Data continues to be a hot topic in L&D. The options for collecting data continue to grow, along with the potential for finding new insights for learning design. But in conversations with L&D professionals about the need for better data, it’s become clear that good design is not only about designing for data, but also designing from data.

The Internet of Things (IoT) technology revolution is about to explode in L&D. While still not commonplace, it has the potential to resemble the stunning uptake of the smartphone—technology that went from new to everywhere in just 10 years. It also has the capability to redefine the learning landscape. In the age of IoT, learning will no longer be about ownership of information; it will be about presence, context, and experience.

Consumer experiences with YouTube, Snapchat, Netflix, console games, and virtual and augmented reality are shaping demand for a new generation of corporate digital learning. 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? How can augmented and virtual reality bring immersion, engagement, and presence to new levels?

On the footsteps of the dot-com and Y2K craze, the first web-based learning management system (LMS) OLAT debuted in 1999 as a free, open-source platform to support adult learning. It was also the same year that TiVo and Unix were released, Napster was sued by the music industry, and Amazon.com became the leading seller of books. In the almost 20 years since “LMS” entered the vernacular of learning professionals, much has changed in technology and the world at large. However, the LMS remains the central learning technology of any organization. L&D is long overdue for a change.

Creating great online learning experiences for Americans with disabilities involves more than just adhering to US government Section 508 standards. The ability for people to navigate learning management systems (LMSs) efficiently, find course content quickly, and consume learning material goes beyond supporting screen readers alone. One strong approach is to focus on user experience (UX) design. Good UX design tactics will not only expand the accessibility of your content but also benefit all your users. Best of all, good UX design can simplify your content.

Microlearning is everywhere. Your clients or L&D leaders may be pressuring you to use it everywhere. For everything. Oh, and by the way, for cheap. But when should it be used—and when should it not be used? Microlearning is a small and powerful tool, but it may not be the answer to every learning dilemma.

In many cases, the conceptual part of the instructional design process is neglected. Designers don’t have time; they don’t have tools; they don’t know how to ideate learning solutions in an efficient way. As a result, they end up with a routine solution aligned tightly with their own knowledge, skills, biases, and comfort zone. It is very hard to design great training based on such an approach.

Like many roles, the world of slot machine technicians is growing more complicated and more technical every day. They have dozens of games, signs, and controllers to install and support and have several cases to address a day. How can people in situations like this keep track of it all? With their smartphone! In their hand they have access to an easy-to-use mobile tool for performance support and continuous learning.

In 2001, Kent Beck and others created the Agile Manifesto to address the high failure rate of projects. Since then, many companies have adopted agile principles but have struggled with the real-world challenges. Despite this change, a large number of projects still fail. The reality is, many companies talk agile, but application varies—standard techniques exist but may not be followed for good business reasons. It may be cool to be “doing agile,” but it’s just not that easy to transition.

As the lines between marketing, communication, and training are blurring, L&D is being asked to think “like a marketer” and develop or promote creative new learning solutions. So how do marketers engage their audience and change people’s behavior despite changing technology and consumer preferences? The secret is their strategy. How can L&D professionals apply these strategies to change learner behavior and engage participants?

When you visualize abstract ideas, you make the ideas easier for people to understand. When you use visual metaphors, you make content seem familiar. An important skill in L&D is the ability to make meaning through visuals—and diagrams, charts, graphs, and timelines can help.

Today’s learners are faced with an ever-growing surplus of content to learn, process, and employ in their careers. Companies have terabytes of knowledge, skills, behaviors, and standard work required for successful day-to-day operations. They need to empower their employees with a system for efficiently building on or augmenting the capabilities each person brings to the organization. Intelligence augmentation is one possible solution.

The L&D landscape is a complicated space: There are dozens of genres of software, including LMSs, LRSs, authoring tools, analytical tools, etc. Yet few people understand what function their software is actually meant to accomplish. Given this fundamental misunderstanding of software’s “jobs to be done,” it’s no wonder that companies struggle to make the right purchasing decisions, often ending up with software that is not the right fit for their needs.

