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.

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?

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.