Adult learning principles state that adults learn best when content is relevant. So why do most virtual classroom lessons rely on lectures and slides? One of the most effective ways to ensure learning sticks is by getting learners involved, and scenario-based learning design does just that. Join this session to discover ideas for producing appropriate scenarios that resonate with your learners in the virtual classroom.

For decades, there was only one dominant learning platform that most training departments used: the learning management system (LMS). However, in recent years the learning platforms landscape has expanded. Not only have LMSs evolved over time, but additional platforms—such as LRSs, LXPs, and more—are also growing in functionality and popularity for learning and performance. This makes an organization’s decision on learning platforms much more complex, as it’s no longer a discussion of which platform, but which suite of platforms will meet an organization’s needs.

Imagine your worst eLearning nightmare, a dry compliance course. Boring! Is it a talking PowerPoint with a next button and a quiz at the end? Extra boring! Unfortunately, simply chopping a boring course into bite-sized modules doesn’t make it any better. But most struggle to break the cycle because they don’t know how to. How do you make a boring topic fun? Where do you even start?

Too often when you’re rushed or don’t have time, you may put your next project out to bid without including the critical information to help your outside resources provide an accurate estimate for what is actually needed. This may lead to misunderstandings, changes in scope, and higher costs.

Technology is advancing faster than humans can keep pace. Organizations are investing in hundreds of technologies to transform their business, leaving employees overwhelmed and unengaged. Despite heavy investment in training solutions to bridge the gap, the cost to produce these materials is high, speed to market is low, and the impact is suboptimal. Learning practitioners passionate about effective digital adoption can seize this challenge to elevate into a new role.

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 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.

When designing learning games, there is a tendency to overcomplicate gameplay and overshadow the learning objectives. Designers often focus on complex rules of play, convoluted UX, and using too many game mechanic elements. One L&D team was tasked to create two engaging games for new-hire orientation. Where do they start, what are the learning objectives, and how can game mechanics align with learning objectives?

According to Time magazine, leaders at IBM and other large technology firms project that the future of the digital revolution will be about both social networks and knowledge: “The next phase is not about the network alone, but also about knowledge.” If you believe that this projection is accurate, what role will L&D play? Are there approaches or solutions you can use now to support this ongoing transformation?

There are many new web services available from Google and Amazon: image recognition, text to speech, voice to text, real-time data, and more. These services are inexpensive (some are free) and have the potential to make your course more engaging and effective. But how do you incorporate them into your course?

Augmented reality, virtual reality, and similar technologies are useful for teaching complex skills. But how do you know if your users are getting the most out of these experiences? A benefit of these technologies is being able to measure the acquisition of knowledge and skills without needing smile sheets or paper tests. Performance data collected through these technologies can provide a more comprehensive picture of learning outcomes.

Imagine you’re a new hire. From applying for your job to your first day it feels like you’ve interacted with 100 people. Learning and development is preparing to host an orientation, and so is your new team, both groups delivering different messages and experiences. At Booz Allen, L&D was delivering orientation, not onboarding, and the business was experiencing an unacceptable level of attrition. A new approach was needed.

Everyone knows that person who has a heavy footstep, a booming laugh, or talks way too loud, and it always seems to be magnified when recording audio. Often you’re working in less-than-ideal environments, trying to make the best of what you’ve got, and you don’t always have time or tools for editing. When you don’t have a professional studio to record audio, the struggle is very real.

As a learning professional, your project budgets may be shrinking. You’re being asked to do more with less. Do you ever wish you had a library of free or low-cost tools at your fingertips? Now you can! There are plenty of free or low-cost tools available if you know where to look.

You’ve probably heard of bitcoin and how early adopters suddenly became millionaires by investing in this cryptocurrency. The underlying technology is called the “blockchain,” and this specific technology has the potential to shake up a lot of industries, including L&D and HR. However, for a lot of people, blockchain remains a mystery. What is blockchain? And how could it eventually affect learning and development?

Adobe Captivate 2017 provides eLearning content creators many interactive tools, but accessibility often takes a back seat to interactivity. In December 2017, a development team was tasked with making a series of interactive presentations accessible to screen readers when they were informed a student with blindness had been enrolled for the upcoming term.

A growing number of learners use mobile devices to take their eLearning courses. While modern authoring tools make creating responsive content easier than ever, testing it is cumbersome at best. You must take into account a growing number of screen sizes and form factors, test how your interactions translate to a touch screen, account for limited bandwidth, etc., while having access to a limited number of testing devices.