How do you take a traditional learning experience like new-hire training and radically reimagine it for today’s learner? More importantly, why should you want to change your approach? There’s a growing consensus in the L&D industry that new employees learn more on the job than they do through formal learning events. Nonetheless, L&D is in a unique position to shape the experience of new employees from day one, which presents a prime opportunity to create a lasting impact as they begin their new roles.

Workplace learning is a two-way relationship between a company’s desire to stay competitive and employees’ need for information to engage job functions. With the struggle for competitive advantage expected to only accelerate, it pays dividends to create a flexible and technology-enabled learning ecosystem that can foster the future generations in the workforce.

Patient safety and compliance are major issues in hospitals today. One organization’s challenge was how to keep 7,000 professionals up to date and compliant regarding patient safety tasks and medical equipment. The issue was that formal learning wasn’t proving to be effective enough as medical equipment was changing with software updates on a regular basis.

A carefully executed eLearning scenario can pull people into a real-world application of new concepts and skills. Yet it’s rare that instructional designers have the time to create immersive scenarios with complicated branching and feedback. Under a tight deadline to redesign an online course in practical ethics, Pennsylvania College of Health Sciences still wanted to give students practice making realistic decisions before they began working with real patients.

Adults learn by doing what they’re being taught. As a virtual trainer, it’s your job to get them “doing.” But sometimes you may find your audience multitasking instead of engaging with the content, and as a result, their learning suffers. How can you keep people actively “doing” within the confines of your virtual platform?

Designing learning for a global workforce is challenging at the best of times. However, when you factor in that this learning must be virtual, mobile ready, and accessible to over 80,000 employees, the challenge becomes substantially more complex. This is the dilemma SAP faced when asked to develop a global diversity and inclusion program for its employees to boost awareness of the value of an inclusive work environment.

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.

Many businesses’ success depends on their customers and partners being skilled users of those businesses’ products and services. But sometimes those products and services are complex or otherwise challenging to learn. Unfortunately, the more people struggle to understand them, the less likely they are to use them effectively to unlock value (and come back for more).

Spoken words carry information far beyond what is found in the words themselves. Written words cannot convey inflection, tone, and true meaning, so it is not surprising that a voice-over recording can sound very different than what scriptwriters originally intended. What if there was a simple way to write scripts for voice narration that increases readability, leading to improved accuracy in delivery and minimizing (even eliminating) time-consuming retake sessions?

The airline industry is highly regulated. As a result, Alaska Airlines’ employees were tasked with completing numerous hours of training each year. With limited resources and time, they needed an innovative method to make this annual training feel fresh to their audience. For the first time in years, they decided that eLearning might not be the answer to the age-old problem of how to make a learning experience truly memorable. Their alternative: comics!

L&D is increasingly using video to address workplace needs, but where should you turn to learn how to make these videos engaging and effective? Hollywood, of course! For more than 100 years, the film industry has mastered the art of engagement, with good films keeping audiences riveted for hours. While not every workplace video needs to be a major production, there are many simple lessons from Hollywood that you can apply in your work to make better videos.

Graphics in the world of learning have been generally stuck in two dimensions. This limitation can get in the way of your ability to immerse the audience in a story or explain how complex models or processes work. Being able to add a third dimension would do more than just add flash to the content—it could actually make a real impact by making the content more understandable and engaging. But how can you create and add 3-D objects to your work, particularly when you don’t have the budget to hire specialty developers or buy expensive software?

Most organizations’ vision of digital learning solutions starts and ends with a focus on creating learning resources for staff on the corporate LMS. One organization wanted to go beyond that to implement a strategy that addressed the full range of digital learning in all aspects of people’s work, from organizational development through staff skills and support.

