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.

So often, in our day-to-day professional existence, we are bombarded with problems, tasks, and situations that require our attention, all the while neglecting the problem solver—that’s you and me. We seldom recharge our professional batteries and, as such, burn out or become uninspired. We’ve become professional hermits, to an extent, and need an outlet to help us maintain our spark, drive, and creativity.

Due to distance and lack of resources, in-person classroom sessions were not possible for every client who needed to learn Altair Engineering’s software. Its clients did not always want to wait for scheduled classes, so Altair needed to deliver content to them to their desktops in a quick and effective manner at their time of need, not when and where the training schedule dictated. 

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. Online learning is delivered directly to the desktop more than ever before. The next challenge is to move learning directly into the workflow. To do this, we 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.

Building an eLearning course that works across all devices (desktop, phone, tablet, etc.) and scales and adjusts accordingly is no small undertaking. However with the right tools, templates, and processes in place you can successfully build responsively to develop eLearning that works and looks good on all devices.

Virtual-classroom platforms are not new. In fact, there are probably people in your organization using these platforms right now for training, webinars, and meetings. But are you ready to make an organization-wide move to give up face-to-face classrooms for virtual ones, or is the prospect too daunting?

It’s no secret that most, if not all, of us are facing an ever-increasing need to provide more and more training on complex products, regulatory issues, advanced application processes, and the like. The question is: How do we continue to offer training that keeps our learners engaged in an environment of stagnated training budgets and headcount reductions?

There are several methodologies that can be employed in training development projects, but when time, cost, and quality are not negotiable, an agile development approach may be ideal. Dairy Queen recently introduced a brand-new product line to its 6,500+ franchise organization. In preparation for this momentous rollout, Dairy Queen needed to create an interactive training program to quickly prepare thousands of franchisees and their crew on the sales and operations of an entirely new product platform for worldwide delivery.

As technology changes the way we live our day-to-day lives, it is fascinating to imagine what the future will bring. As a learning and development professional, however, it’s very hard to keep up the pace. What technology will be trending and will change the way we live and learn, and what technology will be nothing but hype? Will augmented reality really disrupt our learning? And how about virtual reality and wearable tech? And, more importantly, will we ever be able to afford those technologies as learning supporting tools?

The number of freelance workers is expected to grow to more than 50 percent of America’s workforce in the next decade. An urgency has arisen to define, create, and articulate credentials that document alternative learning experiences and directly correlate with the skills required in the project-based job market. How can employers determine which soloists have the capabilities and experience that the work demands? And how can soloists showcase their capabilities and achievements so potential employers can reliably identify them?

Medical education in North America is taught in a decentralized manner with in-class coursework delivered in small blocks and students gaining learning experiences in hospitals and other institutions outside of the university. Medical schools need a way to capture and analyze these experiences to get a true picture of a student’s readiness to treat patients. Furthermore, learning requirements are set to change for medical residents from set-year programs to a competency-based model. Current LMSs alone aren’t able to tie outside experiences to competencies.

We use eLearning and other technology platforms because they are cost effective, easily accessible, provide a consistent learner experience, and increase our geographical reach. Unfortunately, it is quite easy to lose the human connection that is so critical to the engagement of employees and learners.

Most designers and developers strive for continuous improvement in the quality and effectiveness of eLearning programs. However, measuring the success and failure of eLearning is often an afterthought. Worse, the metrics used to measure effectiveness send false messages that lead a person to think the eLearning is more effective than it actually is. This is unfortunate because eLearning offers more measurement options than traditional classroom training.

We have all experienced huge courses, documents, and texts that are barely manageable by the instructional designer. In fact, much of how we design courses and documents makes it impossible for an employee to find the one piece of information they need at the time they need it. Since content is so dense, it makes finding meaningful information difficult, and it makes tracking anything useful in it even more difficult.

Learners are more likely to persist online if engaged in their courses and the educational experience is personalized. Personalized e/mLearning communicates a supportive, nurturing, and respectful learning environment. Branding allows you to tailor the experience and speak to the learners; however, doing so effectively and consistently can be tricky. 

How can creating storyboards online change your writing and review process? What online spreadsheets can help you track open issues? Can you track project time online to help you better estimate projects in the future? What scheduling tools are available? These are just some of the questions we’ll address in this hands-on session. You’ll get to try out a number of online tools (some free, some fee-based) to help you better manage your eLearning development projects. You’ll walk away not only with valuable perspective on what these specific tools can do, but also with an understanding of key features you can look for and use in other tools. 

Training employees and clients is an ongoing challenge. People are busy. Training is expensive, time consuming and usually pretty boring. Athenahealth has a wide range of clients, from physicians and nurses, to front desk staff, and medical billers. Their schedules are chaotic, they have little time to train, and their focus is on doing what they do best, helping patients. The challenge was in moving from an eLearning-heavy approach to a more context-based, hands-on, just-in-time one to meet the needs of learners in this complex environment.

