Collaborative and social tools have transformed how people work together and perform their jobs. These tools and concepts, however, are not yet being used as they could or should be within the learning life cycle—so organizations continue to miss out on key opportunities to optimize the learning experience. This will become even more crucial as L&D moves beyond person-to-person to also encompass personalized interactions with cognitive-based platforms. This session will provide insight into identifying opportunities and implementing new approaches based on real-world examples. It will also provide an overview of an IBM cognitive-based solution that demonstrates the possibilities.

For instructional designers and facilitators, the challenge is to create learning materials that reach and affect audiences positively and do not elicit feelings of exclusion or discrimination. However, you’re human, and every human has hidden or unconscious biases that impact behaviors and thoughts. This can lead to unintentional missteps in design and delivery. As learning becomes more story-driven, you need to be sensitive to how you present characters, including race, gender, gender identity, and organizational roles.

In this session, using the latest neurological research, you will learn where hidden biases come from. You’ll examine how you can uncover hidden biases within yourself and others, and identify strategies to avoid hidden bias in instructional design and delivery. You’ll look at ways instructional designers and facilitators can continue the mission of inclusivity in their day-to-day work, and you’ll learn what will instill pride in your organization and learners and what will cause them to tune out or reject your learning intervention.

In this session, you will learn:

• How to accurately define the concept of hidden bias with reference to the current literature and research studies
• How to identify at least two approaches to recognizing hidden bias within yourself and others
• How to compare at least three examples of learning content or delivery where hidden bias is evident and not evident
• How to list three ways to mitigate hidden bias in instructional design and delivery

Audience:
Novice designers, project managers, managers, directors, and senior leaders (VP, CLO, executive, etc.).

While there are many practices and models grounded in research that people use to create eLearning, there are also a lot of common statements about the field that may or may not be based in fact. Do learners really remember 50 percent of what they hear? Does L&D need to treat generations differently? Do learning styles matter? While these ideas are widespread, are they actually true?

In this session, you’ll get to put some widely touted ideas to the test. Attendees will review the claims together, take a look at the research, and separate the wheat from the chaff. Digital natives, generations, learning styles, and more will be subject to examination. Come find out which ideas you can trust and which you should question!

In this session, you will learn:

• Why these ideas are so compelling
• What the research says about these ideas
• Which L&D statements don’t pass the “sniff test”
• What you can do to avoid falling for learning myths in the future

Audience:
Novice and intermediate designers and managers.

Click here for the session trailer

Learners, particularly online learners, often suffer from illusions of competence in learning, procrastinate, and fail at breaking down content into smaller chunks to build solid expertise. Each can lead to higher rates of frustration and, ultimately, reduce success.

In this session, you will learn about neuroscientific processes that kick off procrastination, and how to tackle it. You’ll also learn about the default mode network and its role in helping prevent frustration. Strategies for the effective chunking of content, improving recall, and the challenge of developing passion for hard-to-master subjects will all be part of the discussion. Finally, you will explore ways to combat frustration when learning challenging content, and ways that metaphor and analogy can increase the speed of learning.

In this session, you will learn:

• How to tackle procrastination
• How to develop expertise in topics ranging from programming to language study to dance
• How to handle frustration when learning a difficult topic
• How to use metaphor and analogy to speed your learning

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

Technology discussed in this session:
PowerPoint with many embedded videos and animations.

Click here for the session trailer

What happens when your current eLearning development tool and your LMS are not enough (and they often are not)? With myriad tools and platforms available, being married to one or only a few is not wise, nor does it provide you the flexibility to create dynamic learning opportunities.

In this session, you will learn ways to utilize multiple platforms and coding such as PHP and WordPress to achieve a better learning experience. You will learn that there are more options than simply using an eLearning software alone with your LMS, as eLearning software can be combined with WordPress and even PHP coding to allow for greater control and ease of use for the learning experience.

In this session, you will learn:

• How to connect your LMS to an external PHP coded page
• How to utilize WordPress within your LMS
• How to combine WordPress along with Articulate Storyline to develop an eLearning course
• How to allow a PHP coded page to track within your LMS

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

Technology discussed in this session:
WordPress, Articulate Storyline, Taleo Learning Management System, PHP Coding, Microsoft Access, and mySQL.

PowerPoint is the basis for much of the training material you design and use, and yet it’s text-heavy, dull, and boring. That switches people off, and they don’t learn anything. It’s poorly used for in-person training, dreadful in webinars, and deathly when converted to eLearning. Quite simply, you can’t keep using PowerPoint like this. You can do better.