Traditional LMSs are not always the simplest of tools to work with. They can, in some cases, be more complicated, limited in their capabilities, or expensive than what you actually need. But if this is the case, you don’t need to settle for an LMS solution that doesn’t actually fit your needs. What you need instead may be found in an unexpected place: WordPress.

The value of virtual reality and 360-degree video content for L&D is quite promising, as the immersive nature of these technologies has the potential to make a major impact on learning and retention when used strategically. However, the actual development of VR and 360-degree video content can at first glance seem daunting, complicated, costly, and even out of reach to most learning organizations. But it doesn’t have to be that way.

Virtual reality has been a hot topic in the L&D space recently. Its use in the field is growing, and you can now move past talking about it in theory and explore real examples of VR for training projects. You can see the real-world experience of a learning solution that incorporates VR, and find out what exactly you need to do to create a meaningful learning experience with it.

Significant learning occurs on the job, but how do you manage and track it? Despite a robust eLearning curriculum, on-the-job training of a geographically dispersed workforce was inconsistent and untamed. The existing LMS lacked the ability to track real-world learning activities, which were too extensive for a paper-based system. Empowering Performance forged a customizable, cutting-edge technology solution that could grow and evolve with the organization.

Leadership development programs come in numerous shapes and sizes. At many companies, though, logistical constraints limit the scope of these programs to just employees at headquarters, which limits the opportunity for people at other locations to build their leadership skills. World Wide Technology wanted to open its leadership program to employees who were located in remote offices. But how could the company give these employees the same learning experience as those at headquarters?

eLearning has a satisfactory set of options if your goal is information delivery or procedural training, but what about creating meaningful eLearning for complex skill development or for the not-so-procedural kinds of problems that show up more and more in the workplace? What about creating learning for those situations where your SME can’t tell you what good performance looks like except to say, “Well, you know it when you see it”?

Selling mobile performance support can be challenging. Your clients or business partners may be unfamiliar with these solutions, lack knowledge of mobile technologies, and think they don’t have the resources (developers, time, money) to support these activities. These obstacles can prevent your clients from seeing mobile performance support as a viable solution. But this kind of solution can be much simpler, more budget-friendly, and easier to support than they expect—at least, it is when you know the right tools.

Losing a skilled employee can cost your organization up to twice the employee’s annual salary, making retention a critical cost-saving metric. In today’s economy, people expect more growth out of their jobs, which is evident in the mobility of workers between firms and industries. Giving employees the ability to expand their skills within a company is critical to not only attracting but also retaining the best talent.

Why do so many companies struggle to optimize the impact and ROI of learning management systems? One problem is that people’s learning preferences have moved beyond what most LMS experiences allow. Another issue is that companies can’t afford to invest in tools that don’t add value to their business priorities. A team at InsideView needed to resolve this dilemma quickly.

You’ve heard you should be making videos, but the reality is that there are barriers to starting and barriers to improving. What factors will most influence audio? What type of microphone or camera should you use? Can a training professional really use a cellphone to make a video? And what about adding lighting? What are the steps and tools you need to create effective and impactful learning videos?

As the workplace becomes more virtual and distributed, soft skills training is more important than ever. Also, as artificial intelligence automates basic technical skills and work processes, many occupations increasingly require strong interpersonal skills for new roles and responsibilities. However, when it comes to soft skills, traditional online learning programs may do a good job teaching what to do, but they don’t always give opportunities for learners to apply how to do it, especially in “true to life” situations.

The corporate training industry is awakening to the need for significantly better reporting and improved accountability across all organizational divisions. The advanced data enabled by a new generation of training development tools will allow businesses to make smarter decisions and formulate competitive strategies based on highly credible and timely insights.

When it comes to accurately identifying skill strengths and gaps in a team, many organizations struggle. Typically these decisions are gut-driven rather than based in analytics, and as a result, they often aren’t as effective as they could be. While many organizations want these decisions to be more data-based, it’s not uncommon for them to not know how or where to pull the data needed to create the most successful teams possible.

