve heard of the benefits of using a micro format, but how can you possibly use it to cover all of that content?

While human narration can add warmth and help connect the learner to your eLearning course, hiring a professional can be costly and time-consuming. Recording yourself can be a more budget-friendly option; but have you tried to record yourself only to find that you sound more robotic than the text-to-speech software? Great voice-over work takes strong delivery and assistance from recording software—and thankfully, it’s actually quite easy to learn the basics of both.

When you say the word “game,” you might think of first-person shooters, slaying dragons, racing cars, and fighting battles—all of the things that your manager does not want to hear. If you are uncertain of how to plan, design, and develop a serious (business) game, then this is the right session for you. Making a “serious game” acceptable to management and fun for the player is the goal.

Status update. Touch base. Weekly meetings. Scope creep. Project plans. Tasks. Milestones. Deliverables. All these things can overwhelm you when managing projects—but they don’t have to! It turns out there are ways to juggle and advance your numerous projects while at the same time maintaining a semblance of serenity.

You use online video, but do you know how it works and why videos uploaded to YouTube may behave differently than those uploaded directly into an LMS? Online video use is growing for training and learning, but many people don’t know what happens and what’s possible after a video is uploaded.

Rapid eLearning development tools are incredibly helpful, but they may leave you scratching your head, wondering “How am I going to do that?” You know there has to be a way to make the idea you have in your head work in this tool, but you’re just not quite sure how. That’s when it’s time to shift your creativity into high gear and find a crafty solution for things that aren’t default processes.

It’s a common problem: You’ve been handed the same old content, but you just can’t bear the idea of creating the same old learning experience with it. But even if you’re limited in the changes you can make to the content, you do have two great tools for enhancing it: storytelling and visuals. By applying powerful storytelling and graphic design techniques, you can transform that tired content into engaging eLearning and leave your audience amazed at how much more entertaining and useful their learning experience has become.

Most eLearning tools out of the box publish to xAPI, but you still have to package up the course and upload it to your LMS, not really taking advantage of xAPI’s true potential of tracking learning no matter where the learning content may be.

It can be difficult to motivate employees to learn. Often, they either don’t think the materials apply to them or they believe they don’t need to know anything more to succeed.

Global. Digital. Mobile. Agile. Disruption. The business landscape is changing rapidly. New technology, new industries, new entrants, new customers, and an evolving workforce are sparking new expectations for every company. How do you respond? Can you advance human performance through innovative design?

Are you overwhelming new hires with thousands of policies, procedures, and fact sheets in your knowledge base? New hires rarely even know what they’re looking for, much less how to find it. This frustration prevents them from gaining confidence and delays achieving mastery in the job. And let’s face it—even experienced employees can struggle from time to time finding the right piece of information in the knowledge base.