Why do people spend hours learning how to master new levels in their favorite games? The answer to this question, and the ability to harness some of that excitement and magic for workplace learning, is why there is growing interest in games for learning.

eLearning designers are often faced with complex training topics that are difficult to deliver concisely. The results are lengthy courses that are counter to the needs of today’s learners, who need to be extremely efficient with their time. To deliver learning to this audience means being very concise in both content and course design, while still having impact and not sacrificing instructional integrity.

One of the major challenges facing organizations is getting the balance between formal and informal right. Capitalizing on the benefits of social learning requires the right environment to facilitate it. The most successful communities have clarity of purpose, support from wider stakeholders, an engaged hub of participants, and a skilled facilitator to nurture it. For anyone interested in creating a sustainable and effective social learning strategy for their organization, understanding the benefits of a community approach and the right balance between structure and exploration is key.

As learning practitioners, we strive to understand the real life environment of experts as much as possible. But getting access to really see how they do their jobs when they are in a more technical or hands-on role (i.e., construction, refinery, factory) is difficult. Many times we can’t get access to use video or real-life images because of safety or clearance constraints. This poses a challenge as we try to create impactful learning materials.

Questions about mobile and social learning can often take the conversation in the wrong direction, ones about issues of screen real estate, for example, rather than the more important questions about learner experience or if mobile is even the appropriate approach. Mobile, coupled with social media, provides a rich resource for informal learning outside of the classroom, as well as supplemental learning within the classroom. 

You’re all excited about the promise of an Experience API-enabled world, but you’ve still got a learning management system (LMS) and a whole host of SCORM-based courses. Now what? In most cases, you’ll need to manage the transition—read: republish your library for the Experience API (xAPI)—over the months and years to come. But 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?

If you work in L&D, chances are you use design assets (like photos, drawings, icons, and fonts) all the time. And if you don’t have a graphic design background, chances are you’re paying someone else to make these design assets for you. Professional designers and stock photos are fantastic resources, and ones I’d never want to get rid of, but sometimes what you need is a DIY solution that’s fast, free, or even better: both.

Although the world of web design has evolved and rapidly leveraged open-source technologies to build new experiences, many eLearning instructional designers and developers have limited themselves to rapid eLearning tools such as Captivate and Storyline. But what is possible when we go beyond our usual toolsets?

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?

The importance of social factors in learning are well established. But knowing how to best influence and impact these factors remains something of a mystery to most organizations. A number of thought-leaders have suggested you can’t do much of anything to impact social learning in the workplace. They are wrong. You can design social learning opportunities and measure their impact. Drawing on research, and from our experiences of working with some of the leading organizations in the world, we’ve developed our own social-learning playbook. Now we invite you to develop your own, based on the framework we provide.

It’s hard enough to get learners to engage with the content of your eLearning course. The issue is compounded even further when learners can’t figure out how to use the course in the first place. All too often, new eLearning designers put their focus solely into designing the learning content, while at the same time ignoring the interface it’s encapsulated in. This leads to confusion on the part of the learner and disrupts the learning process.

Often the idea of using instructional games is met with stiff resistance by project stakeholders and the organization’s leadership: “We don’t want our employees playing games! We are a serious organization with serious work to do!” So how do you design instructionally effective games for the workplace and gain buy-in from stakeholders and leadership in your organization?

A number of myths persist about people’s allegedly ever-shortening attention spans—but what does the science say? Neuroscience, behavioral economics, and consumer psychology all offer insights into how we manage and allocate attention. Additionally, our ability to manage attention and focus seems to be related to our abilities to allocate willpower and influence how we make decisions.

Intellectual property law affects every stage of the development process. Yet, it is daunting and complex. Trying to gain a working knowledge can be overwhelming. As a result, decision making is rooted in ignorance, fear, or frustration, none of which contributes to project goals. The continuing struggle to quickly develop content may lead you to infringe on someone else’s work, expose your work to an unpleasant legal action, or miss out on using free media to enhance your projects.

From the first desktop PCs to today’s cutting-edge smartphones, technology has a history of fundamentally changing the expectations of learning and development programs. We are now on the cusp of another technological advance, one that will once again change some of our definitions and how we address performance issues: wearable technology. This technology will come in various forms, but the one that many expect to serve as a quantum leap forward is Apple Watch.

eLearning developers are often challenged with making learning more interesting or interactive. Games provide an opportunity to meet both needs. You’ve read the research on their impact and you know that games have been useful learning tools through all the stages of life, but building games in eLearning has been a challenge for those who do not know how to program.