In this session, you will learn why using more visuals and animations is critical to making PowerPoint work, along with a process for visualization and some techniques in PowerPoint that can bring presentations and other training material to life. You will view a demonstration that you can use yourself, and you will leave this session with the ability to immediately create new and different uses for PowerPoint. Finally, you’ll get a free PowerPoint toolkit to kick-start your efforts!

In this session, you will learn:

• How to delight your audiences with compelling visual slides
• How to create visual slides using the full range of PowerPoint’s tools to generate your own graphics
• How to manipulate photos within PowerPoint so that they convey meaning
• How to use animation, including sophisticated animation, to tell your story effectively
• How to create, edit, format, and animate live graphs and charts quickly and easily
• How to build slides faster by using toolbars and shortcuts

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

Technology discussed in this session:
Microsoft PowerPoint.

Click here for the session trailer

IDs may be so caught up in content, business expectations, project management, and stakeholder politics that learner needs get overlooked. Today’s learners want personalized learning that resonates with them, solves their problems, and simplifies their jobs. You can’t do that if you don’t know them.

Marketers spend considerable time understanding their target audience to effectively meet their needs. This session will examine the techniques used in UX of building personas, documenting user stories, and creating journey maps to better understand learners. You’ll leave with a better understanding of your audience and evidence to assist your SMEs with meeting users’ needs through the learning you design.

In this session, you will learn:

• How UX professionals analyze to design for users
• How to create personas for your audience members
• How to create a journey map
• How to document user stories
• How to recognize more nuances about your audience

Audience:
Intermediate designers and developers who have some experience with instructional design.

What exactly does performance support entail, and how does it differ from traditional eLearning? Delivery and tracking of performance support is a big differentiator, as you won’t have tests, and you need to get information to where the users are doing their work, rather than on a desktop. This session takes an in-depth look at what makes content performance support, and how you can not only utilize existing training materials but also use a single source to provide both traditional training and performance support. Learn how to track usage patterns of your content, even when it’s used as performance support.

Learning content management system (LCMS) ROI is realized over time as both the number of people managing content and the amount of content grow. These are the benefits of single sourcing, multi-modal outputs, and maintenance of content. This is easier for a trained instructional designer to understand. This session covers expanding the LCMS-based approach to a larger group by providing a more visual page-based UI for quickly creating eLearning delivered by the LCMS. This allows all users to find and reuse existing media and content and publish eLearning quickly without becoming an expert in the concepts of object-oriented content development.

Communities of practice (CoPs) have become a hot topic in the past few years. They are an excellent tool for developing skills, sharing tacit knowledge, and shoring up retention of high-performing staff. But they differ from teams and other types of groups in many ways. Understanding what CoPs are and how they work—rather than just looking at how to create and manage them—is critical to supporting their success.

This session will take a look at the definition and function of communities of practice; examine how successful CoPs work; explore research around the critical CoP issues of learning, meaning, and identity; and identify strategies for nurturing and supporting successful CoPs. This session draws from academic literature on CoPs and offers an evidence-based view of the topic.

In this session, you will learn:

• What a community of practice is and how it functions
• From research on what works, and doesn’t work, in CoPs
• How to nurture and support a CoP
• From examples of successful CoPs

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

Click here for the session trailer

Are you the trainer, instructional designer, coordinator, project manager, and business analyst for your organization, all in one? Are you constantly moving from one role to the next while feeling overwhelmed by endless training projects? As a one-person training team, it’s common to feel challenged by constant time management, project intake and prioritization, development, delivery, and analysis you have to do on a regular basis. How do you reclaim control from this chaos?

In this session, you’ll focus on practical steps you can take right now to make being a one-person training team easier through strategic planning and processes. You’ll explore strategies for creating structured processes and learn how to use your peers, requesters, and project sponsors to offset your workload. You’ll also find out about methods for focusing on core competencies. Through this session, you’ll learn how to transition from being a “jack of all trades and master of none” to a focused individual who can carefully navigate multiple projects and requests at once.

In this session, you will learn:

• Techniques for creating a training intake process
• Best practices for balancing all of your job responsibilities
• Methods of organizing project tasks and deadlines
• Strategies for communicating with your stakeholders
• Strategies for setting expectations with your requesters and project sponsors

Audience:
Novice and intermediate designers and developers.

Technology discussed in this session:
Google Forms, Kerika, Google Keep, Canva, Gravity Forms, and other low-cost cloud-based tools.

The corporate eLearning development world may not always seem creative from the outside, but successful eLearning teams use creativity in every project they design and develop. But how, specifically, can this skill contribute to successful eLearning? What kinds of creativity should be part of your eLearning workflow? What benefits does creativity provide to your development process? How can you explain to your stakeholders that increased creativity contributes to business-focused learning objectives?