Page-turners, cluttered slides, click Next to continue, and complex menus. These are all words and phrases that you’ll often hear when your users and colleagues discuss what’s frustrating about eLearning. If your users can’t easily navigate through your content or can’t find what they need exactly when they need it, that means they can miss some, or even all, of your important content. The good news is, you can calm that clutter and inconsistency with great UI design.

Technology continues to advance rapidly, changing how we live and interact with the world around us. Today’s learning professionals face the challenge of staying ahead of this curve and tracking the technologies that are shaping the future of organizational learning, while at the same time recognizing technologies that may be more of a passing fad.

There has been a lot of hype around games for learning. As a result, games are increasingly used in L&D, but many of these games simply target low-level learning using frames such as Jeopardy or Concentration and have only had minimal impact. There is a need to maximize the value from this approach, and to do this you need to design games that support learning objectives and apply proven instructional methods. And to do this well, you need to understand what the research says about the instructional value of games.

There is some debate about whether personas (or learner profiles, as they’re more commonly known in L&D) are a help or a hindrance. Some argue that personas can end up being a representation of what designers wish their users were like, rather than a true reflection of the users, or that they create distance between designers and users. But others push back on this idea, stating that—when used thoughtfully—personas can increase your empathy for the people you’re designing for, allowing you to keep your work tightly focused on the real needs of your audience and to craft the most effective experiences for them.

The cost of copyright confusion can affect every stage of the development and delivery process. How much does fear or avoidance inform your decision-making when it comes to finding and using online media? Have you missed out on using fabulous free resources because you weren’t (or your organization wasn’t) sure whether you had the rights to use them? Have you seen others accidentally infringe on someone else’s work because of a misunderstanding about fair use? Copyright can seem like a daunting or boring topic to learn—but it doesn’t have to be.

More and more people are learning online, independently and at different times. However, in much of the knowledge transfer that occurs, the “learning” is still passed from person to person through social learning. But in L&D it’s not enough to simply bring people together, facilitate learning, and hope for the best. You’ll want to know whether this social learning is effective and how it impacts performance on the job.

U.S. News and World Report named alternative credentials one of the top five education trends to watch in 2017. IBM and Microsoft are leading this trend by offering career-oriented training and learning pathways, as an alternative to traditional universities and in partnership with universities worldwide. Learners who demonstrate knowledge and competency earn open badges that are easily shared to job sites and professional networks like LinkedIn.

Organizational learning is increasingly becoming a blend of multiple assets from a wide variety of resources. How do you combine YouTube videos, a learning vendor course, an SME white paper and PowerPoint, an internal presentation recording, conference proceedings, and other resources into an effective learner experience that you can track and report on? The simple answer is to use a learning stack with a content aggregation front end. But what does that mean?

Caterpillar has a proud history of working with independent dealers to distribute and service its machinery and equipment. However, delivering consistent customer service through a network of global dealers is a huge challenge. Recognizing the need to focus on people development, they decided to build a technology ecosystem that would modernize dealer learning and development on mobile, provide seamless collaboration and communication, and supply real-time data and insights.

Screencasting is a great way to deliver software training, but that’s not the only use for this approach to multimedia creation. What about using it to create internal production resources by documenting your own development processes? Or how about leveraging it to create other video resources, like a reusable eLearning asset library? There is a wide range of other uses for screencasting that you may never have thought of, and incorporating these uses can make a real difference in your daily workflow.

Audiences today expect richer multimedia in their online experiences. As a result, it seems like producing videos, podcasts, animation, interactive video, or some other sort of multimedia is on every eLearning team’s mind. However, few are ready to launch into production without first building their knowledge about producing effective multimedia, much less submit a request for video and audio equipment or software without having a good plan in place.

