Your goal is to provide learners with a terrific learning experience. Increasingly, those learning experiences are occurring on multiple devices—smartphones, tablets, laptops, you name it! How can you deliver that terrific multi-device experience when you don’t know how to code and you don’t have time to spend endlessly tweaking and adjusting your courses to suit every screen size for every device?

Anyone who has been in the eLearning business over the past 10 years and who works with mobile technology has run into this major issue: Flash. Many legacy programs were either authored using Adobe Flash or an authoring tool with SWF output, and many of today’s mobile devices are unable to support them.

Do you need a simple mobile-first or responsive performance support solution? Today’s mobile workers often don’t need training; what they need is quick access to a knowledge base to find an answer. But the organizations putting these resources in place need something more than page views to measure their effectiveness.

Today’s L&D professionals are tasked to create more video without breaking the budget. There’s also increasing pressure to ensure that these videos are effective at supporting learning and performance goals. What are some of the metrics used to track instructional video, and how do you make sense of those numbers?

Training comes most commonly in the form of a webinar or in-person presentation with a slide deck. You get a lot of information, presentation of complex topics, and a two-way communication street where questions from the audience can be addressed as they come up. These are all good things. But sometimes you don’t want to know how to build a watch—you just need to know what time it is.

The use of online video to support performance is a hot topic these days. But when is it a viable solution? How can it improve performance? And, most importantly, how can you build a solution that uses it effectively?

The use of games in eLearning is growing. However, most eLearning designers struggle to know where to start with games. Building an interactive game can be difficult without skills and practice in coding software.

Traditional video is an important and engaging component of training programs and curriculum development. However, traditional video only allows learners to see the linear path of video projects. What if you could give learners the ability to fully immerse themselves into the videos they’re watching? With 360-degree video, you do just that.

The common approach, when introducing live video into virtual learning applications, is to create an online lecture room where participants watch and can be seen by the lecturer and can easily join the conversation. But this is just the tip of the iceberg! eLearning teams must build on the dramatically changed expectations of new generations brought up in a social revolution that has put live video communication in the hands of over three billion people around the world.

When videos, presentations, and slide shows start to look ho-hum and just aren’t holding your learners’ attention anymore, it’s time to step it up. Say goodbye to boring bullets and static graphics, and give your audience something to keep them watching.

Poor-quality explainer videos can distract your learners and prevent them from getting the message. Many L&D professionals operate on a tight budget and do not have a lot of video editing experience. How do you create professional-level videos that can be delivered on any platform or eLearning tool?

Building mobile interactions for learning is challenging. Adobe Captivate 2017 offers two approaches to mobile development: breakpoints and fluid boxes. When building interactions, you need to put some thought into how to place the objects on the screen. Knowing the rules of how to work with breakpoints and fluid boxes will give you a big head start and help you avoid a lot of mistakes.

Verifying that a new hire is ready for operational responsibilities is a continual challenge, but in the technical support world where “first time fix” is such a crucial measure of customer satisfaction and efficiency, it is vital. Theory tests only go so far; the adoption of mobile devices by this technician community presented an opportunity to gather data in the field to validate understanding and correct application.

Proper lighting in your video makes a world of difference in how your viewers perceive your product. But good lighting can be a challenging aspect of video production. Have you found yourself asking the following questions: “How do I know which lights to get? How do I determine the correct lighting placement? How many lights should I use? Should I buy or rent them?”

Everybody has experienced video training—the good, the bad, and the ugly. But by taking a "real-life" approach to video content, you can up retention and create a unique training experience that goes beyond just training on ideal situations. 

You have a phone and tablet, and you use them for four or five tools and applications, but there is so much more you can do with them. Mobile devices present fantastic opportunities to create and modify photos, videos, and graphics. You are only limited by your own imagination.

You want to make sure your learners are engaged, and you have an idea for a learning game that will help you achieve that goal. You know that it needs to be focused on the content and the learner’s needs and not something you’re going to throw in just for fun. You’re excited to build this, and you think you will be able to repurpose it for other lessons, learners, and content. Suddenly, you hit a wall because you haven’t acquired the higher-order skills in Captivate yet. What, exactly, do you need to know?

Not responding well to responsive course design? Frustrated with the nuances of responsive course development with rapid authoring tools? Tired of trying to get your courses to look great on desktop, mobile, and tablet devices? Need a way to deliver information awareness training that doesn’t require LMS tracking? As responsive course design becomes more prevalent, you must continue to come up with innovative ways to deliver memorable learning experiences.

With the ADL’s release of cmi5 in June 2016 as the xAPI profile for LMS/content communication, a wave of early-adopter authoring tools have embraced the specification. Other authoring tools have been slower to adopt cmi5, opting to rely on xAPI-enabled SCORM modules to extend tracking beyond the limited data points of SCORM.

New for FocusOn this year! This is a popular session being offered twice. It's also available as session 1012.

