We want to improve our audience’s engagement and experience in the eLearning environment. They’ve expressed that they want eLearning experiences are personalized and dynamic, with content that adapts to their performance and choices. In addition to this added complexity, it’s also important that we have the ability to track and measure their completion, as well as the activity and pathways they took to get there. The solution? Leverage the benefits of traditional LMS/SCORM with the benefits of the evolving LRS/xAPI.

Mounting pressure from an increasingly competitive global landscape, regulatory requirements, consumer demands, and complex work environments require effective learning solutions that meet an organization's speed and need. How might L&D integrate modern technologies, data and analytics, instructional methodologies, systems thinking, and an array of sciences to deliver quality learning solutions optimized for helping people and business results? Enter the emerging field of learning engineering.

The learning podcast boom is upon us. They've got a small learning curve, are inexpensive to produce, and are fun for people to consume. One of the most popular formats is the "interview format," in which the bulk of the podcast is comprised of back-and-forth interviews. Although this format is relatively easy to produce, it’s also easy for it to fall flat and become plagued with boring conversations. When these conversations fail to engage the listener, the learning objectives are also lost. So how do the pros do it?

Anyone who manages a learning project understands how critical it is to have SMEs who are interested and involved. Unfortunately, sometimes we have the exact opposite with SMEs that are dazed, distracted, or unresponsive. This makes it difficult to get the information and feedback you need to move you projects forward.

How can a traditional learning audience weather a shift toward Agile? What can happen if they don't like that change? How can L&D professionals increase the chance of successful audience adoption? In 2018, the HAL L&D team set out to transition to more agile methods and encountered severe audience resistance. The pilot group didn't understand the changes, L&D didn't communicate well, and the learning cultural gap widened. Struggling with failure, the team needed an innovative approach to immediately right the ship and change the culture. They wound up increasing participation and adoption, and set the standard for their development going forward.

According to LinkedIn's first annual Workplace Learning Report, only 8 percent of CEOs see ROI for learning and development, yet over 90 percent of them feel that closing the skills gap by L&D would be a game-changer for their business. What is the first step to flipping this ratio? Shouldn't 90 percent of CEOs feel like their L&D programs instill real bottom-line performance in their organizations?

Curious about making games a part of your solutions in a meaningful way? Why not make something unique, engaging, custom-designed, and truly game-based? Point-and-click games, in which choices, puzzles, and discovery lead to memorable learning experiences, are remarkably simple to build using eLearning authoring tools. You may not think of yourself as a game designer, but you probably already create engaging scenarios in which the objective (win-state) is for the learner (player) to come away with usable knowledge (rescue the princess). And building the additional skills you’ll need for crafting these games, such as customizing art, adding interactions, and planning a learner adventure, is not as tricky as it might seem.

People are becoming used to increasing levels of digital sophistication in concierge chatbots like Alexa or Google Assistant. As a result, they’ve truly started to embrace the concept of chatting or talking with these intelligent systems. Our audiences are incredibly busy, can quickly get frustrated when using an LMS, and don't often know answers to common questions such as what courses they should take (or which they started and forgot about), or where to locate content. Concierge chatbots could easily provide these answers through a single, familiar interface, while also increasing engagement and digital respect for L&D.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is a popular topic as of late, but what does it really mean for L&D? Understanding the potential use cases of AI for learning and development is critical to being a savvy consumer. It's not about the technology itself, but the potential it has for solving difficult organizational challenges.

Do you really need a virtual classroom producer? Maybe you don't. But what you absolutely need is the skill set. Whether you assign them to a dedicated producer or do them yourself, commanding the technical aspects of your virtual classroom delivery is the key to online learner engagement. Still not sure? Recall the last webinar you attended, the one that started late due to audio problems? Remember the recent breakout activity you tried to complete, but everyone was too technically confused to get to the assignment? Or how about that time everything was cancelled because the slides wouldn't load, and no one could figure out what to do? Virtual classroom production is an art. It requires a unique skill set that balances deep platform knowledge with multitasking agility, while at the same time calming everyone down before the panicked screams can be heard through the mute. 

Everyone has had a manager come to them with a request that just treats a symptom of the real performance issue instead of the actual cause. Unfortunately, it can be difficult to convince managers and stakeholders to spend time and energy analyzing the problem that they're trying to address. When time is limited (and whose time isn't limited?) you need to maximize your conversations and get the whole story. You also need to update your root cause analysis toolkit with new frameworks to help you better identify and solve problems. And the answer for both is design thinking.

Is the success of popular and engaging games like Fortnite an accident? Not at all. These game developers have figured out strategies for how they can effectively capture someone’s attention and retain it over time. Imagine what you could accomplish if you knew some of the secret methods Fortnite uses and could apply them in your own work?

When you're not a developer, installing frameworks using node, git, grunt and terminal can seem totally overwhelming. Type what? Where? Do what? How do I launch it? Oh, I give up! Then when you’ve finally bribed a developer to help you and you've got the framework working, what happens when it needs updating, or worse, stops working? The Adapt framework and builder have been somewhat confusing for many, and that's not to mention the lack of customization in the builder. What if there was an option out there that offered the Adapt Builder hosted in the cloud? Well there is, and it's fantastic.