Microlearning is really hot right now. You may be getting pressure to “go micro” on your projects. Or maybe you are already using microlearning but question whether it’s really instructionally sound. To resolve these issues, you need to have a clear understanding of microlearning use cases, and how to use microlearning to bring the greatest value to your learning programs.

The two goals of any training program are to teach employees new information and then to enable them to transfer their new knowledge into their workplace. But learning transfer is a complex process, and most trainers do not understand the simple steps that they can take to ensure that knowledge transfers from the computer where it is learned to the workplace where it is needed.

Every training department has to begin somewhere. Canned content can save time and money while providing a ready supply of material, especially for a newly developed program. At CTG, pre-purchased content built the base of a program but left a gap between the company’s needs and what was readily available. They needed to leverage that library of content against the principles and practices of instructional design to create engaging training.

Many organizations struggle through the LMS RFP process, suffer low user adoption rates, and are at a loss for how to correct the situation or how to have prevented it. What if there was a way to simplify the RFP and demo process and increase user adoption? To align your LMS with your organization’s culture and learning environment, and to ultimately learn to love and understand your LMS?

First it was a curiosity. The curiosity grew into a fad, and then into a genuine trend. Now it’s a necessity. eLearning long ago left the experimental or pilot stage and is now a mainstream method of training and education. Everyone is doing it. But are they doing it well?

As adoption of xAPI begins to take hold, it allows for more robust and interesting tracking of the learning process. As actual performance and results data are integrated with learning metrics, designers will have the necessary data to tailor the learning process to individual needs at the same time that they can draw more useful conclusions about learning as a whole across a wider population.

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.

If you’ve ever wondered why video games skyrocket in adoption, it’s because they’re created with a complex behavioral science foundation and psychology behind the scenes. For L&D professionals, these same principles can become practice through gamification, allowing you to take your initiatives to the next level. But before blindly jumping on the new, shiny-toy bandwagon, it’s important to understand what a successful gamification strategy entails and how to ultimately drive behavior change.

There’s a common myth that responsive design means shrinking to fit. It doesn’t! And that’s only the start of the misconceptions then applied to eLearning. The truth is, many designers have several courses that aren’t responsive or are merely paying lip service to being so. You need to start converting them now, otherwise you’re frustrating a huge group of your learners. But where do you start?

Thanks to learning technology like Articulate Storyline, you are now able to simulate activities normally performed in person, such as role-playing scenarios for learners. But at what cost? What is lost from the learning experience when learners don’t interact with one another in person? What if, instead of “replacing” these in-person activities using technology, you instead “enhanced” them using technology? Using near-field communication technology, now you can.

Development programs are often measured though goals and end-of-year reviews, leaving little or no opportunity for coaching or on-the-job training to develop leadership competencies. Opportunities exist to coach and develop leadership competencies daily, but the gap is unidentifiable without any assessment or observation.

Interactive video often has a wow factor that’s hard to deny. What’s critical for L&D, though, is thinking beyond the wow factor to ensure interactive video truly supports learning and performance improvement. Interactive video offers a range of design models, each with different strengths. Understanding how to align those strengths to different learning needs simplifies your design process, reduces development costs, and produces the best results for your organization.

In this session, The eLearning Guild’s director of research, Jane Bozarth, along with writers of recent research, reviews the Guild’s most recent reports on learning styles, learning platforms, and blended learning. We’ll look at what’s happening—or not happening—industry-wide, with an emphasis on what works, such as what factors support success and what content lends itself best to particular approaches.

How often do you source a near-perfect image that you want to manipulate to meet your needs, but don’t know how? Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop are powerful tools for manipulating and creating images and design assets, yet many eLearning designers find them intimidating to approach. Rather than a shotgun approach to learning how to use the software, eLearning designers need to target the tricks that best work for them!

Why are most presentations so bad? Truly terrible? They’re too wordy, text-based, and generally dull. They don’t tell stories that engage, excite, or inspire. And they generally do little to actually help people learn. They are linear and non-responsive, with no interaction—pretty much everything you know doesn’t work to convey information effectively. Few people enjoy creating, delivering, or watching PowerPoint presentations, but that can change.

Augmented reality (AR) is a widely used technology in games, marketing, and everyday apps, but what about learning and development? Where do you get started? Where do you use it? How should you use it? Finding answers to these questions can cause developers to overlook the potential this technology holds and just how easy, effective, and affordable it can be to get started.

