Economic stress, learning technologies, global competition, and the learning sciences present opportunities and threats to learning and performance professionals. How will you respond as we move to more mobile, performance support, and video?

With the combination of highly engaging content and on-the-go availability through mobile, eLearning is now reaching wider audiences. This reflects the power of mobile learning, but its combination with the xAPI is still evolving and is in its infancy. At the same time, mobile learning capabilities like collaboration, messaging, and offline use have yet to be harnessed by many learning platforms. Moreover, the analytical data collected using the xAPI are also underutilized.

Formal online learning doesn’t work like it used to. Attention spans are decreasing, and mobile access is more critical than ever. So how do you create mobile learning without hiring experts or spending a fortune? And how do you get part-time employees to care about making shakes and smoothies?

The prerequisite to effective training retention is gaining the attention of students once they have left the training environment. This is not a trivial challenge! Employees ignore emails, never visit web portals, and forget about apps installed on their phones. How can you gain access to their attention to reinforce important training?

Your business sponsor wants to cut costs and improve performance. Your end users want lots of high-quality, traditional training. You need solutions that focus on enabling performance through the use of both formal training and effective performance support. How can you effectively evaluate learning and performance needs and implement solutions that leverage both formal training and performance support in the most efficient way possible?

Technology continues to advance rapidly, changing how people live and interact with the world around them. Today’s learning professionals face the challenge of staying ahead of this curve and tracking the technologies that are shaping the future of organizational learning, while at the same time recognizing technologies that may be more of a passing fad.

There are so many authoring tools on the market, and so many promise that they’ll let you create stellar mobile learning solutions. How can any organization make sense of which will serve it best? Is one enough, or do you need two? Are two enough, or do you need eight? You don’t randomly choose which car to buy. You don’t throw a dart at a map to decide where to live. Research is key, and consulting an unbiased expert can save a lot of time and cost. Choosing an authoring tool that you can use to create mobile lessons is no different.

The Experience API is an eLearning software specification that allows learning content and learning systems to communicate with each other. The xAPI is appealing to mLearning developers who seek accessible solutions for learner activity tracking. At the same time, considering how diversified the mLearning and training ecosystem is, solutions such as PhoneGap can enable cross-platform delivery. Combining both tools allows for the delivery of a cross-platform solution with the ability to track learners’ experience.

Video technology is ubiquitous. However, many professionals become so preoccupied with whether they CAN produce a video that they often don’t stop to think about whether they SHOULD. Too often, this results in the development of ineffective content that doesn’t support user needs, wastes viewers’ time, and sets a poor precedent for the use of video within the organization.

Microlearning is a way to solve the problems facing L&D today: dwindling attention spans, shrinking budgets, knowledge workers with less time, and perhaps most challenging, the rapid evolution of technology that outdates skills as soon as they’re learned.

Within the learning and development professional community, we don’t always focus on the tools we need to enable our performance. The phrase “The shoemaker’s children have no shoes” comes to mind here. In this session we will discuss a performance support solution created for instructional designers participating in the 5 Moments of Learning Need™ certificate program. We will preview the solution and discuss how it helps instructional designers both as a tool during learning and, more importantly, as a support tool while they apply 5 Moments of Learning Need™ methods on the job.

Interviewing is a common way to gather information and a widely used approach in learning and development, HR, and marketing research. Capturing this information on video for analysis and reuse is a good way to extend the life of captured content. However, many people don’t know what makes one interview more effective than another in what they capture and the questions being asked.

Learning organizations jump feet first into emerging trends without the right people, in the right seats, on the bus. The result of this approach is waste. Video production requirements go beyond the basic understanding of consumer electronics and, within the intersection of learning and development, can result in a considerable learning curve for quality production outcomes.

Subject matter experts (SMEs) have expert knowledge to share. For rapid development situations or just-in-time training, SMEs can contribute good, solid content videos that can be shared with learners—and they can create the videos when they have the time or when a situation arises that would be a great video example, such as demonstrating a process or recalling a dangerous situation.

Practice makes perfect. Few would argue with that statement, but how do you provide enough time for ongoing practice and meaningful feedback with time-crunched employees?

The use of online video has become an essential part of teaching and learning. At the same time, it is challenging to provide accessible video accommodations for audiences across platforms and languages. Google thinks that all video material should be universally accessible—why not caption?

Organizations transforming their businesses for new digital platforms and marketplaces need to make such transition as effective and painless as possible. During the rollout of new software platforms, companies need to continuously monitor the impact that new digital procedures and processes are having on workforce acceptance and customers’ engagement. More effective and intelligent solutions are needed to make companies cross the digital chasm—without falling into it.

Juggling the related-but-different needs for effective formal learning and informal performance support can be daunting. So how do you keep your project from falling short in delivering client needs on time and within budget? How do you adjust when client needs are often changing? Agile provides a framework for adapting to change as it happens and working with the client to deliver the content most needed by learners.

Business leaders often request training when there are better options available. Even when they do need “courses,” it’s often only to check off a box. In these situations, you have a responsibility to validate that creating a course is the most effective and efficient approach. Even when courses are appropriate, they’re rarely enough on their own to drive the change organizations need.

As a performance support professional, you “get it,” but what if your leadership doesn’t? How do you prove that PS is the way to address a business issue and move your organization toward innovation? This session will review a step-by-step framework for developing a proof of concept and demonstrate several budget-friendly tools you can use to make PS come alive.

