Like homeowners faced with the task of making home improvements, instructional designers might find themselves overwhelmed with the notion of making updates to an existing course. But what if there were five simple DIY steps to making renovations or additions to improve the overall usability, effectiveness, and look of your course?

Are we really able to tell how people use digital learning? How do we gain visibility that learning is being applied? Sophisticated tracking gives us the ability to gain insights from user behavior. By focusing on what we can successfully capture—such as time spent within the learning, what learning assets are most popular, and even user sentiment—it's now possible to gain a rich picture of the experience of learning. In this talk we'll explain why tracking is more important than ever, show you technology innovations that push measurement beyond the LMS, and demonstrate how to infer meaning from the data being captured to inform decision-making.

Keeping viewer's attention with video is a challenge. There are many barriers that might keep viewers from pushing the play button. If (and when) they've clicked play, do you know what keeps people watching? Why do they stop? What elements need to be in your videos to make sure they able to learn? The good news is that there are answers, best practices, and information to these and other questions to help you create videos that work.

For decades, learning & development has been wishing for "a seat at the table" with senior leaders. So, why is it so hard to get there? The reasons may be rooted in our legacy as a training function that taught workers to perform predictable tasks and repeatable procedures. Today's work is less predictable; more creative and fluid. Yet in many organizations, L&D's training legacy continues to impact our work processes and outputs, which, in turn affects how we are perceived.

Studies show that nearly 20 percent of the workforce is actively disengaged (Gallup). This problematic statistic has L&D professionals seeking new models. At the same time, the Towards Maturity Report (2018) shows that 61 percent of L&D departments have no policy cementing the way content is communicated and distributed in the organization. The development and use of high engagement communications tools has exploded in other industries. How can the L&D professional take advantage of the macro level trends in communications and media?  

Has one of your organizational eLearning investments been met with mixed reviews or low uptake from learners? Perhaps you're moving to mobile content for the first time, or expanding into a new international market where you don't have on-the-ground presence. Too often we plan, develop, and implement in a vacuum because we believe we don't have the financial resources to conduct targeted user research. Budget constraints keep us focused on solving problems and adjusting with our solutions rather than designing for different cultures, technology levels, and genders. To address the training needs of our audience, delight them with our content, and drive repeat engagement, it's critical we involve them in the process and leverage low-cost tools to make that happen throughout the process.

Many people in the eLearning realm are attempting to use gamification and serious games to spark employee engagement and drive learning retention. The biggest setbacks for are little-to-no planning, tough to pinpoint metrics, little-to-no implementation strategy, and insufficient or nonexistent post-deployment support.

How does the largest employer on the planet, Walmart, attract and develop a new generation of managers who have spent more time playing games than they have in the classroom? How does pharmaceutical industry leader Novartis quickly train hundreds of people on best practice production and aseptic procedures for a new leukemia treatment, where mistakes have life and death consequences? How does Fortune 200 healthcare leader DaVita train a global organization to see the world through the customer's eyes?

Making the workforce future proof is currently high on the agenda of all of us in training and education. In this session you will get an idea of how InnoEnergy uses artificial intelligence (AI) to bridge the skills and competency gap of engineers working in the sustainable energy field. You will learn the three steps that make the full cycle of the project: 1) Extracting emerging skills and competencies from industry reports and road maps, 2) Analyzing resumes of engineers who want to enter the energy sector or want to upskill or reskill their capabilities, and 3) Using the skills gap that emerges from the first two steps to come to an adaptive learning path in the third step of the process.  

If you were tasked with finding solutions to a curriculum problem, what might you do? Microlearning? Mobile learning? Gamification? Virtual reality/augmented reality? More instructor-led training? We're often tempted to turn to new technology or trends, thinking one of these must be what our approach is missing. Certainly these modes are useful, but how do we know if they're the right solutions until we know what the problems are? In this session you will learn to face the problems as our learners would, using empathy, and build the Design Thinking process from there. Only then can you create meaningful solutions that use the right mix of tools and technology to elevate your training.

One of the top challenges for learning professionals is getting managers to support learning. Effective talent development can positively impact employee engagement, innovation, and long-term growth. How can we make leaders own their role in employee learning? How are managers motivated to invest their time in developing their people, which often doesn't bring a return in the short run?