Shrinking budgets and constrained resources have made it more important than ever to make the most of the resources you have when designing learning experiences. Thankfully, the increasing availability of cloud-based applications and other free tools makes it easier than ever to create and develop learning experiences that don’t have to cost a bundle.

Who cares how many people attended your training? No, really, who cares? If someone does, then it’s an important metric. However, your stakeholder is probably more interested in behavior change: How much did the employee apply what they learned to their job, and how has performance improved?

When you ask people about their top three roadblocks when trying to create engaging eLearning, one of them is always budgetary constraints. Instructional designers often have bigger ideas than their budgets will allow. This has certainly been my experience, but over the years, I’ve found ways to get around this by using free and low-cost resources and good old-fashioned DIY.

Companies are always looking for innovative methods to convey training content. Particularly in professional roles where training is costly, complicated, or even dangerous, there is a strong need for technology-enabled training that’s easily repeatable and cost-effective. Scalability is just part of the puzzle—content also needs to be designed for accuracy, immersion, and efficacy so that trainers can provide impactful training experiences with high fidelity to the actual task.

Not all games are created equal, and preparation of instructional content for games is an important consideration. How can you (in practical terms) harness the positive attributes of games, including the fun of play, to produce effective and efficient learning?

Many instructional designers and trainers are stuck in the rut of event-driven learning, whether that means eLearning courses, face-to-face sessions, or virtual training sessions. You probably know that varied, spaced learning delivers better results, but many people find it hard to put this into action.

Many people have helpful information to share with others, but the idea of writing a book can seem overwhelming. Even if the writing itself is something you are confident about, the “getting published” part can be difficult. Working with major publication companies is challenging and takes a lot of time; by the time a published book gets out into the world, some information might even be out of date!

Keeping training assets current with a constant cycle of releases is a significant drain on resources. Release notes must be scoured for changes, and corresponding workflows identified and prioritized by customer impact, before training content can be updated. This session is a case study of the tools and procedures developed by the product education team at athenahealth to automate this process and more efficiently update assets affected by each release.

Onboarding shouldn’t be an impersonal and disconnected experience. But today’s workforce is diverse and often dispersed globally, making it difficult for new employees to feel connected. At HDR, an engineering firm, new employees felt isolated and unable to make meaningful connections during onboarding. The result was a lack of engagement and motivation to complete required training. HDR needed a way to build connectivity and accountability into learning and onboarding.

The role of the learning developer is expanding in scope and responsibility. Today’s learning professionals need to know how to deliver useful content at the time of need. They have to take into account the complete user experience, including user context, device capabilities and limitations, mobile interface design, and audience personas. How does a developer know the best tools to create solutions that translate into a memorable user experience?

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.

As with any team effort, course development projects have specific players with specific functions designed to work cohesively toward one objective: satisfactorily completing on time within budget. It never fails, however, that a new requirement sneaks in at the goal line, forcing designers to scramble for time and resources. What if you could strategize an offense that converts potential obstacles into assets?

Digital learning has arrived, but the learning community is still playing catch-up. When looking at where the L&D industry is going in the future, you need to address two key strategic questions: How can digital learning demonstrate greater value to learners and the business, and how do L&D professionals need to adjust their approaches to learning in order to deliver that greater value through digital learning?

Stories have the power to move people. They allow the storyteller to forge a personal connection with the audience and create a situation where promoting learning and inspiration becomes infinitely easier. At their core, stories create a world where learners are interested, are engaged, and want to learn, which leads to higher retention of information and better understanding of concepts and ideas. But how do you design a good story?

What separates amateur video from professionally shot and edited video presentations? Many in eLearning would be quick to blame small budgets and lack of equipment for less-than-professional video. However, the real problem is that many who shoot, composite, or produce video for learning aren’t visually literate. In other words, they don’t know the basics of visual design and how to apply it to the video medium.