Today’s networked businesses must contend with unprecedented levels of complexity and variety. Business simulations provide active, dynamic learning solutions where learners can replicate realistic business environments as safe-to-fail spaces, so learners can authentically model complex, long-term challenges and improve their performance without any real risk. Managing the conceptual and technical load of creating gamified simulations can be its own challenge—but this session will show you how it’s done.

As expectations rise for the impact you create, but the timeline for creating impact becomes shorter, it can feel like you’re scrambling to find newer and better approaches to design. From waterfall to agile to design thinking, there’s no shortage of methodologies to choose from, but how do you know which is right? Is waterfall bad? Does agile equate to speed and design thinking to engagement? Does it matter?

In order to meet compliance training requirements, many organizations subject their workforce to isolated training events. Organizations choose this approach based on regulations that mandate training in specific topics, but this does not translate into the workforce understanding the mandated behavior associated with these topics. This approach persists because training engagements are easy to track and serve as evidence for compliance even though they are not viewed as particularly effective.

In 2017, 73 percent of L&D respondents to a client survey cited “application to real work” as an important characteristic of leadership development programs, particularly as related to mid-level management. And yet many L&D practitioners do not have a clear path to providing ways for their learners to apply their new knowledge and skills on the job. This session will share best practices for integrating learning with real work.

Training alone does not drive performance—it contributes only to potential. Performance does not manifest until learners become performers at their point-of-work (PoW). This means that learning needs to converge with work, and doing this effectively requires holistic learning and performance assessments at the PoW. These evolved discovery methods then require enhanced performance consulting skills and tactics to enable L&D solutions that are agile and responsive.

Often, when companies are faced with an issue or problem, the solution they lean toward is training. With training being a billion-dollar industry, companies invest large amounts of capital in the development of their employees. One aspect that is often neglected, however, is measuring the impact of the training on the employees and the company.

You are struggling to find ways to increase sales within your organization through learning design. Every minute a salesperson is away from selling costs the company money. You need fast, effective, and impactful models of how to develop sales training that works.

You’ve started using live-action video at work. Perhaps you’ve used it in the past but weren’t happy with the results. If this is you, you’ll agree that using live action to tell a story with the goal of educating the viewer is challenging. A video can just as easily distract or confuse as it can inspire and educate. And it can be expensive to get it wrong!

A recent survey by Donald H. Taylor, chairman of the Learning and Performance Institute, revealed that enterprise collaboration is falling out of favor with L&D. Forrester Research has shown that roughly 80 percent of enterprise social platform implementations fail. In recent years, social technology has fractured into social intranets, enterprise social networks, and chat platforms. What are we to make of this? Has social lost its way? Have expectations been overinflated? Should L&D let go … or do more?

Getting bored with standard Adobe Captivate advanced actions and states? Dive deep into a case study of layered advanced actions and states in a real-world Captivate project. The project has overlay navigation screens, branching sections, and multi-screen knowledge checks. You will learn the benefits and challenges of each part, as well as how they might work in your projects.

When you move toward designing and delivering mobile learning experiences, many common questions come up. How do you shrink a complex, computer-based, live learning experience down to mobile size for learners on the go? How can you teach nuanced, sophisticated soft skills to a senior-level audience using a mobile platform? What’s different and challenging about designing mobile courseware?

In the 2017 LinkedIn Learning Workplace Report, employers reported leadership skills were crucial. Yet when it comes to developing skills, many current offerings teach what to do but lack practice in how to do it. Learners may try role-plays or pre-recorded simulations, but are you truly moving the needle on performance? In light of shrinking budgets, limited time, and lack of effectiveness, how can you demonstrate impactful gains at scale?

Learning happens all around us and in all different forms. You want to reach your target audience in as many ways and as simply as possible. You also face budget limitations, internal IT roadblocks, and enterprises architecture or purchasing challenges.

It is no secret that personalized content is more relevant and engaging. Engaging a network of different people in a world saturated with content requires organizations to deliver relevant and personalized information at the right time, in the right place. Travel technology behemoth Amadeus needed to engage and connect a network of 1 million people. The team needed to renew their learning and development strategy and get everyone onboard.

Face-to-face learning events (meetings, onboarding, team-building, ILT courses, etc.) are often confined to a closed space like a training room. What if you could go beyond the room without leaving the physical space? What if you wanted the org chart, or the company history on the wall, to come alive? What if you could augment reality with meaningful clues to collect in order to solve a puzzle? With low budget?