Adult learning principles state that adults learn best when content is relevant. So why do most virtual classroom lessons rely on lectures and slides? One of the most effective ways to ensure learning sticks is by getting learners involved, and scenario-based learning design does just that. We only have so much time to dedicate to formal learning, every moment needs to be impactful and relevant. Unfortunately, virtual classroom sessions tend to focus on getting as much content out there as possible, and leaving it up to the learners to figure out how to make it all work.  

Learners don't always want to sit through a formal training course, or simply don't have the time. Microlearning is a great way to deliver just what people need, when they need it. But, as a learning professional, how do you create it? While the idea of short learning sessions is great, they can end up taking almost as long as a full course to create, as you need high-impact video or interactive features to explain and reinforce key information quickly. It's important to be able to create microlearning efficiently, so that you ultimately have the time to serve the needs of all your learners with the full range of topics they need access to.

Everyone involved in training creation and delivery is managing at least part of a project, whether they know it or not. While many think of project management as only meeting a series of deadlines, it can provide you so much more than checkmarks on a calendar. Meeting deadlines is important to your success, but what if you could use basic project management techniques to create repeatable processes, improve communications with your stakeholders, and manage risks we all encounter? Best of all, what if it can make your job easier?

Standard eLearning tools are great and you can do a lot with them, but they have their limits. There are parts of those tools that you can’t customize or control or, if you can, it takes a lot of hacking to get it the way you want. Some eLearning tools also produce large files with a lot of extra lines of code that make your courses slower and harder to interact with. Cost can be a factor too, as tools may be priced out for reach for some organizations.

xAPI enables us to track a wide array of data but shareholders are interested in results, not the technology. Simply tracking everything is not a strategy and often creates noise that makes xAPI data more difficult to use. Instead, you need to step back to identify WHAT needs to be tracked with xAPI, and only afterward go through the process to design quality statements.

The sounds of snores from the next cubical over are because Jerry had to take that old, stale compliance course. Anyone can phone it in, click "next", and answer "C" to every multiple choice question. But that video choose-your-own adventure course? Jerry's going to make decisions and see immediate feedback and consequences for his choices. He might even take the course again and again to see what the other outcomes he could get, giving him a fully-detailed understanding of the subject matter with just one lesson! Snores or engagement: which would you choose?

Organizations are struggling to provide leadership development programs that fully engage their employees and provide them with valuable leadership development opportunities. Indeed, according to a recent Fortune survey, just 7 percent of Fortune 500 CEOs believe that their companies are building effective global leaders, and only 10 percent believe that their leadership development initiatives have a clear business impact. How can organizations combat this problem of ineffective training, and develop modern learning programs that offer more productive leadership training in today's digital world?

As part of the 15^th anniversary celebration of DevLearn, we’ll be building a time capsule of what L&D is today, and what L&D professionals think the future of L&D will look like.

It’s great when your boss finally jumps on board with all the bright ideas that you’ve been pitching. Well, until you consider you might never have done this before or the scope of your plan is beyond the current capacity of your team. How do you implement a modern vision for your courseware without breaking the bank? Do you need external support? Can your team do it all? Have you bitten off more than you can chew? Maybe, but maybe not. A strong strategy to select your team, tools, and projects will help you put your money where your mouth is.

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; from listening to music while learning or studying, learning something from a catchy song, or by learning to play an instrument.  In this session you will explore the many relationships between music and learning. You will examine and discuss how people learn to play an instrument—there will even be ukuleles available for some to participate hands-on—and what this might mean to learning in general. Using the introductory ukulele lesson as a framework, this fun session will help you explore the many ways that music impacts and enhances learning. (Ukuleles made available during this session will be donated to the Children’s Hospital of Nevada UMC after the conference.)

Learner expectations continue to rise as engaging AR experiences from the marketing world set a new standard. With many companies experimenting with AR for learning, the reputational risk from failed learning initiatives can be high. So why not reapply proven success from large-budget industries that also use AR to change behavior? Why not learn from the success and failures from the marketers and others who have been experimenting with this technology and testing how to use it most effectively?