DemoFest is a huge science fair-like event; a collective showcase of eLearning examples from conference participants. As you move from table to table, exploring a wide range of learning solutions, you can discuss the tools, tech, and processes with those who built them. Although it’s an exciting evening of discovery, diving deep into each of the projects can be challenging.

Team mantras these days seem to be all about acceleration: Get stuff done. Fail fast. Learn fast. Move fast and break things. Even our methods emphasize the need for speed: Agile. Sprint. Rapid prototyping. And while there's no doubt that traditional design approaches are slow, it seems we're still wasting money on tech that doesn't meet our needs, building stuff we can't scale, disappointing stakeholders, and frustrating users.

What if there was a way to get more accurate data on what, how, and when people needed to learn? Standard L&D analytics generally measure content: Who took what course or module? Where did they take it? When? And, did they like it? We assess with ADDIE models, trying to ensure we hit the right pain points for learners. We use surveys and guesswork. Yet we ignore social learning, the very best source of learning data in an organization.

We have all suffered through online learning content that featured poor audio and/or video. We suffered through it because the material was valuable. But have you ever stopped and asked yourself why anyone would sit through this? Why would anyone come back for more? And why don't I do something to improve the quality of my audio and video content for my learners?

Choosing your organization's first learning management system is a daunting task. What features should you be looking for? What questions should you be asking? How much is too much to spend? And what happens after you make the decision? In many ways, implementing the LMS you've chosen can be even more daunting than making the initial selection.

Personalization is no longer a differentiator in consumer experiences. It has quickly become an expectation. Meanwhile, organizations are lagging behind when it comes to the workplace experience, and employees are starting to notice. As organizations rapidly improve their technology and data infrastructures via artificial intelligence and machine learning, L&D professionals must take proactive steps to re-imagine their tactics and set the foundation for personalized and adaptive learning.

We learn most as we do, when we apply new knowledge and ideas and we can expand this understanding when we interact with others. The 702010 principle re-awakened this understanding over 30 years ago and has reached the mainstream conversation but has also been met with misunderstanding and resistance about who and how to make it actionable.

Learning games are a fun and interactive way to help enhance knowledge and skills. When learners are immersed in a learning game, there’s a higher likelihood they’ll take away key concepts. However, creating immersive learning games can be time consuming. At DISH we wanted to use games, but there were too many concurrent initiatives that forced our learning professionals to be spread too thin to cover a lot of ground. To focus on building more immersive learning games, the organization needed to adjust its development strategy to leverage their workforce in a smarter and more efficient manner.

There's an explosion of virtual reality, augmented reality, and mixed reality applications in corporate training, and some of these training programs need facilitator support. What's the facilitator role in VR, AR, & MR training? And what skills do facilitators need in order to be effective in the VR/MR/AR classroom? Whether it's a facilitator guiding participants through a fully-immersive simulation, using mixed-reality applications in a learning event, or simply guiding people through a blended learning program with VR components, we have to address the new and updated skills needed for effective facilitation in these environments. Facilitators need to figure out which traditional classroom facilitation skills apply, and which ones don't.

Automation is no longer a word that you can ignore. While it may seem reserved for manual labor and robotics, it's actually impacting every industry and market. L&D is not immune. With the constant push to do things faster, better, and cheaper, it can be felt in delivering the products and services that L&D provides. Because of that, leveraging process and task automation may become an important way to help your team remain relevant. L&D automation can take many forms, but how do you start? Since automation for the sake of automation can be destructive and cause additional friction, how do you make strategic choices about which situations it’s best suited for?

In their training, people at an oil and gas company could perfectly define and identify first aid key concepts and successfully complete knowledge checks, such as deciding which technique would prove more useful in certain situations. However, when an accident took place in the real world, they didn't know what to do, how to act, or how to put into practice the theory they’d learned. The company needed a solution that would help their employees deal with these daily situations and teach them how to make life-and-death decisions, while still providing them with a safe place to hone their skills. The solution? Using branching scenarios to create risk-free environments for people to practice what they’d learned and see the consequences of their actions.

eLearning is typically built with a computer-first approach in mind. Designers imagine their learners to be sitting at a PC or laptop, and leave it to the responsive design functions of rapid content authoring tools to do the hard work of making the learning mobile ready. The downside of this approach means this eLearning isn’t optimized fully for mobile usability, which is a challenge because usability and accessibility for eLearning goes beyond adjusting to a smaller screen. Designers need to know how to build with mobile-first in mind to ensure the experiences they create can be used effectively and efficiently, and to avoid frustrating mobile learners.

You've received a request for training support on a new initiative. It's high-profile, mission-critical, and must be launched on time. But the tool/process won't be ready until the same day your training needs to go live. There's no option for pushing back the launch. What do you do?  Well, you can panic, get angry, or get to work. Enter the Minimum Viable Product (MVP)—normally used for software development and other Agile development processes—but an approach that can also be useful for learning. 

Creating the look and feel of a course, document, or animation can be complex and require a plethora of different tools, right? Wrong! You already own one tool that can get you started on every one of these items and more—PowerPoint. With a creative approach to this common tool, you can actually edit photos, design icons, create videos, emulate software, edit audio, and lots more.

With the wide range of tools, apps, and online resources being launched all the time, it’s not always easy to stay on top of what might help you out in your day-to-day work. It’s also easy with this stream of new options to miss out on great new updates or techniques that can allow you to use old favorites in new ways.