In the past few years, voice user experiences—like Alexa, Google, Cortana, and Siri—are becoming as prolific as laptops, smartphones, and tablets. Learning professionals need to start exploring ways to effectively incorporate voice technology into the learning ecosystem. Designing for voice interaction can be intimidating because the tech is so new. How do you translate your existing skills in order to create engaging voice learner experiences?

Have you ever been offered unsolicited advice? If so, you know that advice received before you’re ready falls on deaf ears. The same thing happens at work when training is offered before the need is clear. The need for change is like a journey that your reluctant heroes face. Knowing the phases of this journey helps you plan for guidance at the right time. Everyone knows that the Hero’s Journey is a tool for writing good fiction stories, but what if it could be modified to accommodate common models of conflict resolution?

You know that most media—including eLearning—is failing at representation. You see it every day. And not only is it leaving people out of the picture, it’s less effective as a result. Maybe you’ve tried to make your work more inclusive but haven’t been able to find great media, haven’t been able to convince your stakeholders, or simply aren’t confident in navigating how to respectfully represent different genders, ethnicities, orientations, and abilities.

Content curation is rapidly becoming an essential skill for learning professionals, but many have yet to take the step of putting it into practice. This session will arm you with an understanding of how curation helps both you and your organization, along with the tools and techniques you’ll need to craft your own personalized curation system. It’s time to make curation a central part of your digital learning toolkit.

The world is gripped by accelerated change, and the need to learn and adapt is taking center stage; yet ironically, L&D professionals continue to struggle for relevance and impact. Instead of being sought-after business partners, practitioners are often marginalized as order-takers for narrow training solutions. The challenge is one of urgent relevance as L&D must quickly learn and adapt to better enable the future of work.

You’ve signed the contract for your new LMS, but the hard work is only beginning. It’s time to think like a marketer. How can you get everyone at your company to adopt this new software? How can you help employees to think of learning as happening outside of the classroom?

For so long, learning has been one-sided. Everyone gets the same course and same content, no matter what they have already learned or experienced. xAPI gives you greater details and insights into what the learner does, but where do you go from there? How do you adjust and change content based on learners’ xAPI history?

Gamification is the integration of game mechanics, or game dynamics, into a learning experience, while game-based training can be defined as a game designed for the purpose of solving a problem. However, these words are being used in parallel by the industry, and it can be quite confusing. This session will explain the key differences and definitions that can assist practitioners in ensuring they use the wording appropriately.

Searching for new ways to present content in eLearning is an ongoing challenge for most designers. Animation effects beyond the typical require deeper thought in design, and often involve additional storyboarding. Barriers to learning new animation software result in some designers not pursuing a more engaging approach than typical animation effects. With new smartphone cameras, available apps, and software, you can dramatically reduce those barriers to get started with stop-motion animation.

Can you count how many times eLearning developers on your team have re-created the same button? That time really adds up. You want to create high-quality custom solutions, but they tend to take up lots of time. You’ve adopted templates, but they just don’t cut it for all of your users’ needs. What if you could create custom, cohesive, accessible, and high-quality learning experiences in half the time?

Technology has shaped much of the world of education and training for decades. Understanding the role technology plays in our work is critical as technology continues to advance and become even more embedded into our work. Being prepared for this emerging world won’t be easy and will require an understanding of where we’ve been, where we are, and where we are headed.

Choosing the right learning technology is a daunting task. A bad decision could cost an organization immeasurable time and money, not to mention the negative impact on talent development. Research shows that nearly half of organizations are looking to choose another technology provider. Whether the system is lacking features, is hard to use, or simply appears outdated, companies want a change.

Are your files weighing you down? Do your courses no longer fit on your mobile device? Are you embarrassed by unsightly buffering? It’s time to put your files on a diet, following tried-and-true best practices. In less time than a juice cleanse, you can have the course of your dreams.

It’s no secret the marketing industry is investing millions on emerging technology to change people’s behavior. What can L&D learn from their endeavors? How can you capitalize on their success and failures to design learning solutions that incorporate their best practices and are truly effective?

For years, eLearning tools have been based on a PowerPoint-slide paradigm. However, to be truly device independent, courses need to be responsive and use a webpage style. Articulate Rise provides an easy-to-implement solution that encourages microlearning. This session will discuss using Rise to implement a full, 35-module curriculum that is both responsive and delivered in microlearning-sized chunks. Challenges and solutions will be highlighted.

To some, variables may be an unknown function in Articulate Storyline. Many haven’t had the opportunity to use variables, or have been confused by variables and what they are capable of adding to the learning experience. Whatever the reason for pleading ignorance, this session has it covered!

