Most learners and stakeholders want an efficient learning experience that can increase their competency as quickly as possible. Most training teams want a scalable, flexible, and sustainable solution. Yet too often training programs fail to deliver on these expectations because we try to cram too much information into too short a timeframe using the wrong type of solution.

In this participatory session, you will examine a case study in which Guardian Analytics made similar mistakes and their lessons learned. In small groups, you’ll use the case study to identify training problems and determine options for more effective and relevant customer training. You will explore the warning signs of a poorly planned training project, discover approaches to ensuring programs are scalable, flexible, and sustainable, and learn strategies to ensure you are connecting with your learners. You are encouraged to share your own experiences with inefficient training and the methods you used, if any, to address the problem.

In this session, you will learn:

• The warning signs of ineffective or inefficient training
• The importance of regarding training as an extension of your company’s product rather than as a necessary evil
• Why you must understand your learners’ needs—and the consequences of not doing so
• Effective methods used to successfully flip training into a blended solution

Audience:
Novice to advanced designers, developers, project managers, and directors

Technology discussed in this session:
Jive platform, Captivate, and SmarterPath (a social learning LMS).

To meet the real needs of an organization’s learning and performance strategy, learning programs have to be designed appropriately. On principle, this means acquiring performance objectives, mapping to meaningful practice, presenting models that guide application, supporting with reasonable examples, and making the experience engaging. In practice, you have subject matter experts who don’t have access to what they do, tools that are aligned with knowledge presentation, pre-existing processes and practices that are hard to change, stakeholders who mistake sizzle for steak, and limits on schedule and budget.

In this session, you will explore a case study of an organization’s attempt to successfully meld meaningful outcomes under pragmatic constraints. We’ll discuss what worked, what adjustments had to be made, and what’s still left to figure out. You will leave this session with better context of how to build a learning strategy that works when it really matters.

In this session, you will learn:

• The principles of learning that achieve outcomes
• The barriers to success and the tradeoffs that have to be made
• The lessons learned from a serious attempt to change

Audience:
Novice to advanced designers, developers, project managers, and managers.

Technology discussed in this session:
N/A

Training demands are greater that any one central training department can meet. Departments are always making their own training despite lacking the skills or tools to make it truly effective. Even if subject-matter experts want to partner with a full instructional-design project team, they rarely have the time to do so. And yet despite these challenges, end users still require and deserve a high level of quality in their training programs.

In this case-study session you will learn how Pacific Gas and Electric’s (PG&E) Academy created a number of self-support tools, “brown bags,” communities of practice, and guidelines that enable any business unit to build their own instructor-led training, web-based training, or virtual learning. You will discover how these tools enabled the organization to build more training with fewer resources in a shorter amount of time. You will leave this session with a number of tools, templates, and guidelines that you can take back and adapt for your own organization.

In this session, you will learn:

• What tools, templates, and guidelines are needed to make a self-support model work for all business units
• What evaluation measures, checklists, and coaching need to be in place to ensure quality
• What the business impact is when other groups share in the course-development process
• How you can adapt and leverage internal training-department standards across the business
• How you can leverage similar tools, templates, guidelines, and support methods in your organization

Audience:
Novice project managers and managers with a basic understanding of the course development process.

Technology discussed in this session:
Instructor led training, PowerPoint, Microsoft Word, Adobe Connect, Articulate Studio ’13, SharePoint, Yammer, iMovie/iPhone, and Show and Share video portal.

Management often views training efforts as a line expense for a specific period. Rarely is any type of training activity considered an investment apart from specific tangible elements. eLearning and mLearning initiatives are considered investments since they require tangible financial requirements, including technology and supporting infrastructure viewed as capital expenditures.

In this session you will discuss the specific financial literacy tools used to build a comprehensive financial structure to support your eLearning and mLearning projects and gain senior management buy-in. You will explore why trying to convince based only on qualitative factors is insufficient. You will use tools including cost-volume-profit, break-even, and net-present-value to evaluate a training investment—the same tools senior management uses to run the business.

