Each day we are exposed to multitudes of user interfaces (UI) in media, marketing, and design, all geared to grab our attention. Specific techniques are used to draw us to the next item, scroll down, click here/there, make that purchase, watch that video, or look at that picture. Adopting these techniques and implementing them into our eLearning designs can have a similar engaging impact on learners.

As adoption of xAPI takes hold, it allows for more robust and interesting tracking of the learning process. As actual performance and results data are integrated with learning metrics, we will have the data we need to tailor the learning process to individual needs, and can draw more useful conclusions about the learning as a whole across a wider population. This leaves instructional designers with a set of critical questions: How does this impact my work? What tools do I need? What data should I track? What infrastructure does my organization need to be able to take advantage of this?

Shooting video according to the script is one thing, but what about when you can’t call "cut" and start over again? When there’s no fixing it in post? Or when participants are live online, as well as live in an ILT situation? How can we best leverage interactions cross-format? What technology and resources are needed to pull off livestream?

Learning leaders are feeling pressure to embrace microlearning, both from operational leaders and from the employees they train. Learning leaders want to offer more shorter-form and on-demand content, but often they don't know where to start. They don't know the formats to use, the pros and cons of different mediums, and the relative cost of different approaches. Even more importantly, they don't know where microlearning can fit into their learning ecosystems or how to introduce it into their organizations.

You've heard about xAPI, but wonder what comes next. Getting from this initial position of interest to having wide-spread organizational buy-in can be a huge challenge. It was for us! How do you justify taking resources away from creating and curating learning experiences to build something new and unproven? It can be a challenge to identify the first steps needed to start convincing stakeholders that the investment is worth it. Since xAPI is a complex solution, there is no road map that an organization can follow. We are all looking for the best ways to use project management strategies to leverage the resources that we have access to, so we can go beyond those first "wins" in the process of implementing xAPI.

It's been more than five years since we first heard about xAPI. As the specification is gaining momentum, so is the learning record store (LRS) that accompanies the xAPI. Since we finally have a clear understanding of what actor-verb-object can mean for our profession, it's essential to find the right LRS to give us clear insights. But what platforms are out there, and what are the pros and cons of those systems?

Research shows that sales training positively impacts productivity, quality, and financial results. Still, sales enablement through training can be difficult. Every minute a salesperson is away from selling costs the company money. You need fast, effective, and impactful models to develop sales training that works.

The virtual reality landscape is shifting rapidly as the main barriers to implementation—cost and content—are lowered. Investing in VR for learning is on the verge of being very affordable, but do you need it? The answer to that question depends on what you're trying to teach, and an evaluation of your alternatives. Convincing your leadership to invest in virtual reality can be challenging unless you can speak to its impact on organizational outcomes. How do you know you're getting your learning bang for the buck?

Learning & development departments are at a crossroads. Staffs are stretched to the limit creating, vetting, evaluating, and maintaining content, programs, and curriculum, while looking forward to the future and trying out new things. No consistent or repeatable frameworks exist to test and review emerging technologies such as augmented reality, blockchain, IoT or voice, or AI.

Let's face it, auto generated online certification has no real credibility, as you cannot guarantee if the owner of the certificate is the actual person who passed the course. Also, certificates can easily be reproduced by anyone with some Photoshop skills who has access to the template or a sample. Currently, facial recognition is the most popular biometric technology on the market. It combines high accuracy and high speed of operation. Biometrics is the only form of identification that truly identifies a person. Also called 1:1 comparison, authentication answers questions like: Are you the person you pretend to be? Are you in our database? And do you have the right credentials? In contrast to passwords, PINs, cards, and other forms of identifiers, biometric ID can't be lost, forgotten, or stolen.

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.”

We are exposed to polished and professional content that we only wish we could recreate in a small- to medium-sized company. Hiring outside vendors to create videos, situational learning, and multimedia presentations is beyond the budget for many of us, and yet we recognize and understand the benefits of increasing employee and customer engagement through the leveraging of technology to supplement our online learning. If only we could find a way to do it ourselves…

Scenarios are wonderful tools for encouraging changes in performance. Once we see ourselves in a story and are invited to take on a challenge familiar to us, we become more open to evaluating our own behavior. But bringing a scenario to life takes more than simply describing a situation and slapping a name on the protagonist. Transforming seemingly mundane tasks into powerful stories is something with which even the most prolific and celebrated writers struggle. Writing scenarios for elearning is challenging because it requires communication and storytelling abilities that instructional design programs and certification programs do not teach. IDs are left to their own devices when creating immersive stories for learners that keep them engaged, and simultaneously addresses the performance we want to change.

Storyboarding and prototyping are more important than ever, but too often we're making do with substandard tools or skipping the process altogether because the tools don't make it easy. If only there were tools that would help! Have you heard of Adobe's free tool, XD? It's part of the Creative Cloud but you can download and use it for free, even if you don't subscribe.

Many eLearning designers and developers need to teach systems. It can be quite labor and time intensive to teach face-to-face. Hiring a vendor to build system simulations is another option, but with its own challenges. Vendors have to learn your internal processes, your organization may not have a secure way of giving a non-employee access, and changes to your systems may lead to additional costs to have the vendor-built simulation content updated.

