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?

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.

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.

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? 

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.

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.

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.

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.

Years of momentum have resulted in a collection of use cases for teams seeking to leverage the xAPI to better track, measure, and manage their learning efforts. The time is now; the xAPI can improve the ways you create and deliver content and classes, track interactions, communicate, and measure performance. Armed with knowledge and the proverbial “Swiss Army knife” of xAPI functions, you can begin to “slice, saw, tweeze, and pick” your way through training obstacles.

Implementing effective performance support is challenging. How do you deliver useful information at the time of need without being disruptive to the employee’s workflow? How do you integrate the content effectively within the context of the user’s task at hand? How do you leverage the available technology (devices, web access, security) to reach the target audience and provide a strong user experience?

Performance support is very different from training. In a world where many people are conditioned to think that learning should look like school, with teachers, students, and formal instruction, it can be difficult to get an organization and its workers to adjust to a performance support approach.

As a follow-up to 2015’s Performance Support Symposium presentation, we present the results and lessons learned!

The current state of mobility and the demand it has created for shorter content lengths, collaborative environments, and personalized experiences are the primary drivers of a renaissance that sees learning seeding itself in practically every environment encountered by today’s worker. Learning has propagated beyond the LMS, beyond the classroom, beyond performance support tools. Organizations must come up with new eLearning strategies and archetypes to work within this evolving learning ecosystem.

Electronic performance support systems, workflow learning, just-in-time training, help on steroids. Even though performance support (PS) has existed as a concept for more than 25 years, its many names are a testament to how difficult it can be to explain, let alone sell, PS to customers, senior leaders, or sometimes even your own team.

Getting started is often the hardest challenge when implementing a performance support solution. You have recognized the need for performance support and want to implement it in your organization, but where to begin? What factors should you take into consideration? What resources are required? Where should you first deploy the solution? Across which business processes? These questions and more will be addressed in this session.

Preparing to implement a performance support process requires forethought and planning, but it doesn’t need to be daunting or overwhelming. In this session, we will explore ways you can prepare for a successful implementation and share real-world examples of how outlining the right steps beforehand will ensure the best outcome. 

In the 21^st century, it’s increasingly challenging to keep people engaged in content. Today’s learning professionals must employ new technologies to influence and change attitudes and behavior. Interactive video is one of those technology solutions that the market is gravitating toward, and for good reason. However, there are many different solutions out there, and not all are created equal. When instructional designers and eLearning professionals are selecting technology for their programs, where should they begin?

Mobile learning has tremendous value, but for many organizations, going mobile is a big step. That’s why, when trying to develop a mobile learning culture within your organization, often the hardest part is convincing internal stakeholders. Amid budget constraints, complex infrastructures, IT restrictions, and philosophical misalignment, how do you make a compelling case for mLearning within your organization?

Increasingly, companies must use innovate ways to add to the bottom line. Unlike previous disrupters in mobile and eLearning, Gear VR, powered by Oculus, takes video experiences to the next level. Where does virtual reality fit into an organizational learning strategy? How does an organization effectively move forward to maximize its capability?

Undefined business processes, untested and incomplete systems, continually changing requirements, and scope creep—sound familiar? One or all of these conditions can wreak havoc on a project and cause it to continue on well past its targeted end date. How do you develop content for a project that continually evolves? How do you maximize limited resources under these conditions? How do you survive the project that never seems to end?

Mobile learning is one component in a whole learning ecosystem. Many organizations have discovered what does not work: simply pushing existing content out to mobile as though it were merely an infrastructure. To design and deliver effective mobile learning requires a new design mindset: a mindset for mobile. This will help the organization adapt its approach to truly unlock the power of mobile learning.

Skill training in first aid had changed little since the Knights of St. John formalized the process in the 11^th century. The focus had been on in-class demonstrations, in-class practice, and paper-based exams, and students updated their skills only every three years. Fast forward to 2016; people aren’t learning that way anymore. So how do you transform hundreds of years of subject matter expertise into a 21^st-century learning solution? Follow St. John Ambulance’s journey from inspiration at mLearnCon 2014 to leaping forward to embrace evolution through mobile learning.

Moments after a performance support solution has been introduced, it is quite possible that it contains irrelevant or inaccurate information due to the constant state of change businesses are experiencing in technology, policy, and process. A core tenet of performance support is that it is immediately helpful. Often, it takes just one irrelevant or inaccurate experience to cause a user to abandon a performance support solution permanently.

While technology has transformed people’s lives, L&D has primarily stayed the same. Sure, the industry has evolved by utilizing technology to access and track content, but it is still focused on the traditional course mentality. Should you be going down the same path with mobile learning? What are the opportunities for mobile to help promote a fundamental change in how and when you provide education?

When they go right, video projects can go incredibly right! But when they go wrong, they can go very, very wrong. The stakes are higher with eLearning in video form because of the costs, expectations, and limitations in making updates to content.

JLG, a leading manufacturer of lift equipment for various industries, needed a way for site supervisors to verify whether an operator had the proper certifications to operate any given piece of equipment, down to the specific model. The company struggled with providing immediate compliance instructions.

All too often, embedded performance support (EPS) is seen as a technology or a software application to purchase. While both may come into play, EPS is a discipline that drives new skills in L&D as well as new methods and, potentially, new technology. History shows that being ready to pursue adoption of EPS is not the same as being in a state of readiness to sustain the adoption.