Unity and Unreal Engine create high-quality VR experiences, while AR learning usually requires building an app. A lightweight way to create VR and AR experiences is needed for quicker turnarounds and lower costs.

Most L&D teams are keenly interested in exploring ways to combine their macrolearning needs—traditional ILT classes and VILT sessions, tracked online learning, and structured compliance programs—with microlearning initiatives leveraging mobile, game mechanics, and social interactions. While most legacy LMS platforms have yet to include compelling microlearning features, there are ways to design and integrate legacy macrolearning platforms with modern microlearning solutions to achieve tech-enhanced learning success.

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.

Each day, you are exposed to various forms of media, marketing, and design all geared to grab your attention. Specific techniques are used in almost everything you interact with to draw you to the next item, scroll down, click here or there, and to make that purchase, watch that video, look at that picture. Adopting these techniques and implementing them into your eLearning designs can have a similar engaging impact on learners.

Digital transformation is the push for most L&D organizations. But what does it really mean? Just because you are leveraging digital technology to develop learning assets doesn’t necessarily mean you are working in a digital way. In many ways, today’s L&D is still “analog,” leveraging the latest technology but traditional methodologies and working culture. You may need to not only transform your tool set, but also your mindset and how you work.

Managing learning projects, even small ones, can be a complex endeavor for learning professionals attempting to bring their courses to life. By incorporating appropriate project management principles, instructional designers can create a smooth process for all stakeholders involved in designing and developing learning products to submit project deliverables on time.

xAPI holds enormous promise for bringing data-driven decision-making to the practitioner’s level—if you can make it happen in your organization. Countless sessions attempt to address how xAPI data can assist with ROI, but few outline an actual implementation of xAPI from the ground up. So what does a real xAPI implementation story look like, and what lessons can you learn from it to inform your own use of xAPI?

Organizations are increasingly using serious games in their learning, development, and assessment activities. But designing and developing custom serious games requires a different set of skills than traditional eLearning creation. What skills do you and your team need to create successful serious games, and what people will you need to partner with in order to have a smooth development process?

As an instructional designer or developer, do you have skills that you don’t use in your nine-to-five job? Do you want to try something new, but feel stuck in the day-to-day grind? You want to be your own boss, choose your own projects, set your own hours, and remove the daily commute, but you’re not sure how to make the leap, or you worry about how you’ll make ends meet. Sound like you?

In a landscape of increasing video creation, many learning professionals are approaching video without formal training. This is an amazing opportunity and challenge that brings with it the need to understand what can make videos not work. And while video has gotten easier to create, it’s just as easy (if not easier) to make a bad video. This session will look at seven “gotchas” that video creators should know about.

If you got the chance to walk around experiencing the world as a retired person, would that change your financial planning in the present? If you got to have firsthand experience of being a patient, could that change how you treat patients? If you were able to experience the results of a major safety catastrophe, would that make you safer in your daily work life?

Education, training, and even learning itself is changing. As technology advances, the shift towards learning and development initiatives that require engineering support is growing at an ever-increasing speed. The increased need for engineering skills within learning and development will be a major disruption in the near future, one filled with both challenges and opportunities.

It’s a request you may have received from company leaders: “Create training that doesn’t take employees away from the work they are paid to do.” At first, this might seem as if the eLearning and instructor-led classes you’ve developed aren’t valued. But wait. You know that many valuable learning experiences are rooted in performing actual tasks. Could it be that this request is actually steering you toward better solutions?

The many ways to measure the business impact of learning are becoming increasingly sophisticated, yet many L&D professionals are struggling to even get started. Marketing departments are increasingly adept at measuring their contribution to financial performance, but why are we so much slower at proving our worth?L&D increasingly has to justify its existence, so how do we rise to the challenge?

In 2016, the first iteration of this session explored seven aspects of emergent and innovative technology. This rolling session will be an update on that—seeing what has emerged, what has strengthened, and what has fallen by the wayside. Participants will look to the future: What will impact organizational learning in a three- to five-year time frame? What should be on your agenda right now?

Using animation and motion in a Storyline course, when done well, can be a tremendous asset to the visual voice of your course. When not done well, however, it can be quite the distraction. So how can you know what animations and motions will work well in different situations and how to develop them in Storyline?

When you’re getting started designing an eLearning experience, it’s easy to get stalled at this stage by the sheer volume of possibilities for what you can create, especially if you don’t feel visual design is a strength. But a humble sketch on a whiteboard with a red marker can still become a brilliant eLearning interaction. At its heart, eLearning is a visual medium, so starting with drawing will result in an entirely different outcome.

