The world of technology and information is changing rapidly. As emerging delivery and engagement technologies, including MOOCs, immersions, games, and badges, are disrupting expectations of relevant meaningful learning and development, new waves of learning technology innovation—wearable technologies and the Internet of Things – are promising to shake things up even more. Will you be ready to step up? In this session we’ll examine the current and emerging learning technology markets to anticipate the skills and capabilities required for success as eLearning professionals.

If you visit a Fortune 500 website today, what you see is not created by handcrafting a webpage. Amazon and Netflix recommendations, too, are not completed by someone watching your particular behavior and cobbling together those for you; instead, it’s a set of rules and tagged content. It’s quite likely that when you visit a site, it may be different than when others visit the same site. This isn’t magic, but it’s also not just your everyday content creation process—it’s a content strategy fueled by content systems. And these changes in traditional marketing have big implications for eLearning.

The promise of open digital badges extends beyond their potential to recognize informal learning and professional development. Open badges also provide data that can be mined and analyzed to benefit learners, educators, and learning organizations, both locally and globally across the ecosystem. What does the current universe of badges look like? What practical data can be conveyed through badges? How can usable data be extracted from digital badges that can be used by learners and institutions of learning?

The world of work and the workplace is changing rapidly, and your internal business strategy needs to include motivational elements such as gamification, badging, and incentives to support workplace engagement and interest.

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.

High-impact organizations invest in people. While some skills are prerequisites to employment, others can be acquired on the job, preparing people for more complex tasks, even future leadership roles. That is the promise and possibility of building a progressive credentialing system using competency-based digital badges as “curricular building blocks.”

Three significant challenges L&D practitioners experience are in the ability to add context to their mobile learning and performance support, time and resources to experience the possibilities of new technologies, and having the ability to see real-world applications. 

The world of digital online credentials is changing, and IBM is a leading voice in the IT industry. In this session, using real program data and results and the IBM Open Badge Program as a case study, you will learn how to design a nano-credential program that quickly generates significant results. See how IBM merges credentials and recognition with social media, such as LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. The session explores Mozilla Open Badges, which are quickly emerging as an industry standard to recognize achievements and nurture and progress talent.

The number of freelance workers is expected to grow to more than 50 percent of America’s workforce in the next decade. An urgency has arisen to define, create, and articulate credentials that document alternative learning experiences and directly correlate with the skills required in the project-based job market. How can employers determine which soloists have the capabilities and experience that the work demands? And how can soloists showcase their capabilities and achievements so potential employers can reliably identify them?

We have all experienced huge courses, documents, and texts that are barely manageable by the instructional designer. In fact, much of how we design courses and documents makes it impossible for an employee to find the one piece of information they need at the time they need it. Since content is so dense, it makes finding meaningful information difficult, and it makes tracking anything useful in it even more difficult.

From the first desktop PCs to today’s cutting-edge smartphones, technology has a history of fundamentally changing the expectations of learning and development programs. We are now on the cusp of another technological advance, one that will once again change some of our definitions and how we address performance issues: wearable technology. This technology will come in various forms, but the one that many expect to serve as a quantum leap forward is Apple Watch.

An intensive two-year study of 29 projects that were awarded funds to build digital badge systems in the 2012 Badges for Lifelong Learning competition revealed surprising results.

Technology has completely changed the way we live, work, and learn. Technology has brought us the Internet, smartphones, tablets, and many more tools that have changed our lives forever. Of course, these same technologies have also brought us memes like Socially Awkward Penguin, Success Kid, and yes, Grumpy Cat.

Have you decided to implement a badge program at your organization but are unsure what to do next? Perhaps you are wondering: How do I create the badges? How do I award them? How are the badges displayed? What kind of communications do I send out to those who are awarded badges? How can I promote badges beyond my department? How do I help participants understand the value of badges? Find out how a badge expert used badges to gamify an award-winning developmental math massive open online course at Cuyahoga Community College, and developed a successful badge system for professional development workshops at Kent State University.

As the world becomes more and more mobile, so too has the technology we’ve grown accustomed to using on desktops moved to mobile devices and in so doing has expanded the possibilities. AR is one of the emerging technologies that enable smartphones and tablets to interact with the world around them.

More than four years have passed since the inception of the Open Badges experiment, and in that time the concept of digital badges has moved steadily into the general consciousness. As this novel idea continues to evolve, so do its many opportunities and challenges.   

The coming year will see the launch of inexpensive virtual reality (VR) devices. But this change is not about gadgets; it’s about a massive consumer technology that will be accessible and powerful with huge potential. VR is a medium, not a gadget. How appropriate is it for education and training?

People live in a visual world and are, therefore, conditioned to perceive quality based largely on its visual design. Your digital badge is your visible representation displayed in digital backpacks and ePortfolios. You have been tasked with creating the badge artwork. But you are not a designer and your budget does not support hiring one—so what do you do?