While marketing departments have become increasingly adept at measuring their contribution to financial performance, L&D departments have traditionally been slower at using measurement techniques to prove their worth. There are increasingly sophisticated ways to measure the business impact of learning, yet many L&D professionals are struggling to get started with measurement. What’s the value of measuring learning impact, and how do you rise to the challenge?

How many times have you had to redo a project after you thought you understood the challenge, the goals, or the requirements? As you start to build more complex interactions and applications, you need a process that will allow you to test a concept, measure its results, and iterate over and over until it meets the needs of your audience. These are not new concepts in software development, but L&D can learn how to adopt and utilize them.

Virtual reality has matured into a technology that you can incorporate into eLearning components. As with any newly developed technology or process, eLearning developers may have difficulty identifying the hardware, software, and other resources they need to create eLearning in a virtual environment.

We’ve all had it happen—your employees did the compliance training, the required certification, the new content module, etc.—but a week later you realize that they retained nothing. Companies often overlook content that begs to be gamified—the very niche, complex, or boring content. Your new-hire orientations, compliance training, and required or annual certifications that your employees complete because they have to are the exact training that require your gamification investment to ensure the content isn’t glossed over and that your employees actually learn and retain the content and skills they need to succeed at work.

Imagine that you could simulate a customer call where your learner participates in a verbal conversation with a (pre-recorded) customer, rather than typing a response. Or that your learners could speak their responses to mobile devices rather than slowly tapping on a small software keyboard. You could then listen to and evaluate spoken responses, convert speech to text, and search for keywords and react to them.

Microlearning is a popular topic. But, while people are clamoring for it, the industry has not really defined it. Worse yet, the concept seems to shift depending on who you talk to. Is it short content? Does it require repetition? Do you need technology? Without a consistent understanding of the concept, L&D risks turning microlearning into yet another short-lived trend that fails to help people do their jobs better.

It’s hard enough to get learners to engage with the content of your eLearning course. This 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 ignoring the interface it’s encapsulated in.

Historically, adult learning has been about facts. People are experts at filling their brains with facts, but sometimes they forget about relevancy, recall, usability, and impact. How can you design learning that speaks to the “whole learner”? How can you make a dramatic impact and ensure effective performance outcomes?

A growing number of participants in live online virtual training classes are joining by mobile device, which means they connect via the platform mobile app instead of using the full desktop program. This creates a problem because most virtual training designs assume that all tools and features will be available for learning activities, yet most virtual classroom apps only have limited features. So how should you design for learning transfer?

With the advent of Web 2.0, the concept of community has been able to extend not only virtually, but also into different sectors inside and outside organizations. The extension and expansion has rekindled interest in community: how it forms, how it can be maintained, and how it can be leveraged for marketing consumer products and services as well as for learning.

Corporations large and small are still too often hung up on content when it comes to enablement. For example, in situations where a tool (such as Salesforce or something proprietary) is being updated, enablement tends to focus on filling learners’ heads with knowledge and understanding of the changes. But knowledge transfer is not enablement. Focusing on content is the wrong approach.

Many learning professionals are faced with limited and shrinking budgets, but at the same time, they’re expected to create professional audio and video. So how do you convince your management to let you build a recording studio?

Hands-on exercises and scenario-based training are effective, but they can’t always do the whole job. Storytelling with documentaries can engage learners and give them the context they need in topic areas like policy, leadership approaches, and organizational history.

You design or develop learning content, but you didn’t go to art school and you don’t have a visual design background. Before entering L&D you could barely create a PowerPoint that wasn’t just a bullet list with 800 words, and now you’re asked to create visually complex projects like eLearning, apps, eBooks, and more. You may have learned some basic design principles on your own, but you still know your visuals could use some more polish. So how do you get your visual design work from merely sufficient to great?

Is xAPI here to stay? This is the billion-dollar question. With any new technology, there’s a small set of early adopters who take the plunge while others wait in the wings. When you’re responsible for the learning and development of a large organization, it’s wise to wait and see if this is going to get traction or if it’s just a well-hyped flash in the pan.

Beyond measuring ROI and engagement, L&D should be considering the ongoing effect training has on business metrics. Understanding the financial impact of training is challenging. xAPI is a powerful enabler to help reach level 4. xAPI also triggers visualizations to manage learning impacts on business metrics. It can dynamically correlate learning to performance metrics, helping predict when business issues will occur and where coaching opportunities exist.

For the past 30 years, L&D professionals have done everything they can to stuff the entire world into a computer screen. Building the perfect virtual environment for learners has been the “holy grail” for years and is still elusive. One wrong turn, and you’re leaving the Matrix and running straight into the uncanny valley! So why not use the real world already all around you?

All education organizations struggle to work within the triple constraint: quality, cost, and time. When adding additional resources or extending a deadline is not an option, designers can be faced with sacrificing the quality of the product in order to stay within the project’s limitations. When faced with this dilemma, maximizing your design-per-minute ratio is key.

In today’s world, the first answer to every challenge seems to be a meeting. You hold meetings to talk about meetings, and then you schedule follow-up meetings. But how productive are you in those conversations, and are you really solving problems? Are you optimizing your time and ability to collaborate? Does everyone have a voice at the table?

Regardless of your job title, if you’re working in the eLearning field, particularly in a production capacity, you need an eLearning portfolio. Why do you need an eLearning portfolio? Because it will work for you! Portfolios allow you to focus on the things you really enjoy doing, while potentially funneling prospective clients to your inbox.

You know that it’s best to gather feedback from stakeholders early and often. But you also may have experienced times when inviting stakeholders to review early versions of your work made it difficult for projects to stay within scope, on schedule, and on budget.

Games and gamification are new ideas to many organizations. Executives may perceive games for learning as child’s play, or may struggle to understand how they’re different from the scenario-based learning you already have. Furthermore, some see gamification as an artificial reward system that will have no long-term benefits.

Mobile learning projects can be tremendously difficult to measure and track using SCORM. As a matter of fact, there is some data that cannot be captured at all. For organizations moving into multi-screen learning platforms, capturing important information about how the audience interacts with content is a critical missing piece.

There are many books, presentations, and consultants that focus on LMS implementation, but what you do after implementation can make the difference between simply putting a new system in place and shaping a learning ecosystem that becomes part of corporate culture, aligning compliance, talent development, and business goals. Failure to identify tools to evaluate the health of your learning infrastructure often leads to student abandonment and limits the value of L&D.

The trend of shortening onboarding while still accelerating quality results on the job is driving the increased need for microlearning and performance support. Most of the content people need in those situations is already there in your courses, but making it available in smaller, bite-sized nuggets is only half the challenge; first, learners have to find those nuggets.

Today’s mobile devices pack tremendous computing power and affordable app options for content creation. Even so, they’re not much use for authoring today’s interactive eLearning experiences. Or are they? Could it be possible for something as simple as a 99-cent smartphone app to make your eLearning development workflows more effective? Absolutely!

Now, more than ever before, L&D professionals struggle to capture the attention and meet the high demands of the modern workplace learner. Technology continues to drive forward engaging and professional digital interactions, raising the expectations of today’s learners. Many training organizations aren’t producing content that meets this ever-increasing benchmark, resulting in dismissive and uninterested users. Luckily, there are many techniques that can aid learning professionals in creating these mesmerizing modules.

Do you wan to take Articulate Storyline to the next level? This session will show the eLearning community how a team at G Adventures uses JavaScript, HTML5, and CSS to edit the published content in Storyline 2 and 360 to create a unique custom design.