Our work on competency-based medical education helped us create a learner-centered model that de-emphasized equating competency with grades and focused instead on abilities and achievement as salient learning outcomes. A challenge to this model, though, was providing verification of skill acquisition in an appropriate format. Through a year-long journey we were able to develop a blockchain-based credential framework that could help us execute on this model, and the lessons that we learned could easily apply to other industries as well.

Have you ever been handed a PowerPoint deck and told to go off and build a course? Many organizations tend to begin an eLearning design project leading with their content needs; desired outcomes are merely an afterthought, if they're a thought at all. Unfortunately, whether or not a solution is successful is often left to chance. With so much on the line, who wants to take that gamble? So how can you approach the design process with a more results-focused point of view?

Maybe it's the eyerolls. Maybe it is the rapid clicks of the "next" button. Regardless of what the action is, we know the look and feeling of learner disengagement. If we know that we don't want our end users to feel this way, then why is it a common occurrence in so many organizations? Instead of only focusing on research and high-level theories, this session will explore solutions to this common problem in a unique way—an interactive mystery!

Knowing your audience is a fundamental step in the analysis of designing training. When that audience is international, this is even more critical for understanding cultural differences in both language and visuals. Then add in the additional factor of using the comic medium as a vehicle to tell a story through instruction. This combination is what was faced when designing an instructional comic for labor and delivery nursing students in northern India. This project needed to not just deliver content, but also do it in a way that reflected this audience’s lived experience and also leveraged the unique strengths of the comic medium.

As xAPI has gained increased adoption across the industry, challenges have emerged as we have seen inconsistencies in both the expression and structure of xAPI data generated from a wide variety of tools and sources. While the xAPI profile specification was designed to define and standardize the data structure, more support and definition is needed on how to apply xAPI profiles for specific use cases. In practice, many organizations are developing their own unique approaches without any consistency in xAPI usage that can be re-purposed for a larger audience.           

Is your technology training content as dry as the Sahara Desert? Are short deadlines killing your creativity and ability to provide interesting and meaningful eLearning? Are you new to eLearning development and need a tool that’s easy to learn how to use? At ServiceNow, we had these common challenges and one more: we had technical releases two times a year. This meant that we needed a development tool that curriculum designers could learn without much difficulty and could develop with quickly, because anything that was created would be outdated and need to be replaced within six months. We also wanted a solution that would allow us to take our technology training and turn it into engaging, online content without sacrificing creativity and ease of use. Articulate's latest authoring tool, Rise, helped quench our thirst for interactive eLearning with a tool that is simple to use for design and development.

You've got a great idea to increase learner engagement, decrease learner attrition, or improve learning outcomes by adding a new feature to your learning platform or purchasing a new product or service. Maybe you have clear research to back up your idea, or just a solid hunch based on your experience as an eLearning expert. But implementing your plan will take time, money, and personnel. If you're wrong or you implement the solution incorrectly, you'll end up wasting precious resources without improving your learners' outcomes. What you need is a way to quickly and cheaply test your idea before deciding to commit to a purchase or addition to your learning system.

One in five newly-graduated registered nurses quits within the first year of their first job, never to return to nursing. Exit interviews often reveal the same basic stories: nurses feel unsupported and overwhelmed by the transition from school to nursing practice. But what if hospitals had an early warning system to inform interventions that address a newly-graduated nurse's concerns before a nurse feels like they have to quit? And how could this early warning system be used in other situations, as well?

We all want to be able to show bottom line results from our training efforts. But how do you engage an on-the-go, never-at-their-desk sales force? At Cydcor, a face-to-face, outsourced sales company, engaging a busy learner base in a format that appealed to them was a challenge. Not only that, but the executive team was asking for tangible results. The team needed a fresh approach to meet the needs of the learners and the executive team—and quick!

Our organization had a challenge: we had text-heavy, hard-to-navigate, print-based learning documents with multiple versions. Not only that, the documents needed to be updated often. We wanted to change this approach and instead make the possibility of "right-time-right-place" training and support into a reality using a mobile app. While not a seamless nor instant fix, our results show that we're providing a better learning and support experience to our users with media-rich, navigable and interactive offline, "right-time-right-place" content—an approach which would work well for delivery of any media-rich, navigable content to diverse and mobile users.