In this session, you will discover what kinds of creativity are part of a typical eLearning workflow and how you can use them to your advantage. You’ll also find out more about how creativity improves every aspect of eLearning projects for everyone involved—designers, developers, stakeholders, and even participants.

In this session, you will learn:

• About two specific areas of creativity that are integral to successful eLearning
• How creativity can be used to solve functional skill issues
• Ways to explain how creativity contributes to business objectives
• About tools that can facilitate creativity in eLearning development

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

Technology discussed in this session:
Adobe CC suite, iPad/tablet drawing and sketching tools, brainstorming software, and online creative gallery sites like Behance.

Designers, developers, trainers, instructors, content experts, and others too often design and build instruction in ways that interfere with how adults learn. The result is less-than-optimal learning that can lead to a chain reaction of disengagement in learning materials and limited, if any, performance improvement.

In this session, you will learn specific evidence-based practices and tactics that make instructional materials more “learnable” and promote learning. Explore the numerous factors that enable and increase learning through formal methods and materials, where they are often lacking, and how to improve them. You will be able to apply these practices and tactics to specific learning situations in order to learn to use them effectively in your own efforts.

In this session, you will learn:

• What learnability is and how it helps adults learn
• How to use readability scores to help make content easier to use
• About the tasks and realities of learning
• How to apply multiple learnability tactics to learning situations

Audience:
Intermediate and advanced designers and managers.

CACI International, a federal contractor, delivers compliance training to 20,000 employees annually to meet federal, state, and company legal requirements. Until 2015, the course was little more than a glorified PowerPoint presentation and check-the-box activity, lacking employee engagement, ownership, and commitment. In late 2014, an L&D team set out to take the training from average (yawn) to awesome (right on)! This session walks attendees through that transformation.

This session will share the process of transforming average compliance training into training that increases content engagement, hits the mark with employees (relatable, interactive, fun), and results in fewer compliance violations and better business-making decisions at all levels. The session will explore and demonstrate instructional techniques used: scenarios, authentic examples, videos, comic strips, and gamification. Learn about the technology, software, and other tools the team used to produce a course that engaged learners and achieved learning objectives. You’ll discover how to replicate a dramatic change to your training and overcome obstacles such as a conservative culture, antiquated LMS, and tight budget constraints.

In this session, you will learn:

• A process to transform training from “yawn” to “right on”
• Instructional techniques that engage learners and achieve objectives
• About tools and software that create engaging, interactive, and gamified eLearning
• Strategies to overcome obstacles

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

Technology discussed in this session:
Saba LMS, Lectora Inspire, Pixton Comics, eLearning Brothers templates, and Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator.

Whether you are creating a new project, developing an app, or launching a new platform, join this session to learn about the latest strategies in brainstorming, prototyping, and designing your experiences. This session will highlight tools, techniques, and workflows to help you kick off any project the right way. Learn how to communicate a concept beginning with low-fidelity prototypes, gather user feedback, and translate into high-fidelity prototypes before you start development. Get pumped and ready to take ideas out of your head and make them a reality!

Creating effective learning experiences is not a job for a novice, although many novices are thrown into the role of instructional designer/developer. If beginners turn to the field’s expansive literature, which ranges from cookbook-style guides and blogs to scientific research, they are easily overwhelmed and typically turn to overly simplistic approaches. But even experienced professionals can come to feel they’re never able to do the job that should be done.

In this session, you will learn how to create effective instructional experiences without oversimplifying them. You will come away from this session with six successful strategies that are responsive to research and best practices, simplifying the overall task while addressing the fundamentals needed for highly effective instruction.

In this session, you will learn:

• How to continually evaluate designs as they come together
• How to avoid excessive content presentation as a means to achieve greater content mastery
• How to challenge awareness goals
• How to design backwards (it’s faster, easier, and better)

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

Technology discussed in this session:
Exemplary eLearning applications.

Animation is a powerful tool for creating engaging eLearning experiences. Sadly, many animations are used without purpose as just a design embellishment. When that happens, the animation distracts the learner from the content rather than helping to elevate it.

This session will explore how animation can be used with purpose to create meaningful and appealing eLearning experiences. Demonstrating multiple before-and-after examples, the session will show how animation can explain complex ideas and create valuable learning content.

In this session, you will learn:

• How animation affects the learning process
• How to use animation with purpose to bring meaning to learning content
• About the various types of animations used within eLearning
• How to explain complex ideas and processes through animation

Audience:
Novice and intermediate designers and developers.