The cost of copyright confusion can affect every stage of the development and delivery process. Copyright law can be intimidating, even though its intent is to encourage creativity. Break down the walls that prevent you or your organization from using fabulous free resources because you aren’t sure whether your use will infringe someone else’s rights. Make fair use your friend. Access thousands of free photos, videos, music, and motion graphics.

A lot is known about how people learn and develop skills. Cognitive science research on learning, behavior change, and development of expertise has provided a wealth of information. Unfortunately, much of that wisdom is locked in journal articles and dense books, so designers of learning experiences often rely on traditional methods that may or may not be supported by science.

Throughout the history of training, learning something new has often been treated as an event rather than a process. However, practitioners now know that eLearning, videos, and instructor-led training are only the beginning. To be effective, you need ways to support your workforce over time, building their competence through multiple approaches.

Morningstar is built around serving individuals—both by helping them reach great financial outcomes and by providing outstanding customer service. Morningstar partnered with an online community platform to modernize the support experience, provide greater transparency around product development, and enable its customers to connect with each other. This session shares that journey with you, so you can know what’s ahead if you choose this option for surfacing and supplementing more traditional eLearning.

While organizations have started to recognize the importance of including practice in their learning programs, one of the most critical aspects of practice—feedback—has been an overlooked aspect of performance improvement. Feedback is challenging, as most feedback depends on critique, and an organization’s culture can impact how comfortable employees are in providing and receiving feedback.

Do the executives who fund learning and development care how many courses you have? Or how many students? Or the number of class hours you’ve delivered? Actually, they may react negatively to those numbers. Most of the time, when people are in training their productivity is zero. The key question is how to get to Level 4 and measure actual impact.

There’s a lot of buzz around gamification, and plenty of confusion about what it really means to gamify a corporate training or eLearning program. One thing is clear: It’s much more than just adding badges to your training. It’s about finding the right motivators for your audience and promoting the desired actions or skill sets without getting bogged down in meaningless measurements and mechanics.

You’ve been handed the same old content, and the thought of creating the same old learning experience makes you sad. Worry not! You can transform that tired content into an engaging eLearning experience by applying powerful storytelling and graphic design techniques. You will leave your learners wondering where that new course came from. When they ask, just tell them you put your visuals to work.

As gamified learning transforms the L&D field in positive ways, it also brings along the challenges of game development: design problems, feature creep, troublesome timeline estimation, and project crunch. Game developers often say, “Making games is hard.” This is an understatement. What if there were a fun way to learn how to manage these pitfalls by investing as little as a few days, prototyping innovative eLearning along the way?

While many companies are experimenting with AR in the L&D space, there are a number of businesses harnessing the power of AR for enhancing operational performance outside of the training department. How do these experiences differ, and how can you renew your department’s focus on performance by taking on more advanced AR solutions in your efforts?

Articulate Storyline can be used to create simple and functional interfaces and user applications when you mix in the power of APIs. You can use this tool in unexpected ways to create solutions most wouldn’t expect you could make with a rapid eLearning development tool. It’s easier than you might imagine to learn how Storyline can talk to API-enabled systems.

You’ve captured a video yourself or been given one to publish, but it isn’t perfect. There might be artifacts in the video that you want to hide, or you may want to showcase a feature that the video skipped. The action on the screen might not sync with the audio, or the audio itself might be bad. You could re-record the entire video—or you could fix it using some handy editing tricks.

Learning is a vital part of individual and organizational success, but traditional methods of instruction are falling flat. Today’s learners not only want, but expect, consumer-grade learning experiences—not only regarding content, but accessibility of information and sophistication of learning interfaces. Now, L&D professionals are being tasked with creating learning and training ecosystems that provide information at the point of need and meet the on-demand workflow of today’s professionals.

Training teams are too commonly asked to do more than their resources allow. Training executives are left scrambling to tackle the challenge of servicing a complex organization with learners spanning different geographies, job functions, and development needs. While the recent investment boom in learning technologies has started to scale capacity, it still can feel like it’s not enough, leaving training executives searching for better solutions.

Adobe Captivate is a great tool for developing eLearning courses. However, many seasoned developers have hit walls as they want more functionality than what’s available. Adding JavaScript will open many more doors, but it can be a daunting task. Coding can be overwhelming and difficult to grasp. Even if you have an understanding in JavaScript, knowing where to place the code in Captivate can be a challenge.

Stakeholders typically want their courses fast, cheap, and good. And if you jump too quickly into developing slides, it can cost you extra time down the road—especially when they come back with change requests.

