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.

While linear video is a preferred method for learning, technologically speaking it has not advanced much over the past few decades. Now, linear video has started to incorporate interactive annotations, which have greatly improved users’ learning experience. Adding interactive annotations becomes easier each year.

Creating effective learning experiences is not a job for a novice, although many novices are thrown into the role of instructional designer/developer. If beginners turn to the field’s expansive literature, which ranges from cookbook-style guides and blogs to scientific research, they are easily overwhelmed and typically turn to overly simplistic approaches. But even experienced professionals can come to feel they’re never able to do the job that should be done.

NorthShore is taking proactive measures to combat the rising number of violent trends in health care settings. The company developed online training that teaches employees how to 1) identify the beginning stages of workplace violence, 2) understand how best to respond and prevent it from escalating, and 3) know when to get help.

Much has been made about the astounding dropout rates for massive open online courses (MOOCs): typically 85 percent or more. While it may be misleading to apply the traditional metrics of higher education to MOOCs, there are ways to dramatically improve the numbers.

How will the connected learning landscape shift when cognitive technology takes over? Connected print technologies, extreme wearables, and device-to-device, machine-to-machine communication will transform the way a learner interacts with content, changing everything about the ecosystem of learning.

Mobile is the new way of learning. Learners want it, and companies want to provide it. But app development can be expensive, especially if you are starting from a mostly print or standard eLearning model. Finding a way to give learners and organizations the mobile learning they want without breaking the bank is a must in today’s training market, especially for companies with populations of mobile learners (e.g., sales).

It has been said that Flash is dead, yet there exists an army of Flash content in the world of eLearning today. Seemingly alive and well, these Flash zombies must be eliminated in order to answer the increasing demand for mobile-compatible content. Is there a way to save any of the good work that was done—or is a double tap to the timeline the only way?

There are many situations where learners can benefit from being able to instantly request assistance from an expert through voice or even video chat. That kind of in-the-moment performance support can save time and help people get back to the task at hand quickly, armed with the knowledge they need to do it right. But how do you provide that kind of support directly in your web or mobile applications? In the past this could be done, but only with the assistance of extra plugins that were tricky to use. Thankfully, there’s now an easier way for developers to include this functionality: Web Real-time Communications (WebRTC).

Animation is a powerful tool for creating engaging eLearning experiences. Sadly, many animations are used without purpose as just a design embellishment. When that happens, the animation distracts the learner from the content rather than helping to elevate it.

J.M. Barrie said, “We are all failures; at least, the best of us are.” When attending conferences, you often get the opportunity to see individuals sharing their best work. What isn’t visible is everything that fell apart in the process of achieving something great. These are great opportunities to learn from.

You are always striving to ensure the learner is learning in the best possible way, aren’t you? Sometimes technology introduces a new way of interacting that really takes learning to a new level. Explore some of these technologies and their possibilities for learning.

Learning and development professionals strive to help people get better at what they do every day. But acquiring knowledge isn’t enough to improve performance. In order to do better work tomorrow than they did today, people need to change their behaviors. That’s when learning becomes effective and gets results. However, behavior change is hard. It takes time, energy, and commitment. The only way to keep people engaged in the project of real transformation is to give them an experience they love.

Formal online learning doesn’t work like it used to. Attention spans are decreasing, and mobile access is more critical than ever. So how do you create mobile learning without hiring experts or spending a fortune? And how do you get part-time employees to care about making shakes and smoothies?

In a world of short attention spans and the need to “break through the clutter,” how can you ensure your learning videos leave your audience remembering your message? Maybe it’s time to look outside L&D for inspiration and toward a field that already does this well: advertising. If advertisements can influence people to purchase items they don’t need, are there ways to use this field’s secrets to influence learners (and do this without their feeling manipulated)?

In just a short span of time, a succession of technological advances have impacted L&D, from VHS tapes through to eLearning and mobile—and they’ve landed with mixed success. All have had an impact; none have been transformative. But that’s about to change as distributed technology and AI start to intersect with learning. The success of these technologies, though, depends on industry professionals. Are you ready?