According to the Pew Research Center, 92 percent of adults ages 18 – 29 reported watching videos on a video-sharing site. This is becoming a norm for learning and obtaining new knowledge. Live-action videos with SMEs are not always possible because of the costs and time associated with this practice. If you think advanced animation that is engaging, entertaining, and fun seems out of reach for most eLearning professionals, think again!

mLearning developers spend a lot of time developing courses. Often, the programming is needlessly repetitive, which makes the work inefficient and increases costs. In other cases, the programming leads to undesirable trade-offs because engaging interactions can be difficult and time-consuming to develop. An investigation of how to reduce repetitiveness and improve engagement might lead one to think this problem could be easily resolved through tools or templates. However, it’s not that simple.

Interactive videos increasingly are seen as one of the most effective ways to demonstrate a desired behavior while maximizing learner retention. However, the high cost of external video production combined with expensive interactive video authoring tools often means that this solution is out of reach for many organizations—but it doesn’t have to be.

Microlearning is a way of teaching and delivering content to learners in small, very specific bursts. Microlearning videos can teach people how to use different systems within an organization effectively and efficiently—including systems for travel, finances, document management, procurement, and more.

Many professionals developing eLearning content focus on SCORM or static content. Video is often thought of as an expensive and difficult modality, and is outsourced to agencies and external production houses. It’s so helpful for teaching others to use software, yet there is a fear of getting started with video and committing valuable time and resources to its creation. Constant changes in software interfaces add to these concerns.

Have you seen videos where a green screen or blue screen wasn’t used properly? There’s a thin green line around the edge of the actor or a green hue on their clothes, which makes the video less authentic and usable. Filming someone on a green screen can be a challenging aspect of video production.

Everyone plays games, so why not use that interest to help them improve their performance? This session will address how instructional designers and learning professionals can develop a gamification culture in their organization. By describing and experiencing the difference between gamification and gaming, you will learn how to incorporate gaming techniques into traditional eLearning designs.

Organizations often spend a lot of time and money to create awesome videos for learning, but don’t track how effective the videos are. How do you know if your videos are effective? Are learners watching the videos? For how long? Having this kind of data would help you create better and more effective videos, so how do you track these types of measurements?

Audio is easily neglected in online multimedia, especially for learners viewing on mobile devices with relatively substandard audio playback hardware (tiny speakers or earbuds). In fact, audio has not undergone the same rapid stylistic change that video has in the YouTube era—viewers still expect rich, clean, and well-balanced audio. Poor audio is always the first signal of an amateurish production.

Shooting video according to the script is one thing, but what about when the content is the conversation, or an interview with live Q&A? What about when there is no power to call “Cut!” and start again? No fixing it in post? No webinar agenda? How can you best leverage live interactions without compromising the recorded asset?

In the beginning, gamification was shiny and new and full of promise. But its reputation quickly tarnished when people misused it as a quick fix to create learner engagement. There was too much focus on extrinsic rewards and on elements like points, badges, and leaderboards (PBLs) in ways devoid of meaning to the learner. But gamification is alive and well for those who dug deeper.

Many training professionals are reluctant to start developing game-based learning. They may mistakenly believe their success depends on being able to code as a programmer, being proficient in developing animations or virtual worlds, being able to illustrate as a state-of-the-art graphic designer, or being an expert videographer. By devaluing the effectiveness of low-cost, low-tech solutions, they lose the opportunity to convince key stakeholders to fund more ambitious projects.

Building learning for mobile devices is not the same as building an eLearning module. At its most basic level, it requires tools and features with specific options that support mobile development. But it also requires you to take a different approach to how you should design your content. Great mobile content takes into account the needs of your mobile learners as well as the unique features that mobile learning can provide to them.

The da Vinci Surgical System was an important medical innovation, but not necessarily one that was quick for hospital staff to learn to use. With such a complex product, hospital OR staff needed not only training on how to transport the system, set it up, and use it during surgery, but also follow-up support to help them master interacting with it in the hospital operating room. This support needed to be quick, so staff could quickly access the information necessary to work effectively with the system, and it needed to be available at any time and on any device. The solution was to blend video and performance support, creating a video portal staff could access at their exact time of need.

What’s the best camera for a shoot? The definitive answer is, “The one you have with you.” The ubiquity of the mobile camera means that when you’re in the presence of great instructional content, it can become video in seconds. In addition, viewers are developing a special respect for authentic-looking video—footage that looks raw, real, and genuine. This is why many training videographers have moved to iPhones as their main production equipment, even on high-production-value shoots. So how can you benefit from this stylistic trend?

With an ever-increasing number of people spending more time watching online video than they do watching TV, it’s no surprise that the demand for video content is higher than ever. As you might expect, this trend is also leading to a higher expectation for video communication and training in the workplace. Fortunately, as it continues to grow in popularity, video is also becoming easier and more cost-effective for anyone to produce as long as they have the right tools to help.

New for FocusOn this year! This is a popular session being offered twice. It's also available as session 506.