With the vast number of awesome features included in Adobe Captivate, it can quickly become overwhelming to identify which approach to take on a project. Should you utilize screen capture, program simulations, create a page-by-page presentation, maybe use videos and audio? Don’t get me started on activities and quizzes! And what about the new VR functionality Captivate offers?

Choosing a new learning platform is a little bit like falling down a rabbit hole. With more than 700 platforms from which to choose, getting lost is easy. Why not learn from the soul-sucking experience of those who have traveled this journey before? 

The effectiveness of any eLearning experience is only as good as the instructional design put into it. But can instructional design alone make eLearning engaging and effective? The truth is, good eLearning design is more than just instructional design. An engaging eLearning experience uses visual design, graphic design, and user interface design to help elevate the instructional design and learning experience.

It's a common problem in learning organizations…not enough skilled instructional designers to go around. Building or enhancing instructional design skills quickly and cost-effectively can be a challenge for both small and large learning teams. At PwC learning & development, a recent organizational change found our digital design & development team with varying levels of instructional design skills, and a need to upskill those with little to no experience.

Supporting the diverse learning needs of an organization where time is money can be challenging. The goal of most learning organizations is to drive content and "foot traffic" into their LMS. Today, gains in technology offer more efficient methods to complete tasks. Corporate learning organizations need to examine their goals and determine the best way to support employees in an era of shorter duration learning content, mobile-friendly options, and a workforce that takes ownership for their own learning. During this session, participants will follow one company's journey from LMS to LXP. Topics covered will include the process of finding, implementing, and launching a learning experience platform.

You've attended a great eLearning conference, read some amazing articles, and participated in some inspiring webinars. You're bursting with ideas to invigorate your team's eLearning offerings, but how do you persuade your department or client to share your vision? It's seldom enough to simply tell what you've learned and describe the possibilities. A successful pitch will show how your idea will come to life and improve eLearning performance. With both time and money at a premium, developing a successful pitch, especially one that includes a POC, can be difficult. But by investing in the effort and correctly framing your pitch with a clear "hook," you'll increase your chance of success.

As eLearning professionals, we know gamification helps make learning fun and engaging. It can be a challenge to find the right authoring tool to maximize gamification, while meeting your institutional needs of flexibility, quality, experience, and price. Look no further—the world of video game development has new authoring tools that eLearning professionals can adopt for amazing gamified learning creation.

One of the most sought after uses of artificial intelligence is a system that can continually assess learners and recommend the right content at the right time, adapting with them as they progress. While this description of a recommendation system sounds simple from a user standpoint, it is extremely complex in practicality.

Many L&D organizations are struggling with how to evaluate virtual and other immersive technologies for their learning and training initiatives. Options abound, and with a lot of pressure on corporate training organizations to include VR in their training, today's learning leaders need help in choosing the right solution. A successful evaluation process includes: 1) understanding of how to establish organizational and learner needs criteria to evaluate the immersive technology options, 2) knowing the strengths of the different approaches from both a cognitive science and technical perspective, and 3) recognizing the impacts of how the technology is brought into the organization. The best way to illustrate this process is through hands-on examples in diverse learning situations.

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.

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.

Imagine you're about to build a house with all the bells and whistles. Now imagine building this house without a set of blueprints. Would your contractors know what to build, and where? Would the city be able to approve any additions or modifications you want to make? Like the blueprint for a house, your eLearning storyboard outlines everything about the training you're creating. This same concept applies to eLearning and training as a whole. It's important to create a storyboard that can be easily understood by everyone in the project process, so all are "in the know" on what the final product will look like.

Creating an exciting experience in the VR headset is only part of the solution. How do you ensure that it’s instructionally effective? The ability to produce artificial environments that are believable enables us to produce an authentic context well beyond anything we’ve ever achieved in eLearning. We can produce fully immersive experiences that feel like real life, both in the environment the user experiences and the tasks that they must perform. With an effective ID framework, we can elevate human performance to produce true behavioral change. These aspirations are vitally important in subject matter that requires human interaction, empathy, and decision-making–topics such as sexual harassment, customer service, and negotiations, to name a few. These solutions are possible through a balanced application of instructional design and game design.

What's the best eLearning authoring tool out there? That's a lot like asking, "What's the best car on the road?" The answer can be very subjective, and in the end it's based on what matters most to you. Identifying key features and characteristics that differentiate tools—such as price, ease of use, interactivity, accessibility, and mobile compatibility—can help you can make the best choice to meet your needs.

Electronic accessibility is increasingly important in digital learning, but it can be challenging to achieve in many eLearning authoring programs. There are myriad rules one must know and follow; different programs have different capabilities, including which browsers, devices, and assistive technologies offer the best and most reliable results; more development time is inevitably required, especially if accessibility is treated as an afterthought and not an integral component; and it's not uncommon to find a disconnect between purported performance and tangible, tested reality. What are development teams to do?

Good courseware engages the user with multiple elements. From video to audio to the venerable drag-and-drop, you need to make sure your content is doing the job. But is your audience actually learning anything? More importantly, are they learning the lessons you need them to? And if they are, do you have the tools to prove that to your leadership?