J.M. Barrie said, “We are all failures; at least, the best of us are.” When attending conferences, you often get the opportunity to see individuals sharing their best work. What isn’t visible is everything that fell apart in the process of achieving something great. These are great opportunities to learn from.

This session will explore the experiences of a panel of eLearning professionals who have a checkered past of designing and developing training solutions. They will share some of their eLearning dirty secrets—the worst examples from past projects—and discuss what they learned. They will also invite attendees to share their own eLearning dirty secrets, creating a real-time collection of lessons learned. You won’t want to miss out on this opportunity to see firsthand how others best learn from mistakes.

In this session, you will learn:

• From examples of bad eLearning projects
• About better ways of approaching eLearning design and development
• How to build your confidence to try something new and different

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

Click here for the session trailer

The opportunities to create transformative learning experiences have never been greater: There are more devices capable of delivering immersive media experiences to more people than ever before. Yet many learners are habituated to be wary of traditional, mandatory corporate learning programs. How should learning leaders understand this landscape, and how can they develop learning experiences that resonate with audiences?

In this session, you will learn how today’s audiences value experiences over all else, and how you can elevate learning to exceed these expectations and truly resonate. You will hear about examples of holistic learning programs that matched and surpassed the expectations of a very discerning audience. You will discover how to effectively leverage enhanced media and storytelling techniques to create memorable learning experiences. Explore ideas for implementing learning and communications programs that have succeeded in resonating with both learner and business audiences.

In this session, you will learn:

• How to deliver learning “experiences”
• How to effectively and sustainably earn the mind share of your audience
• How to use creative storytelling to communicate value and authenticity
• How the expectations of learners have changed

Audience:
Novice to advanced designers, developers, project managers, managers, directors, and senior leaders (VP, CLO, executive, etc.).

Technology discussed in this session:
Mobile technology, video, and gamification.

Design thinking—a prototype-driven, human-centered innovation process—can aid in the creation of experiences for the “real world” in a variety of form factors. It can help you develop emotional connections with your intended audience while you imagine new solutions and create user-centered prototypes for hands-on, high-energy design challenges. Sound exciting?

In this session, you will explore implementation of the design thinking process and learn about several best practices currently used in business as well as in education. You will learn about the seven stages of design thinking—define, research, ideate, prototype, choose, implement, and learn—and create user-centered prototypes for hands-on, high-energy design challenges. Learn how to design learning opportunities and thinking around real-world problems and solutions. Appreciate how the design thinking process applies to your personal innovative strategy and to solving problems within your organization.

In this session, you will learn:

• About the seven stages of design thinking
• From three case studies of design thinking applied in the real world
• How to create prototypes for hands-on, high-energy, time-based design challenges
• How to move from design thinking to design actions

Audience:
Novice designers and project managers.

A large amount of research in recent years has explored the value that music has for the brain and learning. Everyone has experienced it in some way, be it from listening to music while studying, learning something from a catchy song, or learning to play an instrument.

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 for 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.)

In this session, you will learn:

• How music enhances learning
• How people learn to play an instrument, and what that means for learning
• How music might enhance your practices
• How to play a ukulele!

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

Click here for the session trailer

“Blended learning” was one of the hottest buzzwords back in the day. In its infancy it was, at best, a design construct that focused on combining the best elements of face-to-face with eLearning. At worst, though, it merely gave the learner the choice of attending class in person or online. This was a cutting-edge approach at one time, but the tools and media for learning have expanded far beyond this. To get the most out of blended learning, you need to shift your thinking and look at how you can use all of today’s tools in the blend.

In this session, you’ll discover what’s beyond the traditional application of blended learning and dive into the next generation of this approach. With this new view on blended learning, your toolkit will move beyond just in-person classes and eLearning to include elements such as assessments for content personalization, simulations, mobile interventions, games and gamification, social learning, user-generated content, knowledge management, and yes, even performance support.

In this session, you will learn:

• What makes next-generation blended learning work
• What tools you should consider adding to your blend, and what the best practices for application are
• How instructional intent applies to this next-gen blend
• What modern blended learning solutions look like in action from real-world examples

Audience:
Intermediate to advanced designers, developers, managers, and directors.

As websites and apps get increasingly more sophisticated and personalized, people are coming to expect a similar experience from learning as well. Adaptive learning is one such technology that promises this experience, but many of the platforms that exist are expensive and currently geared primarily toward K-12 and higher education. How can L&D professionals in the corporate space find ways to provide their audience with this more tailored learning experience?