When investing in technologies and applications to enable effective workforce performance support, who is buying? Who is investing time? Who manages them? Who creates the assets? Who deploys the assets? Who are the beneficiaries? 

Two of the most popular technologies used to engage learners today are video and mobile. Videos are becoming increasingly interactive, even on mobile devices, but developing these videos can be complex. Where does an organization start?

The explosion of mobile devices has revolutionized the web design world, which has shed approaches based on centuries-old printing methods to embrace a new grammar of design, responsive web design (RWD). But the world of learning has not caught up. Like learning any new language, working in RWD means learning to think differently. Thinking differently, though, gives you an opportunity to change how you design learning experiences for the better.

For many organizations, the front-line staff would most benefit from mLearning, yet challenges arise when this audience has different levels of technological adoption and is geographically dispersed. For all learners, mLearning needs to be intuitive, effective, and simple. How can L&D professionals make the best possible mLearning solutions that truly deliver on the learning objectives?

There is a lot of mediocre training out there. This can be attributed to a shortage of time and money available to corporate training departments. Many of the DIY development tools currently in use yield passive learning experiences that are not engaging and do not require critical thinking or problem-solving skills. We are out to change that by using game-based technologies to improve engagement and produce measurable results.

As training audiences are deployed with mobile devices to use for training and performance support, performance technologists often face challenging logistical and infrastructure constraints when building performance solutions.

The convergence of mobile delivery, micro-learning, and new authoring tools provides great opportunities to innovate where limited time and budget are available. Much mobile-delivered micro-learning focuses on spaced repetition and memorization. Micro-sims go beyond knowledge and comprehension and require learners to synthesize and apply concepts in realistic contexts.

L&D is vital to the continued growth of any organization, but how do you develop relevant content that your employees can relate to? And how do you keep your employees engaged and involved in the process of learning?

Online video-based instruction can be just as ineffective as traditional face-to-face lectures when learners are passive recipients of information. The “testing effect” describes the observation that the process of remembering concepts or facts increases long-term retention of those concepts or facts. The creation of question-embedded videos offers a practical way to increase user engagement and increase long-term retention.

Incorporating gaming techniques (serious games, social games, and gamification) within educational programs and corporate training experiences is one of the hottest topics in the learning and development field today. If your organization isn’t already leveraging the power of gaming, then this session is the perfect way to quickly assess whether and where mobile gaming and gamification techniques are right for your organization.

Let’s face it: Learning content is getting out of control. Designers and developers can’t find anything and end up reinventing the wheel. This is a symptom of content overload, a condition as organizations try to make content more bite-sized, modular, and mobile to meet the needs of modern learners. Learners are experiencing it, too. As organizations adapt learning strategies, content strategy must follow.

Mobile first is the standard in today’s learning and development industry. Companies need ways to be able to reach their sales reps wherever they are. Many companies do not have the means to develop device-agnostic mobile applications for learning in the time frame needed to provide just-in-time learning. Mobile messaging can offer a just-in-time learning solution without the development time.

Do the people who most need your mobile learning reside internationally, although you are apprehensive of taking on a global launch? Do you want to learn more about the considerations that impact your global mobile learning success? Maybe you have a solid plan, or maybe you are ready to take the jump and want to validate your strategy with a global organization on the same journey.

The 70:20:10 model holds that 70 percent of learning happens informally on the job. However, there are a lot of distractions at work that inhibit the amount of learning that can be achieved—deadlines, coworker interruptions, meetings, etc. Also, since learning is an afterthought when performing your job, it’s a fairly inefficient process, especially when compared to the other 30 percent, where learning is typically the overarching theme.

Adobe Captivate is a widely used authoring tool for eLearning courseware and mobile learning experiences. Now Adobe offers developers the opportunity to create responsive animations to their mobile learning projects.

Many people accept that the way to extend learning solutions to the moment of need is through performance support. But while L&D professionals recognize the value of this approach, actually knowing how to take existing projects and transform them into solutions that truly support people in the moment can be a challenge.

“If you taught them this, why don’t they do it?” Educational services staff at Saint Vincent Hospital got tired of hearing this question and started looking for a new learning paradigm for the institution. The solution was found in performance support. By blending learning opportunities and performance support for associates before a class, during a class, and on the job, organizations are able to significantly impact job performance.

Learning and development professionals strive to meet on-the-job performance support needs in a typical work environment. Now, imagine the needs of a laboratory where employees are responsible for manufacturing radiopharmaceuticals (radioactive drugs). Cardinal Health technicians operate in a highly regulated lab environment with ever-changing operating procedures that affect a manufacturing process in which one misstep could impact a patient.

We all know that video is an incredibly effective learning method. Learners can remember up to six times more from trainings and classes that incorporate videos than they do from those that don’t. Many trainers, however, are not sure how to most effectively use videos; simply showing clips is not the best method. In fact, it’s a missed opportunity!

With its shift of learning away from information overload delivered in large chunks to learning in more manageable increments within the context of work, performance support is already an improvement on traditional methods of training. Looking to further improve learner performance, in this session we’ll discuss the possibilities of imagining “support” as “learning” with insights from psychological and neuroscience research. Building on unconventional notions about the nature of memory, constructing learning methods on a “remembering” curve, and attending to the learning environment are just a few of the opportunities we will explore in this open conversation with panelists.