Most trainers today make video, but many have not had the opportunity to learn key principles for making video engaging because it's usually not taught in train-the-trainer classes or adult learning programs. It's the stuff usually taught at film schools.

Whether you're a learning professional or a marketer, you're competing for the same thing: attention. Without it, you can't get people to think and act and perform in new ways. There's one big difference, though. Marketers have been much more successful. Savvy marketers understand that tapping into the psychology of emotions sparks engagement in today's hyper-distracted world. That's a mindset learning professionals need now more than ever before.

Whether your job title is instructional designer, learning experience designer, or trainer, the career path forward (and upwards) may not always be clear cut.  There are often critical moments that can shape one’s career. Understanding how to recognize these moments, and the context of the questions and answers that shape your decisions, can make a huge difference in your career.

Once upon a time, training was measured in seat time and the ISD community saw that this was bad. After great debates and much consternation, seat time was replaced with learning objectives and cognitive task analysis, and the ISD community pronounced that this was good. But is it? The result is that learning programs—in both education and training—are assessed on knowledge to be learned rather than what is needed on the first day on the job. As an example, people learning cybersecurity are tested on their knowledge but not on their ability to innovate and apply the knowledge, or on the "weaponized attitude" that they need to be successful.

When it comes to creating gamified or game-based learning experiences, most practitioners throw game mechanics at a program without a methodology or rational strategy. They assume that what is fun for them will be fun for their participants. The result is hit-or-miss. When budgets and time are in short supply, organizations cannot afford such an approach.

Oftentimes we present the learner with content they need to use for a job within the classroom setting. This may work for some, but others may forget what they have learned once they are on the job. Why not access what the learner is seeing in the moment and provide additional context or information that would enable them in the moment? End users may have to wait for a specialized technician, when instead we could use AR tools that could walk users through some initial trouble shooting steps for what they are currently seeing in the moment.

Too often our industry rushes to develop a course, or whatever the default method is within their workflow. We need to break the habit and provide the paths to create better tools and access to learning for audiences.

The eLearning Guild’s director of research, Jane Bozarth, along with contributors to recent research, hosts a review of several recent Guild reports. We’ll look at the ever-expanding role of the instructional designer, be joined by Julie Dirksen for an overview of what research says about designing with AR and VR, and then hear from Megan Torrance about the current state of xAPI. The focus of this session is on what is really happening across our industry now, with an emphasis on what works, what factors support our success, what content lends itself best to particular approaches, and what would enhance our own professional development.

Microlearning. Personalized learning. Learning styles. These are all buzzwords you've heard from vendors, at conferences, and on social media. The pace of technology development and implementation is increasing exponentially, and so is the number of buzzwords. Even if you try to keep abreast of the latest L&D trends, it's impossible to be an expert in everything. How do you know what to try right now, what to keep an eye on for the future, or what's industry hogwash?

Essentially, workflow learning is less about content consumption and more about solving problems and creating innovations while in the midst of the workflow. It is less about software and platforms, and more focused on changes in behavior and process of thinking.

From faxed questionnaires to mailed DVDs, training solutions have evolved over time. How do you work within a limited environment but still innovate? How do you get buy-in from your organization when technology keeps evolving, but you feel like your organization's training is lightyears behind? What's the best way to manage change so the focus stays on the training? And, how do you evolve your learning management system as your learning needs change over time?

Delta Air Lines Pilot Learning and Development needed a way to push Captivate beyond its off-the-shelf capabilities to meet the requirements set out by both Delta and the FAA, and to enable us to produce 15-20 lessons every three months. Widgets can be hard to use, even harder to customize, and it is almost impossible to figure out how make one on your own, however we were able to crack the code and develop some widgets that are now an essential part of our training workflow.

Like homeowners faced with the task of making home improvements, instructional designers might find themselves overwhelmed with the notion of making updates to an existing course. But what if there were five simple DIY steps to making renovations or additions to improve the overall usability, effectiveness, and look of your course?

Are we really able to tell how people use digital learning? How do we gain visibility that learning is being applied? Sophisticated tracking gives us the ability to gain insights from user behavior. By focusing on what we can successfully capture—such as time spent within the learning, what learning assets are most popular, and even user sentiment—it's now possible to gain a rich picture of the experience of learning. In this talk we'll explain why tracking is more important than ever, show you technology innovations that push measurement beyond the LMS, and demonstrate how to infer meaning from the data being captured to inform decision-making.

Keeping viewer's attention with video is a challenge. There are many barriers that might keep viewers from pushing the play button. If (and when) they've clicked play, do you know what keeps people watching? Why do they stop? What elements need to be in your videos to make sure they able to learn? The good news is that there are answers, best practices, and information to these and other questions to help you create videos that work.

For decades, learning & development has been wishing for "a seat at the table" with senior leaders. So, why is it so hard to get there? The reasons may be rooted in our legacy as a training function that taught workers to perform predictable tasks and repeatable procedures. Today's work is less predictable; more creative and fluid. Yet in many organizations, L&D's training legacy continues to impact our work processes and outputs, which, in turn affects how we are perceived.