In this session, you’ll learn about the basics of adaptive learning, why it has been gaining momentum in K-12 arenas, and why it should be on your radar in the corporate environment. You’ll discuss obstacles to implementing full-scale adaptive learning technologies within the corporate infrastructure, and how you can leverage some of the adaptive philosophies within your current learning culture. You’ll also discover budget-friendly ways to use tools you already have, like Storyline or Captivate, to incorporate adaptive learning principles and give your audience a tailored learning experience.

In this session, you will learn:

• Where eLearning software falls on the spectrum of adaptive learning technology
• Three ways you can apply adaptive learning principles to eLearning
• How to create an adaptive learning path
• Which Storyline 2 features support adaptive learning design

Audience:
Intermediate and advanced designers and developers.

Technology discussed in this session:
Articulate Storyline 2, Adobe Captivate, and Smart Sparrow.

Have you ever found yourself in front of a classroom of reluctant learners who, arms crossed, decline to participate? Have you ever carefully crafted eLearning, only to hear later that learners rig paper clips in the keyboard so the course will automatically advance while they peruse Car & Truck Trader? “But we’re different. You don’t get us,” they say. Reluctant learners present a huge barrier to achieving good training results.

This session will explore the reasons behind this attitude in the context of three specific industries: firefighting, manufacturing, and aircraft maintenance. You will learn how to overcome this resistance and deliver training solutions that meet employee needs. You’ll also discuss strategies for developing buy-in from tough learner audiences.

In this session, you will learn:

• Strategies for creating training for a resistant audience in a way that builds buy-in and yields good training results
• About motivations behind the “But we’re different” attitude toward training
• About characteristics of skilled trade experts that contribute to a “But we’re different” attitude

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

During design and development, SMEs sometimes suggest ideas or practices that are antithetical to good instructional design. For example, a designer might have a stakeholder who believes it’s best to simply film a daylong stand-up training session and deliver it as one video. When this happens, it is helpful for the designer to be able to identify research findings to help the SME understand why learning should be designed differently.

This session will outline the most current research regarding assessment, usability, and multimedia in eLearning. Being able to cite research with SMEs and other stakeholders can assist the designer in creating quality instruction, as decisions are based on findings. Knowledge of current research is also one way for designers to remain current with regard to best practices in their professional field. Framed as a story, the session will use scenarios in which research is used to make design decisions, and attendees will receive a list of places to look for current research to inform eLearning practice.

In this session, you will learn:

• How to cite research in three areas: multimedia, visual design/usability, and assessment
• How to successfully use research to make data-driven decisions for design and development
• How to find sources of eLearning research
• How to conduct a research-based discussion with SMEs

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

Trends show that the volume of custom-developed compliance content and custom content in general is rising. Additionally, much of the content developed over the past 10 years is expiring and must be refreshed.  How should you approach this problem?  Explore the path to quicker, cheaper methods of managing the ever-changing complexities of compliance and custom-developed content. In this session you will learn three key areas of focus that will save you time and money. 

Millennials make up a quarter of the US population and will be a majority of the workforce in less than 10 years. Learning is a priority for Millennials, but how they learn differs greatly from previous generations, and new approaches are needed. This session will explore Millennial learning needs and discuss strategies that will engage them and keep them coming back for more.

Admit it: You have a love/hate relationship with stock photography websites. Sure, you love how using stock images can inspire your creativity, but you also hate how hard it is to find ones that look genuine and aren’t exaggerated. eLearning developers rely heavily on stock-image-based designs for building workplace eLearning. And it’s not just a problem of finding stock images full of people with the right poses or expressions. The bigger challenge is that the images you find often just don’t feel authentic.

In this session, you’ll learn 10 practical pointers for overcoming these challenges. Explore the research behind authenticity in images and find out how you can modify images to increase their authenticity. The session will cover when it’s acceptable to use stock images and when you should seek alternatives. You’ll learn about websites that provide diverse images, and you’ll leave with loads of free resources and inspiring ideas you can immediately apply to your projects.

In this session, you will learn:

• What research says about why authentic images really matter for eLearning
• How to find better-quality, more authentic imagery
• About specific websites that specialize in diverse imagery
• Different search terms to broaden the pool of images
• Easy techniques to add more authenticity to stock photos using tools you may already have
• When to consider alternatives to stock imagery

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

Using workplace stories to engage learners and enhance your content is a hot topic in learning and development. But when you’re getting started with storytelling as an instructional design technique, you’ll likely have a lot of questions about where to find effective stories for this purpose and how to make sure they not only entertain but also foster learning at the same time. You’ll also want to know how best to integrate storytelling techniques in the tools you already use.

