Camtasia is an all-in-one tool that you can use for screencasts, video, and even user interaction. It has many powerful features and a few that could greatly improve the engagement level of your eLearning production. Camtasia “power users” can create visually stunning courses with very efficient workflow.

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!

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 the 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.

Massive open online courses (MOOCs) continue to be both big news and big business, but one aspect that is less often discussed is the behind-the-scenes perspective. Building a greater understanding of the design considerations, facilitation techniques, and data interpretation from MOOCs can give you valuable inspiration for designing and facilitating any people development activities—regardless of whether or not you’re building MOOCs.

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.

For a remote workforce such as flight attendants, who travel all over the country, eLearning is effective, necessary, and widely enjoyed. However, there are no computers on the airplane, which serves as their office. Due to the lifestyle of the work group, many do not have computers at home; this leads to a large percentage’s trying to complete non-mobile courses on their tablets or smartphones, causing a poor user experience.

For instructional designers and facilitators, the challenge is to create learning materials that reach and affect audiences positively and do not elicit feelings of exclusion or discrimination. However, you’re human, and every human has hidden or unconscious biases that impact behaviors and thoughts. This can lead to unintentional missteps in design and delivery. As learning becomes more story-driven, you need to be sensitive to how you present characters, including race, gender, gender identity, and organizational roles.

Learner-driven, adaptive, engaging, future-proof, innovative, and business-aligned—you need to deliver all this and more! Constructing a strategy to match, though, is tough, pushing L&D to redefine its role in the business. However, by applying a performance lens to learning, you can engage everyone from the board to new starters, construct a holistic strategy, and put learning at the heart of the workflow.

How do eLearning developers ensure that trainings are well designed graphically? There are many resources out there for web design standards, such as the Nielsen Norman Group and the World Wide Web Consortium, but what about eLearning design? Sure, there are plenty of resources for free templates and character packs, but that doesn’t really help developers learn how to properly design online training.

Learners are distracted with daily competing priorities and struggle to retain information presented through digital learning. Ebbinghaus’ forgetting curve shows that retention rates are abysmal. Educators and instructional designers are pressed for time and resources to deliver learning that maximizes retention and desired outcomes.

Today, 360-degree video is becoming a part of consumers’ lives on social media and through entertainment. However, to be effective for learning, it needs to be interactive, relevant, and trackable. Achieve these, and you can give learners the ability to explore a space and discover its secrets (or risks). As video shifts, learning professionals need to be ready to make the most of the changes.

While there are many practices and models grounded in research that people use to create eLearning, there are also a lot of common statements about the field that may or may not be based in fact. Do learners really remember 50 percent of what they hear? Does L&D need to treat generations differently? Do learning styles matter? While these ideas are widespread, are they actually true?

Learners, particularly online learners, often suffer from illusions of competence in learning, procrastinate, and fail at breaking down content into smaller chunks to build solid expertise. Each can lead to higher rates of frustration and, ultimately, reduce success.

The challenge with the majority of learning that goes on in organizations is that it is quickly forgotten. Modern neuroscience tells us that in an increasingly complex digital world, with so much competing for our attention, a majority of what we learn in organizational training is forgotten within days. With the amount of time, money, and energy spent on developing these learning experiences, it is critical that organizations find ways to maximize their investment by ensuring learners retain the information they are given.

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.

Modern adult learners don’t always have time to learn in a classroom; they need engaging mobile learning solutions that can be accessed anywhere and at any time. Teaching through podcasting can allow organizations to package training in a manner that is appealing to learners and easy to consume. On-demand narrative audio can allow learners to gain important skills while on the go.

Virtual reality technology is here and getting better every day. Still, there are a variety of different types of virtual reality platforms that all present different pros and cons for use in training. With technology evolving so quickly, learning professionals need to stay informed of what options are available today, what will be available tomorrow, and what VR means for the future of immersive learning.

Content that’s unclear. Links that don’t work. Buttons that aren’t aligned. These things can distract from your eLearning course. You want to make sure your course is good, but if you aren’t careful, you could spend more time in review cycles than it took you to design and build it in the first place. How do you strike a balance between thorough review and your time and cost constraints?

Training professionals work hard to help train employees and produce meaningful behavior change within organizations. But modern cognitive science shows that, in spite of their efforts, people forget most of what they learn. Research indicates startling facts about retention: Within only an hour, people forget 50 percent of what they just learned. A week later, that number jumps to an astonishing 90 percent.

Every revolution requires both dreamers and pragmatists. The xAPI dreamers have been painting a beautiful picture of what is becoming possible. To realize its full potential, the pragmatists need to catch up. The xAPI needs a very specific set of work completed to be successful, and it needs organizations to participate in making the next generation of learning systems and impacts possible.

American Honda Motor Company identified a need to create a consistent and credible customer service experience for a highly technical product—across all employee skill and experience levels. Service employees were not uniformly educating customers, leading to potential lost sales and lower customer satisfaction.

More advanced, nonlinear projects often call for more advanced solutions. In cases such as these, Storyline’s built-in triggers and logic system often lead to an unwieldy and difficult-to-manage course. Using JavaScript in conjunction with Storyline’s built-in triggers and variables, you can greatly expand Storyline’s capabilities while reducing the overall effort.

Many eLearning professionals are attempting to use gamification and serious games to spark employee engagement and drive learning retention; it seems everyone is working to make the best serious game that will enhance learning objectives and retention. The biggest setbacks for some have been little to no planning, tough-to-pinpoint metrics, little to no implementation strategy, and insufficient or nonexistent post-deployment support.