Are you meeting all Five Moments of Learning Need? You already teach the moments of “new” and “more.” But what are you doing to support the moment of “apply,” when your learners become performers and have to use the knowledge you taught them? What about the moment of “solve,” when things are broken and need to be fixed? Or the moment of “change,” when they have to unlearn old habits?

When a new specification such as the xAPI comes out, it is important to understand the basics. And one of the most critical basics of the xAPI is the concept of statements: the way most xAPI data is communicated. Before getting started with an xAPI implementation, you’ll want to have a strong understanding of what statements are and how you can form them yourself.

Big data and learning analytics are top of mind for many organizations throughout the training industry. However, while there is a lot of of information about what you can do with data, there is much less about what you should do. Since data can include deeply personal or sensitive information, training organizations cannot consider using this information without first thinking about the ethics of what they are intending to do with that data and the privacy of individual learners.

A large amount of research in recent years has explored the value that music has for the brain and learning. Everyone has experienced it in some way, be it from listening to music while studying, learning something from a catchy song, or learning to play an instrument.

Online videos are extremely popular these days, particularly for quickly learning new skills and just-in-time content. While short videos can be an effective way to learn soft skills and system processes, many instructional designers and developers believe they have neither the tools nor the skills to create these training videos themselves. But they’re wrong, because most people have a surprisingly useful animation tool already: PowerPoint.

It’s harder and harder to catch the attention of learners, especially field sales representatives. It is also difficult to encourage them to practice important skills like sales techniques and how to speak with customers in different situations. While they need to practice these critical skills to succeed in their roles, they don’t always take the time to do so. What could engage this audience?

“Blended learning” was one of the hottest buzzwords back in the day. In its infancy it was, at best, a design construct that focused on combining the best elements of face-to-face with eLearning. At worst, though, it merely gave the learner the choice of attending class in person or online. This was a cutting-edge approach at one time, but the tools and media for learning have expanded far beyond this. To get the most out of blended learning, you need to shift your thinking and look at how you can use all of today’s tools in the blend.

As websites and apps get increasingly more sophisticated and personalized, people are coming to expect a similar experience from learning as well. Adaptive learning is one such technology that promises this experience, but many of the platforms that exist are expensive and currently geared primarily toward K-12 and higher education. How can L&D professionals in the corporate space find ways to provide their audience with this more tailored learning experience?

Design starts on paper—or at least it used to. Early apps were clunky, and those that had great promise fell short because of a stylus that did not feel the same as a pencil. With the advances in touch-sensitive screens and stylus technology, designing or sketching on an app is like having a library of sketchbooks. The current problem is no longer technology, but rather choosing the right app. When choosing which app to use, it takes time and practice to become proficient enough to determine whether it is the right app for your application and workflow.

Are you designing training for people who need to experience situations firsthand, but struggle with how to do that effectively and efficiently? Is your workforce widely distributed, so in-person training is just too expensive? What if you could bring a situation to your audience anywhere and any time you needed to with a solution that was both immersive and cost-effective? While this sounds like a training option from the future, it’s actually something you can launch right now using Google Cardboard and 360 degrees of virtual reality.

Intellectual property law affects every stage of the development and delivery process. Unfortunately, it’s daunting—and, even worse, often deadly boring. As a result, your decision making about what media resources you can actually use might be rooted in ignorance, fear, or frustration, none of which contributes to your project goals. As a result, it’s not uncommon to struggle with how to use free media to enhance your projects while also avoiding accidentally infringing on someone else’s work or exposing yourself to unpleasant legal action.

Poor leadership is a significant drain on organizations, with some estimates claiming it costs the US economy billion of dollars a year. That’s why leadership development remains a top priority for many companies. But while organizations want to invest in this training, in many cases the training they offer doesn’t fully meet the needs of the leaders taking it. So where should you look for inspiration on how to make your leadership development more effective? Games!

