eLearning Foundations Bootcamp

Sunday, March 24

Designing eLearning can feel complex when you’re getting started, whether you’ve just recently begun creating learning experiences or are moving from designing classroom experiences to digital ones. You have to juggle new tools, approaches, and work partnerships, all while trying to make a final experience that communicates content clearly, meets your stakeholders’ goals, and provides a useful experience for your audience.

The eLearning Foundations Bootcamp will help you quickly build the core skills needed for eLearning design and development, regardless of the tools you use or the content you’re sharing. From techniques for crafting strong content to processes for managing your workflow and approaches for building partnerships with subject matter experts and stakeholders, this intensive event will give you a toolkit of practical techniques that can make your work easier and more effective.

Who should attend

This co-located event is ideal for people new to crafting eLearning experiences. This can include accidental instructional designers who may not have a background in learning, people segueing from designing in-person training to digital, or those who have completed a formal instructional design program but are still looking for help with practical application. This event will share strategies and techniques that are tool-agnostic, so no matter what tools you design and develop content for, what you’ll learn in this event will apply to the work you do.

Agenda

Morning: Mastering Your Workflow

8:30a – 8:45a

Welcome

8:45a – 9:30a

eLearning Approaches

We’ll kick off the day by looking at the most common eLearning approaches, their pros and cons, and when to use them.

9:30a – 10:30a

Project Workflow

Regardless of what kind of project you’re creating, you’ll want to have a clear workflow plan to ensure it goes smoothly from start to finish. This section shares approaches that can help you organize your project timeline, communicate clearly with partners, and prevent delays or unexpected scope changes.

10:30a – 11:15p

Building Your SME and Stakeholder Relationships

Subject matter experts, stakeholders, and clients are typically the people you’ll partner with most when creating eLearning. But it’s not uncommon for different priorities, experiences, and mindsets to make these key partnerships tricky to navigate. In this section, you’ll take a closer look at some of the most common challenges eLearning designers and developers face with these groups and discuss tips that can help you solve these issues—or even avoid them entirely.

11:15a – 12:00p

Understanding Your Audience

There’s no single approach to eLearning that works perfectly in every situation. That’s why successful eLearning starts with a deep understanding of who you’re designing for—the audience for the learning experiences as well as your organization or client. You’ll explore techniques that can help you uncover key information about these groups so you can design eLearning solutions that are best suited for their needs.

12:00p – 1:00p

Lunch

Afternoon: Crafting Great Experiences

1:00p – 1:45p

Creating Learning Experiences for Your Audience

Continuing on from the morning, you’ll look at approaches that can help you take what you know about who you’re designing for to inform the choices you make when creating your eLearning experiences.

1:45p – 2:30p

Storyboarding

Storyboarding is a technique that can help you quickly test out potential eLearning ideas and get SMEs and stakeholders on board with the concepts and content. It the long run, it often saves production costs and can prevent miscommunication between you and your partners on a project. In this section, you’ll find out more about the processes that go into storyboarding, as well as what this technique can look like when applied to different eLearning mediums.

2:30p – 3:30p

Weaving in Interactivity and Choice

When looking for ways to help grab and keep people’s attention, interactivity and audience choice are two common approaches used in eLearning—but these approaches only work well when they’re used strategically. You’ll look at how to use these approaches to do more than simply entertain, but to enhance your content and deepen understanding as well.

3:30p – 4:15p

Assessing Performance

Completing an eLearning experience doesn’t always mean people really understood the content, let alone can use it later on. We’ll share ideas for how you can assess not just completion, but also how people will use what they’ve learned in real situations.

4:15p – 4:30p

Wrap Up

In these final few minutes, we will look at ways to extend the learning beyond the forum.