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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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?

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.

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.

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?

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.

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?

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.