Frequently, learning design is about showing people how to do the right things, but actually getting them to change their behavior can be another story. It’s particularly challenging to get people to change those intractable habits and behaviors that everyone struggles to avoid, despite the wealth of available information about better choices.

The popularity of video in learning has grown substantially in recent years, due in large part to how much easier and cheaper it has become to create this content. But while video is a valuable tool, it’s also a medium that most L&D professionals aren’t trained in—and the last thing you want is for that lack of experience to lead to videos that are just plain bad. Thankfully, a little knowledge can go a long way toward improving your video skills. But where do you start?

Traditional video has become an important and engaging component of training programs. That said, while it’s a fantastic tool for learning, it is still often limited to the linear path or story that it shares. People can watch video, but they can’t control it themselves. But what if L&D professionals created a more immersive world for learners by giving them the ability to explore anything and everything around them? That more interactive video experience is possible now with 360-degree video.

It’s not uncommon to focus on trying to find the perfect project management tools for a project. With all the exciting options out there, it’s easy to be tempted. However, research shows that the most important component of project management isn’t the tools you use but is, instead, your mental game. Do you choose collaboration over control? Sponsor communication over hiding, purpose over tasks, or trust over politics? Do your stakeholders believe you can do it? Learn how to get your mental game right to drive project success.

People never want for information at home. When they have a problem, they search the Internet or post a question on social media. When they go to work, everything changes. Vital knowledge remains hidden in a variety of silos. Organizations are unable to leverage the same knowledge-sharing behaviors that drive resources like YouTube and Wikipedia. Employees are then left to fend for themselves—often with negative results.

Do you feel like you’re not taking advantage of your tablet or smartphone outside of email, text messaging, and a couple apps? Mobile devices can be much more than tools to consume content and conduct conversations. Your mobile device is armed and ready to not only uncover learning opportunities but also help create them.

Many instructional designers would like to incorporate games into their projects but aren’t sure how to get started and often find the prospect of designing a game to be intimidating. What are the various approaches to instructional game design? How do you determine which approach is most appropriate for your instructional need, taking into account your budget and timeline? And how do you get started designing a game?

In the past few years, many organizations have introduced recognition and certification programs using digital badges, but too often the results produced by these programs have disappointed. Badge earners don’t bother to claim or share their badges, and as a result, issuing organizations have wasted their time and effort.

Employees at a global technology giant were enrolling in a popular performance improvement workshop at a rapid clip. The learning activities and exercises were interactive, hands-on, and practical. But wait lists were long, mostly because capacity was limited by the delivery format: two days of face-to-face instructor-led training. The challenge: to scale enrollments while reducing costs, without sacrificing learner engagement. The solution: a brain-friendly virtual learning environment and experience.

It’s difficult to create an eLearning course that is optimized for all devices (phone, tablet, laptop, etc.). There’s a reason that, although most of the web is now designed responsively, there are still few instances of good responsive design in eLearning. Many of today’s eLearning courses do not function and flow like the other apps that people use every day. The result? A learning experience that is full of friction.

With the advent of so many new technologies, ensuring the learner has the best access to the right-size, right-format content, delivered at the right time, is challenging. Coupled with rapid development cycles, this means designers have less time to do thorough or extremely detailed needs analysis.

Flash has been losing popularity as an eLearning development tool. Coinciding with its decline is the rise of Adobe Animate, which provides the ability to create compelling and interactive HTML5-based eLearning. Adobe Animate has emerged as an effective alternative to hand coding.

L&D professionals constantly strive to create useful and meaningful content. But while they often use interviews, profiles, test results, and more to try to understand the people they design for, these things don’t always paint the full picture. But what if you could bring in even more data about your audience? You may have heard of the “Quantified Self,” a movement that recommends using technology to track a wide range of data about yourself and, through that information, to get to know yourself better. Can you apply this mission to the field of L&D? And if so, how can you go about collecting those data and interpreting the results?