Studies show that nearly 20 percent of the workforce is actively disengaged (Gallup). This problematic statistic has L&D professionals seeking new models. At the same time, the Towards Maturity Report (2018) shows that 61 percent of L&D departments have no policy cementing the way content is communicated and distributed in the organization. The development and use of high engagement communications tools has exploded in other industries. How can the L&D professional take advantage of the macro level trends in communications and media?  

Has one of your organizational eLearning investments been met with mixed reviews or low uptake from learners? Perhaps you're moving to mobile content for the first time, or expanding into a new international market where you don't have on-the-ground presence. Too often we plan, develop, and implement in a vacuum because we believe we don't have the financial resources to conduct targeted user research. Budget constraints keep us focused on solving problems and adjusting with our solutions rather than designing for different cultures, technology levels, and genders. To address the training needs of our audience, delight them with our content, and drive repeat engagement, it's critical we involve them in the process and leverage low-cost tools to make that happen throughout the process.

Many people in the eLearning realm are attempting to use gamification and serious games to spark employee engagement and drive learning retention. The biggest setbacks for are little-to-no planning, tough to pinpoint metrics, little-to-no implementation strategy, and insufficient or nonexistent post-deployment support.

How does the largest employer on the planet, Walmart, attract and develop a new generation of managers who have spent more time playing games than they have in the classroom? How does pharmaceutical industry leader Novartis quickly train hundreds of people on best practice production and aseptic procedures for a new leukemia treatment, where mistakes have life and death consequences? How does Fortune 200 healthcare leader DaVita train a global organization to see the world through the customer's eyes?

Making the workforce future proof is currently high on the agenda of all of us in training and education. In this session you will get an idea of how InnoEnergy uses artificial intelligence (AI) to bridge the skills and competency gap of engineers working in the sustainable energy field. You will learn the three steps that make the full cycle of the project: 1) Extracting emerging skills and competencies from industry reports and road maps, 2) Analyzing resumes of engineers who want to enter the energy sector or want to upskill or reskill their capabilities, and 3) Using the skills gap that emerges from the first two steps to come to an adaptive learning path in the third step of the process.  

If you were tasked with finding solutions to a curriculum problem, what might you do? Microlearning? Mobile learning? Gamification? Virtual reality/augmented reality? More instructor-led training? We're often tempted to turn to new technology or trends, thinking one of these must be what our approach is missing. Certainly these modes are useful, but how do we know if they're the right solutions until we know what the problems are? In this session you will learn to face the problems as our learners would, using empathy, and build the Design Thinking process from there. Only then can you create meaningful solutions that use the right mix of tools and technology to elevate your training.

One of the top challenges for learning professionals is getting managers to support learning. Effective talent development can positively impact employee engagement, innovation, and long-term growth. How can we make leaders own their role in employee learning? How are managers motivated to invest their time in developing their people, which often doesn't bring a return in the short run?

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. We only have so much time to dedicate to formal learning, every moment needs to be impactful and relevant. Unfortunately, virtual classroom sessions tend to focus on getting as much content out there as possible, and leaving it up to the learners to figure out how to make it all work.  

Learners don't always want to sit through a formal training course, or simply don't have the time. Microlearning is a great way to deliver just what people need, when they need it. But, as a learning professional, how do you create it? While the idea of short learning sessions is great, they can end up taking almost as long as a full course to create, as you need high-impact video or interactive features to explain and reinforce key information quickly. It's important to be able to create microlearning efficiently, so that you ultimately have the time to serve the needs of all your learners with the full range of topics they need access to.

Everyone involved in training creation and delivery is managing at least part of a project, whether they know it or not. While many think of project management as only meeting a series of deadlines, it can provide you so much more than checkmarks on a calendar. Meeting deadlines is important to your success, but what if you could use basic project management techniques to create repeatable processes, improve communications with your stakeholders, and manage risks we all encounter? Best of all, what if it can make your job easier?

Standard eLearning tools are great and you can do a lot with them, but they have their limits. There are parts of those tools that you can’t customize or control or, if you can, it takes a lot of hacking to get it the way you want. Some eLearning tools also produce large files with a lot of extra lines of code that make your courses slower and harder to interact with. Cost can be a factor too, as tools may be priced out for reach for some organizations.

xAPI enables us to track a wide array of data but shareholders are interested in results, not the technology. Simply tracking everything is not a strategy and often creates noise that makes xAPI data more difficult to use. Instead, you need to step back to identify WHAT needs to be tracked with xAPI, and only afterward go through the process to design quality statements.

The sounds of snores from the next cubical over are because Jerry had to take that old, stale compliance course. Anyone can phone it in, click "next", and answer "C" to every multiple choice question. But that video choose-your-own adventure course? Jerry's going to make decisions and see immediate feedback and consequences for his choices. He might even take the course again and again to see what the other outcomes he could get, giving him a fully-detailed understanding of the subject matter with just one lesson! Snores or engagement: which would you choose?

Organizations are struggling to provide leadership development programs that fully engage their employees and provide them with valuable leadership development opportunities. Indeed, according to a recent Fortune survey, just 7 percent of Fortune 500 CEOs believe that their companies are building effective global leaders, and only 10 percent believe that their leadership development initiatives have a clear business impact. How can organizations combat this problem of ineffective training, and develop modern learning programs that offer more productive leadership training in today's digital world?