Communities of practice have been around since humans started using stories to share knowledge and information. People instinctively rely on the expertise of their social and professional networks to solve problems and learn new things—it’s practically in our collective DNA. Why, then, do countless attempts to create and cultivate communities of practice in the workplace either lose momentum or fail to get off the ground altogether?

Too much of instructional design is about what to do, rather than why. And there’s the small problem that when push comes to shove—when the answers aren’t obvious, or when recommendations collide—you need a basis for deciding. That basis is a deeper understanding of the cognitive science behind learning. It’s not rocket science, but it is more complex than “post content and ask quiz questions.”

Whether it’s an online meeting, a presentation via webinar, or live online training, engagement is the main question on everyone’s mind. Interaction is the answer to engagement, and leveraging the features of the platform you use is the answer to interaction. However, the features alone do not engage participants. It is what you choose to do with those features that will make the difference in your next virtual training, webinar, or meeting.

Tighter budgets, smaller L&D teams, and an increasing number of learning requests. You can’t do more with less. Or can you? L&D needs a new approach—and one that can be built in-house by leveraging internal expertise. What if there were an option for L&D to put the employees at the center of the learning ecosystem and enable them to drive and self-serve their training needs?

As a training manager or instructional designer, have you found yourself on the outside looking in when business decisions are made? Do you have a seat at the table when business strategy is discussed within your organization? Are you in the unenviable position of reacting to others’ decisions regarding employee training rather than influencing or leading the conversation? That doesn’t have to stop you from changing the situation and becoming a true business partner who can help drive strategy.

You have a conceptual understanding of xAPI but don’t know how to graduate from playing with xAPI to using it for serious business. How do you handle security? Can you be confident that systems work together in a trustworthy fashion? What is a profile, and how does it allow for consistent meaning-making? This session will provide a 201 for xAPI so you can kick off your first project with confidence.

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.

It’s not uncommon for people in L&D to have to take on some, if not all, of the visual design of their projects. It’s also not uncommon for those same people to not have a background in visual design. So what can you do if you know you want to use design more effectively in your projects but you just aren’t sure where to start?

Learning designers tend to wear many hats: project manager, instructional designer, video creator and editor, game designer, eLearning developer, technology troubleshooter, graphic designer, and marketing guru, just to name a few. To be successful wearing these many hats, you need the right tools! Unfortunately, you may not have the budget for your dream tools. So, what do you do? You need the best free tools available!

Many reports and studies claim there is dissatisfaction with the learning function inside organizations everywhere. And as the workplace and workforce continue to rapidly change, the need to upskill and develop employees has never been greater. Enter VR, which has become the solution to corporate learning’s problems. In its infancy as a new technology, VR has drastically improved the way individuals learn information—and corporate learning has taken notice.

Keeping students engaged in their learning is always a challenge. Can messaging enhance the learning experience? Could chatbots open up a whole new communication backchannel? Automatically? And safely? This exciting session will address these questions and more, including a hands-on demonstration.

Many stakeholders want to allow learners to access courses on their phones, and LMSs tout their ability to do that. However, it’s not as simple as clicking “publish.” When creating or modifying eLearning courses for the phone, there are pitfalls you must avoid to ensure an optimal learner experience.

Video continues to have explosive growth as a delivery medium for knowledge transfer events. Organizations are incorporating video-based learning into the daily flow of work and establishing methods for delivery and tracking of video assets in their learning ecosystem. This session will explore these new workflows, as well as how video can become an integral part of your students’ learning journey.

Many L&D teams and organizations suffer from a lack of innovation and different thinking. They can easily become stagnant, always looking at their world at the LMS level with no thoughts about the art of the possible. But innovative thinking can drive up engagement and significantly enhance the learning experience. So how can you increase it at your organization?

As learning organizations are tasked with including Section 508 and WCAG 2.0 accessibility requirements in their eLearning content, many designers and design teams are left asking the same question: How do I take a set of bullet points from a government website and put them into practice? What is tab order? What does good alt text look like, and when should I be using it? Inquiring minds want to know!

More and more eLearning developers are using JavaScript to create advanced learner interactions not available through traditional authoring software. JavaScript provides a level of flexibility, power, and interactivity that has empowered eLearning developers to create more dynamic and more maintainable learning. JavaScript is the engine—the secret sauce—behind all of digital learning. Learning to hand code can be empowering and even career-changing.