In this session, you will learn:

• How to define capital investment evaluation tools and apply financial tools to build an effective case for eLearning and mLearning
• How to utilize the financial results to build a case for an initiative
• The skills to communicate eLearning and mLearning effectiveness
• How to implement an eLearning and mLearning budgetary forecasting process to demonstrate the extended impact the initiative will have on an organization
• How to benchmark financial performance to evaluate the lifecycle of the initiative and assess whether external sources are more effective

Audience:
Novice and intermediate project managers, managers, directors, and VPs with basic comprehension of financial concepts.

Technology discussed in this session:
Excel spreadsheets.

One of the most challenging aspects of developing learning programs is managing the sheer volume of content generated on a daily basis. There are eLearning modules, demos, simulations, videos, job aides, quick-start guides, webinars, ILT decks, graphs, flowcharts, assessments, animations, podcasts, and the source and media files to go along with each. The most frustrating aspect of all this is the number of times developers are forced to reinvent the wheel because, while the perfect content may already exist in one format it is incompatible with content in another format.

In this session you will discuss how implementing a learning-content management system (LCMS) can help address many of the content curation and organizational issues facing learning-development teams today. Using athenahealth as a case study, you’ll review the process they went through in choosing a vendor, getting leadership buy-in, the ups and downs of implementation, what custom work needed to be done, bringing over legacy content, convincing IDs that learning another new tool would be worth it, what worked as promised, and what didn’t.

In this session, you will learn:

• The challenges of trying to curate and update tremendous amounts of content
• The advantages of using an LCMS to develop and manage learning content
• How athenahealth implemented an LCMS during the chaos of a major software release
• How athenahealth plans to utilize the power of the LCMS in the future
• Lessons from an LCMS implementation

Audience:
Novice to advanced designers, developers, project managers, and managers who have experience as an instructional designer.

Technology discussed in this session:
Kenexa Premier LCMS.

In their clinical training, physicians and other clinicians are not learning the skills they need to lead their organizations through the rapid changes happening in health care. It has become more and more difficult to pull clinicians away from patient care to teach them core leadership skills. As a result, health care organizations are struggling to provide these critical skills with shrinking time and resources.

In this session participants will examine a case study on the physician leadership development program at NYU Langone Medical Center (NYULMC). You will discover how this program utilized a flipped learning approach to using a combination of eLearning and classroom training. You will discuss how key subject matter experts inside and outside of the organization partnered to determine how to best develop, design, and implement this training. You will explore an approach for building strong partnerships and collaboration to maximize the benefits of eLearning and classroom training. Participants will learn how to embed eLearning into larger training programs, target the training topics and content to your organizational environment, create personalized custom videos, and build capability for mobile access to your training.

In this session, you will learn:

• To develop a strategy for developing and implementing blended learning strategies for leadership development programs
• To build partnerships between SMEs and eLearning designers and developers
• To create blended learning programs that maximize the potential of different learning modalities (lecture, discussion)
• To customize eLearning that caters to your own blended learning program

Audience:
Novice to advanced designers, developers, project managers, managers, and directors with a basic understanding of adult learning principles.

Technology discussed in this session:
Articulate Storyline.

Instructional designers and eLearning professionals are often faced with the daunting task of designing learning interventions to meet the needs of multiple stakeholders quickly and effectively. Many eLearning solutions are perceived as boring, ineffective, or incapable of meeting learning goals effectively, leaving designers with an uphill battle to sell new ideas and concepts to colleagues. Even strong concepts and well-designed projects face barriers and challenges.

In this session participants will explore strategies to assess the needs of various stakeholders, pitch eLearning project ideas and garner support, work with subject-matter experts while staying within an appropriate project scope, and implement time and cost-saving tips in development. You will examine two eLearning projects, each utilizing simulation and case-based learning strategies to drive the design of immersive, story-driven projects that capture and hold stakeholder interest and ensure that learning objectives are achieved. You will leave the session with takeaways for managing risk encountered during various stages in the design process.