As part of the 15^th anniversary celebration of DevLearn, we’ll be building a time capsule of what L&D is today, and what L&D professionals think the future of L&D will look like.

It’s great when your boss finally jumps on board with all the bright ideas that you’ve been pitching. Well, until you consider you might never have done this before or the scope of your plan is beyond the current capacity of your team. How do you implement a modern vision for your courseware without breaking the bank? Do you need external support? Can your team do it all? Have you bitten off more than you can chew? Maybe, but maybe not. A strong strategy to select your team, tools, and projects will help you put your money where your mouth is.

There’s been a large amount of research in recent years exploring the value music has on the brain and learning. We’ve all experienced it in some way in our lives; from listening to music while learning or studying, learning something from a catchy song, or by learning to play an instrument.  In this session you will explore the many relationships between music and learning. You will examine and discuss how people learn to play an instrument—there will even be ukuleles available for some to participate hands-on—and what this might mean to learning in general. Using the introductory ukulele lesson as a framework, this fun session will help you explore the many ways that music impacts and enhances learning. (Ukuleles made available during this session will be donated to the Children’s Hospital of Nevada UMC after the conference.)

Learner expectations continue to rise as engaging AR experiences from the marketing world set a new standard. With many companies experimenting with AR for learning, the reputational risk from failed learning initiatives can be high. So why not reapply proven success from large-budget industries that also use AR to change behavior? Why not learn from the success and failures from the marketers and others who have been experimenting with this technology and testing how to use it most effectively?

Our work on competency-based medical education helped us create a learner-centered model that de-emphasized equating competency with grades and focused instead on abilities and achievement as salient learning outcomes. A challenge to this model, though, was providing verification of skill acquisition in an appropriate format. Through a year-long journey we were able to develop a blockchain-based credential framework that could help us execute on this model, and the lessons that we learned could easily apply to other industries as well.

Have you ever been handed a PowerPoint deck and told to go off and build a course? Many organizations tend to begin an eLearning design project leading with their content needs; desired outcomes are merely an afterthought, if they're a thought at all. Unfortunately, whether or not a solution is successful is often left to chance. With so much on the line, who wants to take that gamble? So how can you approach the design process with a more results-focused point of view?

Maybe it's the eyerolls. Maybe it is the rapid clicks of the "next" button. Regardless of what the action is, we know the look and feeling of learner disengagement. If we know that we don't want our end users to feel this way, then why is it a common occurrence in so many organizations? Instead of only focusing on research and high-level theories, this session will explore solutions to this common problem in a unique way—an interactive mystery!

Knowing your audience is a fundamental step in the analysis of designing training. When that audience is international, this is even more critical for understanding cultural differences in both language and visuals. Then add in the additional factor of using the comic medium as a vehicle to tell a story through instruction. This combination is what was faced when designing an instructional comic for labor and delivery nursing students in northern India. This project needed to not just deliver content, but also do it in a way that reflected this audience’s lived experience and also leveraged the unique strengths of the comic medium.

As xAPI has gained increased adoption across the industry, challenges have emerged as we have seen inconsistencies in both the expression and structure of xAPI data generated from a wide variety of tools and sources. While the xAPI profile specification was designed to define and standardize the data structure, more support and definition is needed on how to apply xAPI profiles for specific use cases. In practice, many organizations are developing their own unique approaches without any consistency in xAPI usage that can be re-purposed for a larger audience.           

Is your technology training content as dry as the Sahara Desert? Are short deadlines killing your creativity and ability to provide interesting and meaningful eLearning? Are you new to eLearning development and need a tool that’s easy to learn how to use? At ServiceNow, we had these common challenges and one more: we had technical releases two times a year. This meant that we needed a development tool that curriculum designers could learn without much difficulty and could develop with quickly, because anything that was created would be outdated and need to be replaced within six months. We also wanted a solution that would allow us to take our technology training and turn it into engaging, online content without sacrificing creativity and ease of use. Articulate's latest authoring tool, Rise, helped quench our thirst for interactive eLearning with a tool that is simple to use for design and development.

You've got a great idea to increase learner engagement, decrease learner attrition, or improve learning outcomes by adding a new feature to your learning platform or purchasing a new product or service. Maybe you have clear research to back up your idea, or just a solid hunch based on your experience as an eLearning expert. But implementing your plan will take time, money, and personnel. If you're wrong or you implement the solution incorrectly, you'll end up wasting precious resources without improving your learners' outcomes. What you need is a way to quickly and cheaply test your idea before deciding to commit to a purchase or addition to your learning system.

One in five newly-graduated registered nurses quits within the first year of their first job, never to return to nursing. Exit interviews often reveal the same basic stories: nurses feel unsupported and overwhelmed by the transition from school to nursing practice. But what if hospitals had an early warning system to inform interventions that address a newly-graduated nurse's concerns before a nurse feels like they have to quit? And how could this early warning system be used in other situations, as well?