What happens when your current eLearning development tool and your LMS are not enough (and they often are not)? With myriad tools and platforms available, being married to one or only a few is not wise, nor does it provide you the flexibility to create dynamic learning opportunities.

PowerPoint is the basis for much of the training material you design and use, and yet it’s text-heavy, dull, and boring. That switches people off, and they don’t learn anything. It’s poorly used for in-person training, dreadful in webinars, and deathly when converted to eLearning. Quite simply, you can’t keep using PowerPoint like this. You can do better.

Do you have a subject matter expert (SME) who makes everything more difficult than it needs to be? How about the SME who just doesn’t seem to grasp the work you’re doing together? Or the SME whose idea of dates and deadlines is not at all aligned with the project needs? It isn’t their fault. SMEs are a vital part of the process, and of whether or not the project is a success. However, they don’t always understand that fact because, of course, they already have a “day job.” It is your job to build the plan, communicate it well, and stay on top of the details so they don’t have to.

Virtual reality (VR) is a new tool that has the potential to drastically change the way people view and implement training and development. In generations to come, people will use virtual reality like social media is used today. This is the future of how people will learn. But today, this technology may seem too complicated and unattainable for many organizations to implement into their learning portfolios.

Large-scale system transformation initiatives are challenging at the best of times. But when you factor in a rollout that involves restructuring, growing existing operations, and establishing new franchise owners to enable strategic expansion and remarkable customer service as part of the initiative, they become substantially more complex. In 2013, Coca-Cola faced this very issue in North America when it needed to replace outdated systems with a common enterprise solution. With an accelerated plan to transition more than 60,000 users to a new operating solution, this initiative required innovative approaches to train and support users rapidly and efficiently.

Communities of practice (CoPs) have become a hot topic in the past few years. They are an excellent tool for developing skills, sharing tacit knowledge, and shoring up retention of high-performing staff. But they differ from teams and other types of groups in many ways. Understanding what CoPs are and how they work—rather than just looking at how to create and manage them—is critical to supporting their success.

Back by popular demand, Hyperdrive returns to DevLearn this fall. This year’s Hyperdrive competition focuses on innovation, showcasing projects that are using technology and solutions to create new and exciting opportunities for learning and performance support.

Are you the trainer, instructional designer, coordinator, project manager, and business analyst for your organization, all in one? Are you constantly moving from one role to the next while feeling overwhelmed by endless training projects? As a one-person training team, it’s common to feel challenged by constant time management, project intake and prioritization, development, delivery, and analysis you have to do on a regular basis. How do you reclaim control from this chaos?

Good courseware will use multiple elements such as video, audio, interaction, and good old-fashioned reading. You struggle to balance all of it until it’s a finely harmonized symphony of information, waiting for a student to take it all in. But are any of those activities or videos you’ve worked on actually helping anyone learn? How can you show the relationship between the activities and performance?

Many have said that 2016 is the year of virtual reality (VR), as Facebook (Oculus Rift), Sony, Samsung, and HTC, to name a few, are launching consumer products. But how can it be used for learning, especially in a corporate environment? Is VR all hype, or are there sound pedagogical principles behind it?

Learning and performance ecosystems represent a new way of thinking about L&D. Many agree with this approach in concept. But where are the examples? This session showcases a real-life learning and performance ecosystem solution.

Dairy Queen, like many organizations, experiences challenges in knowledge retention following formal training. Dairy Queen needed a strategy that would equip learners with tools and resources to help boost learning retention of role-specific knowledge and skills throughout all learning stages. What Dairy Queen required was a rapid development process to create role-based learning tools to remedy these challenges and address real-time training needs of thousands of Dairy Queen franchisee employees.

Many companies have legacy content that is text-heavy, hard to navigate, impossible to control once out “in the wild,” and ultimately not very effective. Connecting those static documents within a larger training pathway, and keeping that content up to date, can be very difficult. Additionally, getting information about who might be using that content, or how it is being used, is pretty much impossible. Sound familiar?

The corporate eLearning development world may not always seem creative from the outside, but successful eLearning teams use creativity in every project they design and develop. But how, specifically, can this skill contribute to successful eLearning? What kinds of creativity should be part of your eLearning workflow? What benefits does creativity provide to your development process? How can you explain to your stakeholders that increased creativity contributes to business-focused learning objectives?

Gamification is a multibillion-dollar business that has touched a wide variety of fields, but especially learning and development. At the same time, according to research from Gartner, approximately 80 percent of gamification projects fail. So how can you use gamification in a way that’s actually successful? You need to think like game designers and go beyond the buzzwords and definitions.

Designers, developers, trainers, instructors, content experts, and others too often design and build instruction in ways that interfere with how adults learn. The result is less-than-optimal learning that can lead to a chain reaction of disengagement in learning materials and limited, if any, performance improvement.

MOOCs are growing in use in public and private sectors, taking on different forms and providing diverse experiences. The approaches are relatively new, and there is still much to learn. Have you ever wondered whether your organization could benefit from lessons learned designing and facilitating a massive open online course (MOOC)? The answer is: Yes, it can. The data and experiences obtained from a course of thousands can be applied in many different ways.

A large variety of eLearning authoring tools are on the market, and it can be difficult to determine which tools will meet your needs. Two of the most widely used are Adobe Captivate and Articulate Storyline. eLearning designers and managers are challenged with determining which tool will fit their needs today and in the future as the demands for learning content change.

Video is eating the Internet. People are consuming and creating more of it than ever, and 64 percent of consumers identify as binge watchers. But these trends don’t just apply to entertainment content—they’re having a huge impact on learning, and learners’ expectations, too.