In an ideal world, your organization would have enough designers and developers to create all the eLearning and performance support tools employees need to do their jobs right—and you’d have the budget to pay vendors when your team's capacity was running low. Unfortunately, we don't always live in that ideal world. We sometimes find ourselves in one where resources and budgets may be stretched, but company initiatives still need to be supported by training programs. One way to address this is to use your development team for key initiatives, but give your SMEs the tools, resources, and support they need to develop non-essential programs. There’s risk that SMEs could pump out slide after slide of bullet points that no one really learns from, but it can be mitigated with a strategy that maintains some design quality standards while allowing SMEs to get the development done.

Learning modernization cannot be merely shoving legacy content into new technology. It needs to be a transformation in the way organizations approach learning to ensure better utilization of people and resources as the workforce of the future emerges. To be successful, the development of learning ecosystems requires collaboration between information architects, instructional designers, software developers, human resource managers, and others. Teams are applying skills in which they may have never received formal training and, while the principles of classic educational models (e.g., Bloom's Taxonomy) continue to hold true, the means by which we apply them has evolved. No one field has the background skillsets and expertise to accomplish this task alone.

Our mission at The Game Agency is to help companies train their employees better. Investing in human capital is the most important strategy a company can have to ensure its workforce has the knowledge and confidence to be successful. People are so distracted today and traditional training is simply not stimulating enough. Creating a game-based learning strategy can be overwhelming and just getting started can be daunting. Gamified learning is pointless without good data and robust analytics; however understanding all the data and analytics can be challenging.

As a small department at Ally Insurance, it would be easy to rely on the old standby of instructor-led classroom facilitation for all topics— especially the boring ones. But we know that instructor-led classroom facilitation is not always the best, most efficient, or even most innovative way to communicate content to learners. What if a small but mighty department could create and implement a whole new way to learn and retain information?  What if they could quickly be the leader in L&D for their entire company with this new way of learning? And what if that new way was radically fun and techy?

A struggle many of us face in our work is a lack of retention of concepts and content. Studies show learning experiences that aren’t entertaining, current, or relatable to the audience can have less success with short-term and long-term learning retention and comprehension. The solution: transforming your pedagogy to include pop culture references. This approach gives people a personal relationship with the material being taught, which can lead to increased comprehension and retention.

Copyright law can be intimidating, even though its intent is to encourage creativity. The cost of copyright confusion can affect every stage of the development and delivery process, as well. But thankfully it can be easier to understand how to respect copyright and find free online media you can legally use than it might seem at the surface.

As technology has continued to advance, engineering methods are increasingly needed for learning and development initiatives that depend upon data science, computer science, and learning science to structure solutions and to measure outcomes and results. Learning engineering represents a new amalgamated discipline that applies engineering methodologies to develop learning technologies and infrastructures to better support learners and learning. The need for learning engineering is becoming more apparent, and the powerful combination of this field with the work of instructional design has the potential to significantly advance learning and its impact on organizations. For this partnership to work well, we need to understand what competencies instructional designers need to have in this new world, as well as the competencies that learning engineers bring to the table .

The traditional approach for designing a learning experience and then gathering content can sometimes also inadvertently include frustrating roadblocks—things like SME wrangling, latecomer reviewers who disrupt design and delivery timelines, and new content that hits the stage at the eleventh hour. With more learning for us to create and quicker turnarounds expected, anything that can help us speed up our design cycles and reduce these kinds of disruptions can be a real win.

Training professionals find it difficult to prove the ROI of their efforts. That makes it harder to grow programs, sell training services, or find our "seat at the table”. Many of us can't get past Kirkpatrick's levels one or two to measure our training outcomes, and as a result can't also measure the broader impact of our training efforts. How do we get access to the data we need, and how do we successfully use that data to tell a story that resonates with stakeholders?

Good news: Your company is about to have its "iPhone moment" and nearly quadruple in size! Bad news: You are responsible for scaling training as the company grows from a promising start up into a world-wide industry leader. You have a small team of jack-of-all-trades learning professionals that need to scale training faster than an intern returning from a coffee run. The budget is small, the bandwidth is past its limit, and the days until launch are looming. What would you do if big changes were coming quickly with no sign of slowing down?