In this session, you will learn:

• How to map performance/learning problems to concrete eLearning objectives, ensuring alignment of ideas with stakeholder needs
• Effective ways to present your project ideas effectively to garner interest, enthusiasm, and support
• Strategies for working with subject matter experts on determining content while keeping within a manageable scope
• An effective process for designing interactive, case-based eLearning modules to engage and hold the interest of learners

Audience:
Novice designers, developers, and project managers with a clear understanding of instructional design frameworks (e.g., ADDIE) and the affordances and limitations of eLearning authoring platforms.

Technology discussed in this session:
Articulate Storyline.

As learning and development professionals, we often spend a significant amount of our time trying to put together the pieces of a giant organizational puzzle so we can do our jobs. We are, in many ways, the middlemen between those who know and those who need to learn. L&D must reposition itself away from its current role as an information conveyor and leverage its unique skills to help people find and use information to improve their performance.

In this session participants will discuss the value of user-generated content as a way to overcome many modern L&D challenges. You will review the collaboration principles and tools Kaplan continues to use to break through common barriers to curating and sharing user-generated content, including technical limitations, regulatory concerns, and employee motivation. You will also discuss ways this content can be used to create powerful on-demand and targeted learning experiences that scale. Participants will leave this session with actionable ideas on how to transform valuable tacit information into meaningful, crowd-sourced, well-curated, user-generated content.

In this session, you will learn:

• How to shift the focus of your organization’s information culture from consumption to contribution
• Four proven methods for motivating users to share what they know all the time
• Collaborative principles Kaplan used to build its enterprise social network and knowledge curation platform
• How to use simple video to add context to traditional online reference materials
• How user-generated content can help L&D focus its resources on more meaningful and timely learning experiences

Audience:
Novice to advanced designers, developers, project managers, managers, directors, and VPs with a basic understanding of the concepts of user-generated content, online video, and enterprise social networking tools.

Technology discussed in this session:
Confluence, JIRA, webcams, iMovie, Axonify, Kaltura, online discussion forums, Salesforce.

Learning has been and always will be social. However, in a world of increasing use of eLearning and mobile-learning courses, we run the risk of coming full circle back to stale, unengaging “click-here”-based learning. People naturally collect in communities of practice outside of work (Facebook, Google+, reddit, Tumblr, etc.) to share and collaborate. How do we create an ecosystem of learning that engages learners both within and outside our eLearning content?

In this session you will learn how to develop communities of practice through an online-learning ecosystem. You will explore best practices for how to engage learners and keep them engaged. You will discuss ways to facilitate large-scale communities of practice (15,000+) down to smaller, more intimate, communities (50+). You will gain tips and tricks on how to use curation for user-submitted content, communication portals (blogs, forums, etc.), and direct discussion linked to specific learning modules.

In this session, you will learn:

• Why social learning is vital for training
• Ways to implement social learning ranging from small to enterprise
• Best practices for engagement with learning through social tools
• How other companies are utilizing social learning

Audience:
Novice and intermediate designers, developers, project managers, and managers.

Technology discussed in this session:
Wisetail LE, Adobe Captivate plugins, JavaScript, and LMSs.

At the request of the Quebec Ministry, innovative technology was developed to support a first-of-its-kind distance learning program launched in Quebec to encourage potential immigrants to perfect their knowledge of the French language prior to arriving in Quebec. This was an important goal to help accelerate immigrants’ access to the job market as well as facilitate their integration into their new home.

In this case-study session, you will gain insights into how they implemented the technology to create a tool that is one of the most significant innovations in online training in Canada. You will discuss best practices for developing and implementing technology to support distance learning programs with measurable success. You will understand the framework from which a successful solution was developed and implemented so that you can adapt it for your organization.

In this session, you will learn:

• How innovative technology was implemented to ensure integration
• Best practices for developing and implementing technology to support distance learning programs
• The framework from which a successful solution was developed and implemented
• How this new training delivery method offers a success rate comparable to that of a classroom-based course

Audience:
Advanced designers knowledgeable in distance learning.

Technology discussed in this session:
The Technomedia Learning and Development module.