Microlearning! It’s the most popular word in corporate learning today. It is also the most controversial. While some claim microlearning to be a transformational concept, others see it as nothing but smoke and mirrors. To really find the value, you have to get past the noise and focus on the fundamentals that created the microlearning hype. To really see the benefit of microlearning, you have to end it.

If they’re going to work in a virtual classroom, your traditional learning methodologies need a makeover. A virtual session is more than lecture and uploaded PowerPoints. Unique techniques must be used to engage learners throughout the session. A common pitfall is to focus on the technology and forget about the design—often resulting in unengaging sessions focused on using the tools and not meeting the needs of the learners.

Rapid UX models like agile, lean, and design sprint are the centerpiece of software, web application, and product design. Yet today’s L&D teams still use unresponsive and archaic instructional design models that follow an outdated waterfall paradigm. The rapid pace and demands of today’s business environment require that IDs utilize emerging UX design techniques to produce immediate results and learner performance.

With an ever-expanding number of teaching and learning technologies available, it can be challenging to pick the ones that fit the needs of your learners and organization. All of these technologies claim to solve your problems, so how do you know you are making the right choice? Without a sound strategy, it may be difficult to select appropriate, innovative, and institutionally sustainable technologies.

It’s easy to make video that’s not very good; a lot of bad video gets made on smartphones. But that doesn’t mean that mobile devices can’t make great videos too! The truth is that the camera on your phone is way better quality than those you grew up watching.

User data can be difficult to manage and track when using different platforms and delivery methods for your content. Data reporting across numerous sources can be disjointed, hard to centralize, and overwhelming to analyze in a meaningful way. Different LMSs don’t always provide user data in the same manner or use the same metrics; the same user taking the same course on different LMSs could create completely different user reporting.

Just like FCA dealership sales consultants, many employees have to recall hundreds of facts at a moment’s notice. FCA typically improves performance using traditional blended learning approaches. With the advent of mobile gaming, they realized that they needed to explore new ways of helping learners retain information. And the end result needed to be easy to access, quick, and facilitate frequent and extended engagement.

Audiences are almost universally busy, and there is a huge amount of content out there to take in. eLearning courses were promised to fit flexibly into people’s schedules, but they often still require a computer and aren’t designed or developed well for a mobile device. What’s one answer to this issue? Podcasts. People squeeze podcasts in during their commutes, while making dinner, and even in the shower!

Virtual reality technologies have long been the promise of the future but just out of reach for the mainstream. Recent VR innovations, though, have allowed instructional designers and learning engineers to create and distribute custom VR content in ways that make VR a transformative part of training and learning programs across industries. When combined with xAPI, these futuristic technologies allow you to gain never-before-captured insights from next-gen digital experiences.

What if you could infuse the power of social learning into virtual reality or augmented reality? While they offer deeply immersive experiences for individuals, both can be primarily a solo experience. Learn how Visa is using connected mobile devices in concert with AR and VR hardware to create collaborative experiences for learners.

Your client provides a lengthy slide deck and asks you to create an engaging and fun course. You roll up your instructional design sleeves and start slashing unnecessary content and preparing a learner-focused design where learners practice scenario-based decision-making. But what do you do when your client rejects your design and demands a locked-navigation course that uses every word from their lengthy slide deck?

L&D is evolving and bringing you new ways to reach your learners by reaching beyond the classroom and into the workflow. It’s what modern learners expect. But how do you transcend eLearning or live training events and bring knowledge into the workflow in contextual ways that increase retention, and that create intentional refocus and additional application opportunities?

Organizations often find difficulty adopting new learning technologies due to lack of funding or a limited ability to customize tools for business needs. But by leveraging open-source software, learning professionals can use the community of developers to affordably grow their departmental abilities.

A new wave of game-playing professionals are entering the workforce. Professional football players already rehearse their moves with video games. Pilots earn flight miles in flight simulators. Soldiers are recruited and trained with the America’s Army game. How will corporations develop the next generation of learners who have spent more time with video games than in school? How will they bring immersion, engagement, and presence to new levels?

Voice technology is becoming essential to everyday life. Speech recognition accuracy has gone from 95 to 99 percent, which has people using it all the time. In less than two years, 50 percent of searches online will be performed via voice. Voice is faster, less cumbersome, near-universal, and effective. It’s natural! So why not use it to deliver just-in-time training for your learners?

Fluid boxes in Adobe Captivate 2017 are seemingly magical containers that allow you to create responsive eLearning courses in a snap. Just add the images, videos, animations, buttons, and other objects to the fluid boxes and they will automatically arrange on the screen based on the screen size and orientation.