Video production and delivery have evolved quickly over the past few years. Unfortunately, pre-2010-era video knowledge often dominates how people consider using video for learning, including their understanding of video files and codecs, streaming specifications and file sizes, video production techniques and styles, and even the role of video in training media. Moreover, these misconceptions actually keep teams from launching the video production processes they’d love to be working on.

In a world of fragmented content consumption and constant distraction, how do you not only grab your audience’s attention but also get them to care about your content? One way is to create an emotional connection by putting them in the driver’s seat of the experience. Giving your audience choice both attracts their attention and creates emotional investment, allowing the message you share to go deeper and actually change behavior.

You know that taking online courses isn’t the only way to learn. You want to invent new learning formats and experiences that better meet your audience’s needs. However, in many cases you need to include tracking, and the types of learning trackable by traditional learning management systems are limited. The Experience API (xAPI) specification is flexible enough to track a wide range of learning experiences, but it’s a new technology, and barriers to adoption still exist. How do you bridge this gap?

How do you develop a generation of learners who may have spent more time with video games than in school? How do you leverage the explosion of screens and devices to change behavior among all learners? How do you use the recent growth in affordable virtual reality devices to bring immersion, engagement, and presence to new levels? This is the reality in which you design training. So how do you use these media experiences as inspiration for where L&D should go in the future?

When a new director of diversity and inclusion reviewed the courses offered at Johns Hopkins Medicine International, the eLearning development team was surprised to find out just how much work its content needed in order to be current and inclusive. Staff had thought they were practicing diversity and inclusion at a high level, but this review showed that they were way off the mark. Both this review and feedback from newer members of the team helped the eLearning development team realize the nuances to incorporating diversity and challenged them to do better.

Admit it: You have a love/hate relationship with stock photography websites. Sure, you love how using stock images can inspire your creativity, but you also hate how hard it is to find ones that look genuine and aren’t exaggerated. eLearning developers rely heavily on stock-image-based designs for building workplace eLearning. And it’s not just a problem of finding stock images full of people with the right poses or expressions. The bigger challenge is that the images you find often just don’t feel authentic.

Implementing an effective mobile user experience is challenging. How do you deliver useful information at the time of need without being disruptive to the employee’s workflow? How do you integrate the content effectively within the context of the user’s task at hand? How do you leverage the available technology to reach the target audience? How can you create a mobile app that is “sticky”?

Using workplace stories to engage learners and enhance your content is a hot topic in learning and development. But when you’re getting started with storytelling as an instructional design technique, you’ll likely have a lot of questions about where to find effective stories for this purpose and how to make sure they not only entertain but also foster learning at the same time. You’ll also want to know how best to integrate storytelling techniques in the tools you already use.

You’re excited about the promise of an xAPI-enabled world, but you currently have a learning management system and a host of SCORM-based courses that you can’t just get rid of. Early on, it can be difficult to see how you can stay flexible and manage this transition over time. But what if you could get the most out of both an LMS and an LRS (learning record store) at the same time that you move to your next-generation learning and performance infrastructure?

When you’re developing strategies to engage your learners, you need to keep your audience and their anticipated learning environment top of mind. But with more and more people shifting when and how they want to access training content, it’s more important than ever to make sure your design strategies reflect this. Your success in reaching the modern learner will depend on understanding how these shifts should influence your technology selection, implementation strategy, and design approach.

Accessibility is about more than just doing the bare minimum for compliance. It’s about the difference you can make when you ensure everyone has equal access to what you’ve designed. While this intent is good, in the real world, actually making all your content accessible can seem like a daunting task. But it doesn’t have to be.

Selecting authoring tools wisely is important! Choosing the right tools will set you up for success, and choosing the wrong tools can lead to disastrous results. Knowing your project’s requirements and the capabilities of the tools help ensure you select the best tools to get the job done. 

Critical thinking is an incredibly valuable skill in today’s workplace. In fact, the US Department of Labor proclaimed that it’s the raw material of workplace success. But while organizations value this skill, they don’t always systematically seek out and support it. Many employers actually say their employees struggle with critical thinking skills, and most want to provide more development opportunities in this area. How can the L&D field address this gap and help amp up people’s ability to think critically?

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.