In this session, you’ll discover how best to leverage the power of workplace stories in your eLearning projects. You’ll take a look at a broader model for finding and building instructional stories in general, and also explore how to convey these stories using the specific strengths and weaknesses of eLearning. You’ll learn how using stories strategically can boost engagement from your audience, and even how to use stories to motivate them before and after each course. This session will also introduce you to a variety of tools that can help you share these stories in exciting new ways.

In this session, you will learn:

• What the basic elements of story are, and how to use them to tell a story in the context of eLearning
• How workplace stories can increase engagement while also teaching and reinforcing content
• How to find real workplace stories to use in your eLearning
• How to determine whether your instructional story just entertains or also fosters learning
• About tools that can help you find and bring to life workplace stories for your eLearning projects

Audience:
Novice and intermediate designers and managers.

Technology discussed in this session:
eLearning development tools (Captivate, Storyline, etc.); animation tools (PowToon, CrazyTalk, etc.); augmented reality tools (Aurasma, etc.); and social media tools (brainstorming, sharing, chat, etc.).

When you’re developing strategies to engage your learners, you need to keep your audience and their anticipated learning environment top of mind. But with more and more people shifting when and how they want to access training content, it’s more important than ever to make sure your design strategies reflect this. Your success in reaching the modern learner will depend on understanding how these shifts should influence your technology selection, implementation strategy, and design approach.

In this session, you’ll learn more about how the design of learning should be influenced by where and when it is anticipated to occur. You’ll look at best practices from experts on the Five Moments of Learning Need, principles of modern workplace learning, and “push” versus “pull” training culture. Through exploring how to design pull learning for specific environments, when to use microlearning techniques, which media formats can help, and how social technologies may assist you, you’ll be better able to make design decisions that meet the true needs of modern learners.

In this session, you will learn:

• Why modern learners need a different approach to stay engaged with your content
• How to integrate best practices on engagement from experts
• How to design pull learning for specific learning environments
• When microlearning techniques are most appropriate for increasing engagement
• How formats like video, infographics, and short eLearning modules support different situations and moments of need
• What role social and collaborative technologies play in a pull learning environment

Audience:
Intermediate designers, developers, project managers, and managers.

Technology discussed in this session:
Social and collaborative learning tools and microlearning.

Click here for the session trailer

Accessibility is about more than just doing the bare minimum for compliance. It’s about the difference you can make when you ensure everyone has equal access to what you’ve designed. While this intent is good, in the real world, actually making all your content accessible can seem like a daunting task. But it doesn’t have to be.

In this session, you’ll find out just how easy it can be to learn how to design for everyone. You’ll hear from a panel of seasoned designers and developers who will share their personal stories about accessibility and how they’ve used best practices to design universal or inclusive solutions. You’ll learn how to start the conversation with stakeholders, create accessibility standards, and even teach others about accessible solutions.

In this session, you will learn:

• About basic accessibility standards
• How to create accessible content
• How to get buy-in from stakeholders
• About the basics of user research
• About different types of users

Audience:
Novice designers, developers, managers, directors, and senior leaders (VP, CLO, executive, etc.).

Critical thinking is an incredibly valuable skill in today’s workplace. In fact, the US Department of Labor proclaimed that it’s the raw material of workplace success. But while organizations value this skill, they don’t always systematically seek out and support it. Many employers actually say their employees struggle with critical thinking skills, and most want to provide more development opportunities in this area. How can the L&D field address this gap and help amp up people’s ability to think critically?

In this session, you’ll find out what critical thinking is, what it looks like on the job, and, most importantly, how you can contribute to building expertise in it at your organization. You’ll explore which training forms are most effective for building this complex skill and how mediums like video, mobile, and performance support can play a part. You’ll also find out about research-based methods and strategies to make your critical thinking training more effective. This session will help you create compelling experiences that encourage people to not sleepwalk through work but, instead, actively analyze and evaluate the work they do to make better connections and decisions.

In this session, you will learn:

• What critical thinking really is, and why it’s so essential to L&D
• How you can contribute to the development of critical thinking at your organization
• Research-based methods and strategies you can use in your content to boost critical thinking skills

Audience:
Novice and intermediate designers, developers, managers, directors, and senior leaders (VP, CLO, executive, etc.).

“Design thinking” is a common buzzword in both business and L&D these days. But while the term is talked about at length, the actual process for design thinking and the strategies associated with it are mentioned much less often. What makes design thinking so useful? What strategies do you need to keep in mind while using it? And most importantly, how exactly can you use it to create better courses and content?