Technology like xAPI has provided the learning industry with the opportunity to track anything, anywhere, and L&D and HR leaders are hailing the arrival of people analytics. These advances provide substantially more data about the people in an organization, but what do you do with the data? Are you gathering the right information? Where do you even start?

Have you ever watched a really engaging web-based conference session and wondered, “How’d they do that?” When slides or polls appear or videos pop up and play automatically, it’s not magic! There’s a person behind every action who must click, type, or drag to make things happen. And learning how to use these features when you run your own webinars is surprisingly easy.

Audio can be one of the most powerful tools in your toolbox when it comes to creating effective and impactful eLearning. Bad audio, however, can be one of the most destructive tools—distracting the learner and making your course feel unprofessional or unfinished. Don’t let your courses fall prey to bad audio. There are easy steps you can take to create high-quality audio without big-budget voice talent!

When new technology hits the market, there is often a push to incorporate it into all upcoming projects. You may hear statements such as “We need a GoPro video” when what the speaker really means is, “We need a high-energy, action-oriented video.” When you know what is needed, not just what is wanted, you can make informed purchasing decisions to help ensure that the efforts are high-quality and in budget.

As communications and technologies continue to change, there is increased pressure on corporate workers to keep up with these changes, learn on the job, improve time to competency, and increase productivity. In addition, demographics are changing. Older workers are retiring, resulting in a loss of valuable internal corporate knowledge, while organizations must continually hire new, less experienced workers to replace them. There is a need to capture and share the knowledge that helps new workers improve performance and continue to learn over time. Using social media at work can be a compelling solution to this dilemma, offering informal learning solutions on a just-in-time basis.

When they go right, video projects can go incredibly right! But when they go wrong, they can go very, very wrong. The stakes are higher with eLearning in video form because of the costs, expectations, and limitations in making updates to content.

You are trying to reach the untethered modern learner: someone who rarely comes into the office and won’t sit for any eLearning module longer than five minutes. These learners want learning and performance support to be on demand, like Netflix, and conveniently located on their mobile devices, like Airbnb and Uber. To reach this audience, you want to encourage their learning to be as habitual as checking their phones. So why not provide effective learning experiences through a simple, easy and habitual tool they use every day: Short Message Service (SMS)?

eLearning has fallen behind other sectors in developing engaging, immersive experiences. While the world of advertising is continually exploring new ways to affect people’s habits and decisions, eLearning developers often focus purely on knowledge acquisition. This session will explore how the psychology of marketing can affect the efficacy of eLearning.

Some of the best training out there looks like it was developed by a single designer, regardless of how many people worked on it. But often when more than one learning professional is in the mix and there aren’t established design standards, even with the best of intentions the final product suffers from inconsistency and results in training that looks hodgepodge. The bigger the team, the worse that inconsistency can become. Consistency is key—and the solution resides in detailed style guides, design documents, and templates to make your work look polished and professional.

Yesterday’s sales enablement strategies are no longer enough for the “new normal” that most L&D professionals face. The marketplace grows more competitive each year, and the regulatory landscape is always shifting. Trainers must help reps become trusted partners to their customers, and that means moving beyond just features and benefits selling.

Simulations can provide learners with safe environments in which to learn how to use new skills through practice and failure. When done well, they give people the opportunity to get things wrong and learn from that experience in a way that has little to no risk involved. They can also be deeply immersive, replicating the actual experience of doing something in a realistic and engaging way. Because of this, they can be incredibly effective tools for learning. But how do you create simulations on your own, particularly if you’re on a tight budget?

Captivate’s newest responsive player is built on HTML5 and JavaScript, which opens the door for you to access its code directly. This allows you to go beyond the default features in this tool and make your own customizations. But what kinds of hacks can you actually do with JavaScript, and how do you get started?

iBeacons allow learners to interact with their environment in new ways that were not possible even five years ago. While many learning professionals are aware of iBeacons and their disruptive possibilities, many do not understand the fundamental concepts or how to implement the devices in their training programs. Beacons can be used to provide location context in eLearning and create low-bandwidth augmented reality experiences.