We all want to be able to show bottom line results from our training efforts. But how do you engage an on-the-go, never-at-their-desk sales force? At Cydcor, a face-to-face, outsourced sales company, engaging a busy learner base in a format that appealed to them was a challenge. Not only that, but the executive team was asking for tangible results. The team needed a fresh approach to meet the needs of the learners and the executive team—and quick!

Our organization had a challenge: we had text-heavy, hard-to-navigate, print-based learning documents with multiple versions. Not only that, the documents needed to be updated often. We wanted to change this approach and instead make the possibility of "right-time-right-place" training and support into a reality using a mobile app. While not a seamless nor instant fix, our results show that we're providing a better learning and support experience to our users with media-rich, navigable and interactive offline, "right-time-right-place" content—an approach which would work well for delivery of any media-rich, navigable content to diverse and mobile users.

In an ideal world, your organization would have enough designers and developers to create all the eLearning and performance support tools employees need to do their jobs right—and you’d have the budget to pay vendors when your team's capacity was running low. Unfortunately, we don't always live in that ideal world. We sometimes find ourselves in one where resources and budgets may be stretched, but company initiatives still need to be supported by training programs. One way to address this is to use your development team for key initiatives, but give your SMEs the tools, resources, and support they need to develop non-essential programs. There’s risk that SMEs could pump out slide after slide of bullet points that no one really learns from, but it can be mitigated with a strategy that maintains some design quality standards while allowing SMEs to get the development done.

Learning modernization cannot be merely shoving legacy content into new technology. It needs to be a transformation in the way organizations approach learning to ensure better utilization of people and resources as the workforce of the future emerges. To be successful, the development of learning ecosystems requires collaboration between information architects, instructional designers, software developers, human resource managers, and others. Teams are applying skills in which they may have never received formal training and, while the principles of classic educational models (e.g., Bloom's Taxonomy) continue to hold true, the means by which we apply them has evolved. No one field has the background skillsets and expertise to accomplish this task alone.

Our mission at The Game Agency is to help companies train their employees better. Investing in human capital is the most important strategy a company can have to ensure its workforce has the knowledge and confidence to be successful. People are so distracted today and traditional training is simply not stimulating enough. Creating a game-based learning strategy can be overwhelming and just getting started can be daunting. Gamified learning is pointless without good data and robust analytics; however understanding all the data and analytics can be challenging.

As a small department at Ally Insurance, it would be easy to rely on the old standby of instructor-led classroom facilitation for all topics— especially the boring ones. But we know that instructor-led classroom facilitation is not always the best, most efficient, or even most innovative way to communicate content to learners. What if a small but mighty department could create and implement a whole new way to learn and retain information?  What if they could quickly be the leader in L&D for their entire company with this new way of learning? And what if that new way was radically fun and techy?

A struggle many of us face in our work is a lack of retention of concepts and content. Studies show learning experiences that aren’t entertaining, current, or relatable to the audience can have less success with short-term and long-term learning retention and comprehension. The solution: transforming your pedagogy to include pop culture references. This approach gives people a personal relationship with the material being taught, which can lead to increased comprehension and retention.

Copyright law can be intimidating, even though its intent is to encourage creativity. The cost of copyright confusion can affect every stage of the development and delivery process, as well. But thankfully it can be easier to understand how to respect copyright and find free online media you can legally use than it might seem at the surface.

As technology has continued to advance, engineering methods are increasingly needed for learning and development initiatives that depend upon data science, computer science, and learning science to structure solutions and to measure outcomes and results. Learning engineering represents a new amalgamated discipline that applies engineering methodologies to develop learning technologies and infrastructures to better support learners and learning. The need for learning engineering is becoming more apparent, and the powerful combination of this field with the work of instructional design has the potential to significantly advance learning and its impact on organizations. For this partnership to work well, we need to understand what competencies instructional designers need to have in this new world, as well as the competencies that learning engineers bring to the table .

The traditional approach for designing a learning experience and then gathering content can sometimes also inadvertently include frustrating roadblocks—things like SME wrangling, latecomer reviewers who disrupt design and delivery timelines, and new content that hits the stage at the eleventh hour. With more learning for us to create and quicker turnarounds expected, anything that can help us speed up our design cycles and reduce these kinds of disruptions can be a real win.

Training professionals find it difficult to prove the ROI of their efforts. That makes it harder to grow programs, sell training services, or find our "seat at the table”. Many of us can't get past Kirkpatrick's levels one or two to measure our training outcomes, and as a result can't also measure the broader impact of our training efforts. How do we get access to the data we need, and how do we successfully use that data to tell a story that resonates with stakeholders?

Good news: Your company is about to have its "iPhone moment" and nearly quadruple in size! Bad news: You are responsible for scaling training as the company grows from a promising start up into a world-wide industry leader. You have a small team of jack-of-all-trades learning professionals that need to scale training faster than an intern returning from a coffee run. The budget is small, the bandwidth is past its limit, and the days until launch are looming. What would you do if big changes were coming quickly with no sign of slowing down?

We want to improve our audience’s engagement and experience in the eLearning environment. They’ve expressed that they want eLearning experiences are personalized and dynamic, with content that adapts to their performance and choices. In addition to this added complexity, it’s also important that we have the ability to track and measure their completion, as well as the activity and pathways they took to get there. The solution? Leverage the benefits of traditional LMS/SCORM with the benefits of the evolving LRS/xAPI.