In this hands-on session, you’ll build an understanding of the design thinking process and learn how to apply it to the design and development of your learning content. Through reworking a real course or lesson plan that you bring with you to this session, you’ll learn various strategies to assist with gaining a stronger understanding of your learner, generating big ideas, and prototyping the learner experience. You’ll leave this workshop with a practical collection of useful strategies and a concrete beginning to a new course or learning experience!

In this session, you will learn:

• What design thinking is and how to apply this process to your course design
• Strategies for researching and empathizing with your learners
• Methods for collaborating and generating ideas
• Approaches for prototyping
• How to apply these concepts to your own work

Audience:
Novice designers.

Technology discussed in this session:
Stormboard.

Technology required:
Attendees will need to sign up for a free Stormboard account.

Frequently, learning design is about showing people how to do the right things, but actually getting them to change their behavior can be another story. It’s particularly challenging to get people to change those intractable habits and behaviors that everyone struggles to avoid, despite the wealth of available information about better choices.

This session will explore how to design with behavior change in mind. You will examine behavior change from a number of different angles, using techniques from the fields of neuroscience, behavioral economics, behavioral psychology, persuasive technology, user experience, and even game design.

In this session, you will learn:

• How to identify and understand the barriers to behavior change
• Ways to design solutions that don’t just inform learners, but also inspire behavior change
• How to use specific models and techniques for designing a change effort

Audience:
Intermediate and advanced designers, developers, and managers.

Employees at a global technology giant were enrolling in a popular performance improvement workshop at a rapid clip. The learning activities and exercises were interactive, hands-on, and practical. But wait lists were long, mostly because capacity was limited by the delivery format: two days of face-to-face instructor-led training. The challenge: to scale enrollments while reducing costs, without sacrificing learner engagement. The solution: a brain-friendly virtual learning environment and experience.

In this session, you will hear the story of learning solutions architects and instructional designers who transposed this location-bound workshop to a live, virtual, web-based delivery platform. You will see how their redesign allowed for more course offerings, lower costs, and improvements to learner interaction and engagement. You will learn how they used the latest research from the neuroscience of learning design to accomplish four key design objectives: maximize learner attention and focus on activities and outcomes; induce learner-generated meaning, associations, and insights; stimulate emotional connections to the learning through positive social pressure; and encode new learning in long-term memory through spaced repetition.

In this session, you will learn:

• Four key principles of the neuroscience of learning
• How to maintain learner attention and focus in a virtual learning environment
• How to stimulate learner-generated meaning and insights
• How to design for emotional commitment to the learning through positive social pressure
• How to use spaced repetition effectively to encode learning to long-term memory

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

Technology discussed in this session:
WebEx, Adobe Connect, and Citrix.

With the advent of so many new technologies, ensuring the learner has the best access to the right-size, right-format content, delivered at the right time, is challenging. Coupled with rapid development cycles, this means designers have less time to do thorough or extremely detailed needs analysis.

Take time and do your homework! What is motivating your learners? How do their goals and experiences alter your learning strategy? Why do you care about their feelings or emotions? In this session, you will explore strategies used in learning and marketing to identify techniques to tackle learner needs as you design learner personas. You will learn about a tool that can capture these personas, and finally, you will find out how to use user stories to showcase these learner profiles.

In this session, you will learn:

• New approaches to tackle learner needs
• How to capture personas within a new tool or framework
• How to craft user stories to showcase learner interaction with learning components and technologies
• How to assess ways in which learning can utilize techniques from the field of marketing

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

What is 508 compliance? What is WCAG 2.0? How can you make your courses compliant? What is the easiest way to create alternate text? How does a course that is taken by someone using JAWS even function? How can you make sure you’re thinking of your learner? These are some of the questions that demand answers for the Storyline user, as many instructional designers lack both the understanding of what 508 compliance really means and the competence to effectively develop compliant courses.

In this session, you will see how Articulate Storyline can help you create eLearning modules that are more accessible for users. You will see how a learner uses JAWS to complete your courses. You will learn how to use alternate text to describe screen elements, and you will learn to build courses with closed-captioning effects. Finally, you will leave this session with hands-on understanding of the Storyline features that support accessible content.

In this session, you will learn:

• What 508 compliance and WCAG 2.0 mean to you as a developer
• How to view a course through a learner utilizing JAWS
• How to create appropriate alternate text for objects
• How to create closed-caption text for your learners

Audience:
Novice to intermediate designers, developers, and project managers who are familiar and comfortable with Windows, the Storyline user interface, and eLearning concepts.

Technology discussed in this session:
Articulate Storyline 2; Windows 7, 8, or 10, or Mac running Parallels; Adobe Flash Player 10.3 or later; JAWS screen reader program.