Adobe Presenter works perfectly in some situations and not others. Knowing when to use a particular tool is half the battle. Adobe Presenter features many new possibilities for you to use it if the situation calls for it.

An intensive two-year study of 29 projects that were awarded funds to build digital badge systems in the 2012 Badges for Lifelong Learning competition revealed surprising results.

There’s been a large amount of research in recent years exploring the value music has on the brain and learning. We’ve all experienced it in some way in our lives, be it from listening to music while learning or studying, learning something from a catchy song, or by learning to play an instrument.

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.

Competency-based education within the University of Wisconsin System’s Flexible Option program allows students to demonstrate mastery of a subject area and earn a degree without adhering to a rigid course schedule. This shift in higher education is part of a larger move away from learning measured by seat time or credit hours to an evaluation of learning outcomes.

Authoring, particularly cloud-based, is a growing segment for L&D. With numerous platforms and approaches to consider, having a strong framework with which to source, assess, and evaluate a tool is critical. Selecting the wrong technology for authoring your learning assets can prove costly to the organization and its learners if critical criteria or processes are overlooked or misunderstood.

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.

Every organization relies on the Internet these days for many things: a public web presence, sales, marketing, customer service, document sharing, research, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and much more. Every time a member of the organization uses the Internet, there is potential for a security breach. As an employer, an employee, and a private individual, nothing that you do on the internet is truly private, and all of your activities can be linked together by observers.

Regardless of your industry or job focus, learning management systems remain the central focus for corporate learning and the foundation upon which most types of traditional, informal, social, and mobile learning is built, deployed, and tracked. With numerous industry analysts announcing the death of the LMS, you can't afford to miss this critical update for today’s learning leaders, business decision makers, LMS administrators, and learners of all types.

Video is an increasingly used and powerful tool for performance support. Incorporating video into a responsive performance support project, however, can be daunting. How to use it, which tools are best, and when to use video are just some of the decisions to be made.

Subject matter experts (SMEs) are the lifeline of our work as instructional designers, trainers, and facilitators of learning. They bring the content to life and provide both relevance and context. Our goal should be to ensure the working relationship is the best that it can be. However, we are often speaking different languages to each other, causing the instructional design process—and, more importantly, communication—to break down. 

The traditional lecture-based classroom format of corporate training can be time consuming, inefficient, and costly. A number of companies have switched to an eLearning model, which is much more cost effective but can be a difficult platform to teach concepts that require the higher forms of cognitive learning.

Technical training solutions often lack the rigor that leaders want to see when they are trying to answer the question, “Is our technical field ready?” Even when training activities and resources do require learners to go deep technically and to be challenged, the measure of learners’ readiness is too often based on attendance at an event or consumption of training assets.

Have you ever wondered whether there are special tactics for enhancing memory recall that psychologists are keeping locked away in their ivory towers? Well, such tactics exist! Not only do they exist, but many best practices and techniques can be extrapolated from research, and are entirely accessible to eLearning developers to generate high levels of memory retention.

There’s no doubt that employees of the 21^st century are different. The way they engage in workplace tasks is different. The way they consume content is different. Their brains themselves are different. How do you create a more effective learning solution for people whose brains have been rewired by our quick-change, bite-sized content world? Easy. You simply rewire the whole learning experience.

Technology has completely changed the way we live, work, and learn. Technology has brought us the Internet, smartphones, tablets, and many more tools that have changed our lives forever. Of course, these same technologies have also brought us memes like Socially Awkward Penguin, Success Kid, and yes, Grumpy Cat.

The ability to customize content for learners is the best tool in the hands of eLearning authors. Learning is better when you can customize the experience based on learner choices, responses, specialization, and scores achieved in a quiz. It would be even better if you have the ability to serve content to learners based on their location. 

You spend an incredible amount of time designing, developing, and delivering virtual instructor-led training (VILT) or webinar sessions. It can be a challenge to find the time to promote the topics and follow up with participants in a way that keeps the content fresh in participants’ minds without a lot of additional work. Oftentimes, the content and delivery can be reused in a variety of ways along the learning continuum, from generating interest to post-training performance support, without a lot of resources or effort.

When planning to adopt virtual-classroom platforms for learning sessions, successful organizations need a clear idea of what management, design, delivery, and technical issues to consider.

Have you decided to implement a badge program at your organization but are unsure what to do next? Perhaps you are wondering: How do I create the badges? How do I award them? How are the badges displayed? What kind of communications do I send out to those who are awarded badges? How can I promote badges beyond my department? How do I help participants understand the value of badges? Find out how a badge expert used badges to gamify an award-winning developmental math massive open online course at Cuyahoga Community College, and developed a successful badge system for professional development workshops at Kent State University.