Mounting pressure from an increasingly competitive global landscape, regulatory requirements, consumer demands, and complex work environments require effective learning solutions that meet an organization's speed and need. How might L&D integrate modern technologies, data and analytics, instructional methodologies, systems thinking, and an array of sciences to deliver quality learning solutions optimized for helping people and business results? Enter the emerging field of learning engineering.

The learning podcast boom is upon us. They've got a small learning curve, are inexpensive to produce, and are fun for people to consume. One of the most popular formats is the "interview format," in which the bulk of the podcast is comprised of back-and-forth interviews. Although this format is relatively easy to produce, it’s also easy for it to fall flat and become plagued with boring conversations. When these conversations fail to engage the listener, the learning objectives are also lost. So how do the pros do it?

Anyone who manages a learning project understands how critical it is to have SMEs who are interested and involved. Unfortunately, sometimes we have the exact opposite with SMEs that are dazed, distracted, or unresponsive. This makes it difficult to get the information and feedback you need to move you projects forward.

How can a traditional learning audience weather a shift toward Agile? What can happen if they don't like that change? How can L&D professionals increase the chance of successful audience adoption? In 2018, the HAL L&D team set out to transition to more agile methods and encountered severe audience resistance. The pilot group didn't understand the changes, L&D didn't communicate well, and the learning cultural gap widened. Struggling with failure, the team needed an innovative approach to immediately right the ship and change the culture. They wound up increasing participation and adoption, and set the standard for their development going forward.

According to LinkedIn's first annual Workplace Learning Report, only 8 percent of CEOs see ROI for learning and development, yet over 90 percent of them feel that closing the skills gap by L&D would be a game-changer for their business. What is the first step to flipping this ratio? Shouldn't 90 percent of CEOs feel like their L&D programs instill real bottom-line performance in their organizations?

Curious about making games a part of your solutions in a meaningful way? Why not make something unique, engaging, custom-designed, and truly game-based? Point-and-click games, in which choices, puzzles, and discovery lead to memorable learning experiences, are remarkably simple to build using eLearning authoring tools. You may not think of yourself as a game designer, but you probably already create engaging scenarios in which the objective (win-state) is for the learner (player) to come away with usable knowledge (rescue the princess). And building the additional skills you’ll need for crafting these games, such as customizing art, adding interactions, and planning a learner adventure, is not as tricky as it might seem.

People are becoming used to increasing levels of digital sophistication in concierge chatbots like Alexa or Google Assistant. As a result, they’ve truly started to embrace the concept of chatting or talking with these intelligent systems. Our audiences are incredibly busy, can quickly get frustrated when using an LMS, and don't often know answers to common questions such as what courses they should take (or which they started and forgot about), or where to locate content. Concierge chatbots could easily provide these answers through a single, familiar interface, while also increasing engagement and digital respect for L&D.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is a popular topic as of late, but what does it really mean for L&D? Understanding the potential use cases of AI for learning and development is critical to being a savvy consumer. It's not about the technology itself, but the potential it has for solving difficult organizational challenges.

Do you really need a virtual classroom producer? Maybe you don't. But what you absolutely need is the skill set. Whether you assign them to a dedicated producer or do them yourself, commanding the technical aspects of your virtual classroom delivery is the key to online learner engagement. Still not sure? Recall the last webinar you attended, the one that started late due to audio problems? Remember the recent breakout activity you tried to complete, but everyone was too technically confused to get to the assignment? Or how about that time everything was cancelled because the slides wouldn't load, and no one could figure out what to do? Virtual classroom production is an art. It requires a unique skill set that balances deep platform knowledge with multitasking agility, while at the same time calming everyone down before the panicked screams can be heard through the mute. 

Everyone has had a manager come to them with a request that just treats a symptom of the real performance issue instead of the actual cause. Unfortunately, it can be difficult to convince managers and stakeholders to spend time and energy analyzing the problem that they're trying to address. When time is limited (and whose time isn't limited?) you need to maximize your conversations and get the whole story. You also need to update your root cause analysis toolkit with new frameworks to help you better identify and solve problems. And the answer for both is design thinking.

Is the success of popular and engaging games like Fortnite an accident? Not at all. These game developers have figured out strategies for how they can effectively capture someone’s attention and retain it over time. Imagine what you could accomplish if you knew some of the secret methods Fortnite uses and could apply them in your own work?

When you're not a developer, installing frameworks using node, git, grunt and terminal can seem totally overwhelming. Type what? Where? Do what? How do I launch it? Oh, I give up! Then when you’ve finally bribed a developer to help you and you've got the framework working, what happens when it needs updating, or worse, stops working? The Adapt framework and builder have been somewhat confusing for many, and that's not to mention the lack of customization in the builder. What if there was an option out there that offered the Adapt Builder hosted in the cloud? Well there is, and it's fantastic.

DemoFest is a huge science fair-like event; a collective showcase of eLearning examples from conference participants. As you move from table to table, exploring a wide range of learning solutions, you can discuss the tools, tech, and processes with those who built them. Although it’s an exciting evening of discovery, diving deep into each of the projects can be challenging.