Participant technology requirements:
Laptop (PC or Mac running Windows); Storyline 2, update 5 or later (installed and operating).

Click here for the session trailer

Have you ever watched a really engaging web-based conference session and wondered, “How’d they do that?” When slides or polls appear or videos pop up and play automatically, it’s not magic! There’s a person behind every action who must click, type, or drag to make things happen. And learning how to use these features when you run your own webinars is surprisingly easy.

If you’ve always been a participant and never a presenter, this session will give you a behind-the-scenes peek at how interactivity in webinars can be done. To get started, you’ll explore the Adobe Connect software from a presenter’s point of view so you can see what aspects of it you’ve been missing. You’ll find out more about how to choose the right kind of webinar room to set up, which settings you’ll want to customize to get ready for interactions, how to work with participant questions and tech problems, and what the main differences are between the presenter view and the participant view.

In this session, you will learn:

• How to choose the right type of webinar room (meeting, training, event, webinar) for your event
• How to customize settings and features to accommodate planned interactions
• How to manage participant questions and technical issues
• What presenters do that participants don’t see

Audience:
Novice and intermediate designers and managers.

Technology discussed in this session:
Adobe Connect.

eLearning has fallen behind other sectors in developing engaging, immersive experiences. While the world of advertising is continually exploring new ways to affect people’s habits and decisions, eLearning developers often focus purely on knowledge acquisition. This session will explore how the psychology of marketing can affect the efficacy of eLearning.

In this session, you will learn marketing techniques that you can apply to eLearning development for a more comprehensive approach to learning. You will explore psychological perspectives on learning and developing healthy habits. Learn about key strategies for supporting the needs of the whole student, including the social and emotional components that create impactful learning. You will be able to identify how learning resources can be leveraged to their full potential: not just to relay knowledge, but to inspire behavioral change.

In this session, you will learn:

• About straightforward changes you can make to dramatically increase the impact of your learning resources
• From examples of different eLearning approaches to understand the differences that make a difference
• About the psychology behind behavioral change, and how to apply it to eLearning design
• How to ensure your eLearning resources are developed with the whole student in mind

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

Technology discussed in this session:
Adobe Captivate and Articulate Storyline.

Click here for the session trailer

Some of the best training out there looks like it was developed by a single designer, regardless of how many people worked on it. But often when more than one learning professional is in the mix and there aren’t established design standards, even with the best of intentions the final product suffers from inconsistency and results in training that looks hodgepodge. The bigger the team, the worse that inconsistency can become. Consistency is key—and the solution resides in detailed style guides, design documents, and templates to make your work look polished and professional.

In this session, you’ll discover how using style guides for your team projects can lead to quicker development times, more consistency, and easier decisions about the look and feel of future projects. You’ll explore what a detailed approach to style guides looks like and discover best practices to use in creating your own. Developing and using these style guides will save countless hours—time that you can spend making more top-notch training instead of trying to clean up inconsistency.

In this session, you will learn:

• How to judge whether something needs a standard “style”
• About the importance of templates
• What a design document is
• How to create a style guide in Microsoft Word, and why you need one
• How to use screenshots to enhance your style guide
• How to know when you need to update your style guide

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

Technology discussed in this session:
Microsoft Word, PowerPoint, Adobe Illustrator, Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Flash, and Snagit.

Simulations can provide learners with safe environments in which to learn how to use new skills through practice and failure. When done well, they give people the opportunity to get things wrong and learn from that experience in a way that has little to no risk involved. They can also be deeply immersive, replicating the actual experience of doing something in a realistic and engaging way. Because of this, they can be incredibly effective tools for learning. But how do you create simulations on your own, particularly if you’re on a tight budget?

In this session, you’ll explore both the learning theory and practical application that you’ll need to start designing simulations that build workplace skills. You’ll learn how to apply game design techniques and architectures to learning, as well as how they can contribute to your learning goals. You’ll also discuss examples of real simulations that are used in the workplace now and look at ideas of where simulations may go in the future to increase their effectiveness.

In this session, you will learn:

• How to design immersive and engaging simulations
• How applying aspects of game design can make your simulations more effective
• About low-cost technologies that are available to help you create simulations yourself
• How to address the challenges of delivering simulations on mobile devices
• How to design simulations for an audience that has limited time available for learning

Audience:
Novice and intermediate designers and developers.

Technology discussed in this session:
Browser-based simulations, Unity 3D, augmented reality, virtual reality, Oculus Rift, and Microsoft HoloLens.

Click here for the session trailer