Adobe Captivate is a commonly used tool, but a surprising number of its features are just a bit hidden and not well known. The layers of sophistication these features add can enable you to save a lot of time, deliver more engaging and personalized learning, and tap into resources more easily. It’s just a matter of knowing where these features are and how to use them effectively.

xAPI shouldn’t be fear-inducing, and it isn’t! You can use HTML and JavaScript to create statements to send to a learning record store (LRS). With a little input, practice, and feedback, you’ll learn how easy it is to use HTML and JavaScript to move your organization faster toward the future of measurable experiences.

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.

Internal audit reports and consumer research revealed that employees of Turkey’s largest private bank, Isbank, needed support to improve customer service for a wide range of retail banking products and services. For Isbank’s learning team, the challenge was finding an engaging, effective, and easily accessible learning solution on detailed, complicated topics for a geographically dispersed and demographically diverse workforce.

The former state of onboarding for investment professionals lacked content and delivery flexibility in order to meet the needs of many variables in the onboarding process. The new program provides flexibility to allow for optimal learning effectiveness in moving the new associates to productivity as rapidly as possible.

Find the sweet spot of learner engagement by combining the bite-sized power of microlearning with the motivating effect of digital badges. By chunking your content to create microlearning-style tutorials and using digital badges to reward learners and mark their achievements, you will increase learner persistence and success in your online courses!

Your client has just asked you to design an engaging eLearning course. The content will be a challenge, which you like. You quickly come up with a vision for the course: interactive, applicable, fun. You know instantly this course will be your showpiece, an award winner. Then the client says, “We need it to be accessible.” Your dream is dashed as you anticipate extra work and no engagement. But it doesn’t have to be that way!

L&D professionals work hard to create great training and are disappointed when employees fail to learn. It may be tempting to blame the students, but L&D efforts usually fail because they don’t understand the mind of the learner. As a result, you may build training modules that are not consistent with the brain’s natural means of acquisition. Teaching can be more effective once you understand how the learner’s mind operates.

As learners go mobile, demand for learning on phones has increased. Yet options for delivering a responsive, mobile-first, and interactive experience have been limited—until now! Join this interactive session to learn how two organizations embrace an open-source tool to develop elegant, impactful, and engaging learning. Learn how to take advantage of technology, “Adapt” your approach to design and development, and embrace best practices for interactive mobile learning.

Why do you do what you do? Who are you trying to train, and why should they be there? The answer goes way beyond corporate compliance or skill-building initiatives. The answer lies deep beneath the surface in the hearts and minds of the people you are trying to train. But how do you find out what motivates them and how to help them succeed?

Is the LMS dead? Can a combination of today’s mobile apps, social interactions, and game-enabled microlearning replace yesterday’s “macrolearning” platforms? Do training programs need to be so structured and prescriptive when modern adaptive approaches are now a reality? The ever-evolving educational technology landscape presents more choices than ever, but finding the right solution in the deep and wide pool of possibility is no longer a game.

With a direct service delivery (DSD) national workforce that ranges from tenured employees to those just entering the workforce, Farmer Brothers—a national coffee roaster, wholesaler, and distributor—had to identify how to optimize, standardize, and streamline sales training across a diverse, geographically dispersed team. The company addressed how to preserve its legacy of great customer service while simultaneously upskilling employees’ ability to sell additional products.

L&D professionals often think about one single training program only, instead of looking at the entire journey their learners take. Mapping out the learner life cycle and assigning content that engages them along the way not only helps create unforgettable learning experiences and drive individual performance, but also helps with the transfer of knowledge after a training session ends.

Many instructional designers and training specialists find themselves in the position of creating print-ready learning materials on short notice and no budget. Depending on available technologies, content knowledge, and access to a graphic designer, this can be a daunting task. Plus, most approaches used to create training-on-the-go are flat and forgettable. What if there’s another option for designing print-ready learning materials in a short amount of time for memorable learning?

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.