Team mantras these days seem to be all about acceleration: Get stuff done. Fail fast. Learn fast. Move fast and break things. Even our methods emphasize the need for speed: Agile. Sprint. Rapid prototyping. And while there's no doubt that traditional design approaches are slow, it seems we're still wasting money on tech that doesn't meet our needs, building stuff we can't scale, disappointing stakeholders, and frustrating users.

What if there was a way to get more accurate data on what, how, and when people needed to learn? Standard L&D analytics generally measure content: Who took what course or module? Where did they take it? When? And, did they like it? We assess with ADDIE models, trying to ensure we hit the right pain points for learners. We use surveys and guesswork. Yet we ignore social learning, the very best source of learning data in an organization.

We have all suffered through online learning content that featured poor audio and/or video. We suffered through it because the material was valuable. But have you ever stopped and asked yourself why anyone would sit through this? Why would anyone come back for more? And why don't I do something to improve the quality of my audio and video content for my learners?

Choosing your organization's first learning management system is a daunting task. What features should you be looking for? What questions should you be asking? How much is too much to spend? And what happens after you make the decision? In many ways, implementing the LMS you've chosen can be even more daunting than making the initial selection.

Personalization is no longer a differentiator in consumer experiences. It has quickly become an expectation. Meanwhile, organizations are lagging behind when it comes to the workplace experience, and employees are starting to notice. As organizations rapidly improve their technology and data infrastructures via artificial intelligence and machine learning, L&D professionals must take proactive steps to re-imagine their tactics and set the foundation for personalized and adaptive learning.

We learn most as we do, when we apply new knowledge and ideas and we can expand this understanding when we interact with others. The 702010 principle re-awakened this understanding over 30 years ago and has reached the mainstream conversation but has also been met with misunderstanding and resistance about who and how to make it actionable.

Learning games are a fun and interactive way to help enhance knowledge and skills. When learners are immersed in a learning game, there’s a higher likelihood they’ll take away key concepts. However, creating immersive learning games can be time consuming. At DISH we wanted to use games, but there were too many concurrent initiatives that forced our learning professionals to be spread too thin to cover a lot of ground. To focus on building more immersive learning games, the organization needed to adjust its development strategy to leverage their workforce in a smarter and more efficient manner.

There's an explosion of virtual reality, augmented reality, and mixed reality applications in corporate training, and some of these training programs need facilitator support. What's the facilitator role in VR, AR, & MR training? And what skills do facilitators need in order to be effective in the VR/MR/AR classroom? Whether it's a facilitator guiding participants through a fully-immersive simulation, using mixed-reality applications in a learning event, or simply guiding people through a blended learning program with VR components, we have to address the new and updated skills needed for effective facilitation in these environments. Facilitators need to figure out which traditional classroom facilitation skills apply, and which ones don't.

Automation is no longer a word that you can ignore. While it may seem reserved for manual labor and robotics, it's actually impacting every industry and market. L&D is not immune. With the constant push to do things faster, better, and cheaper, it can be felt in delivering the products and services that L&D provides. Because of that, leveraging process and task automation may become an important way to help your team remain relevant. L&D automation can take many forms, but how do you start? Since automation for the sake of automation can be destructive and cause additional friction, how do you make strategic choices about which situations it’s best suited for?

In their training, people at an oil and gas company could perfectly define and identify first aid key concepts and successfully complete knowledge checks, such as deciding which technique would prove more useful in certain situations. However, when an accident took place in the real world, they didn't know what to do, how to act, or how to put into practice the theory they’d learned. The company needed a solution that would help their employees deal with these daily situations and teach them how to make life-and-death decisions, while still providing them with a safe place to hone their skills. The solution? Using branching scenarios to create risk-free environments for people to practice what they’d learned and see the consequences of their actions.

eLearning is typically built with a computer-first approach in mind. Designers imagine their learners to be sitting at a PC or laptop, and leave it to the responsive design functions of rapid content authoring tools to do the hard work of making the learning mobile ready. The downside of this approach means this eLearning isn’t optimized fully for mobile usability, which is a challenge because usability and accessibility for eLearning goes beyond adjusting to a smaller screen. Designers need to know how to build with mobile-first in mind to ensure the experiences they create can be used effectively and efficiently, and to avoid frustrating mobile learners.

You've received a request for training support on a new initiative. It's high-profile, mission-critical, and must be launched on time. But the tool/process won't be ready until the same day your training needs to go live. There's no option for pushing back the launch. What do you do?  Well, you can panic, get angry, or get to work. Enter the Minimum Viable Product (MVP)—normally used for software development and other Agile development processes—but an approach that can also be useful for learning. 

Creating the look and feel of a course, document, or animation can be complex and require a plethora of different tools, right? Wrong! You already own one tool that can get you started on every one of these items and more—PowerPoint. With a creative approach to this common tool, you can actually edit photos, design icons, create videos, emulate software, edit audio, and lots more.

With the wide range of tools, apps, and online resources being launched all the time, it’s not always easy to stay on top of what might help you out in your day-to-day work. It’s also easy with this stream of new options to miss out on great new updates or techniques that can allow you to use old favorites in new ways.