Too many times, training struggles to show its impact on a business; the metrics used to measure training are unrelated to the bottom line results of a firm. Training departments often have difficulty showing their impact on sales and revenue goals. Thus training is viewed as a support function or engaged only when necessary.

How much does a car cost? How long does it take to build a house? How long is a piece of string? The answer in all cases—it depends. You can run into the same uncertainty with an eLearning project if it is not properly defined up front. If you don’t know what you are trying to accomplish, what stakeholders expect, what your technology constraints are, and what business drivers will affect your project, how can you create and follow a plan to a successful conclusion?

Sound learning theory underpins much of traditional instructional design (ID) and can greatly improve user experience, but the advent of a need-to-know-now culture is proving the art of innovation can and must work alongside the science of design. The challenge is to balance the needs of your users and the concerns of established IDs against harnessing the originality of developers who may lack a traditional background.

Creating learning objects is a time-consuming process. Most learning objects have content that could be used across different courses and departments. However, many learning objects, such as videos, tutorials, instructional documentation, and online courses are created with identifying details that make them difficult to repurpose or share with other members of the organization.

“Blended learning” was one of the hottest buzzwords at the dawn of the new millennium. At its worst, it was giving the learner the choice of attending the formal class in person or online. In its best and most cutting-edge application, it was a design construct focusing on combining or blending the best elements of face-to-face classes with eLearning courses to increase retention and/or reduce costs. It was a cutting-edge approach at the time, and for many organizations, this is where they currently are with applying blended learning. But the blend has changed.

Massive open online courses (MOOCs) have received a fair amount of publicity, but mixed reviews overall. Participants appreciate the collaborative nature of MOOCs, and their accessibility—but much of the learning is passive in style, which tends to be fairly ineffective, transfers poorly to on-the-job skill application, and doesn’t maintain participants’ interest. Today’s typical MOOC format is therefore not particularly well-suited for most corporate training needs. Companies are, nonetheless, interested in capturing the positive qualities of MOOCs.

An eLearning template is not a set of PowerPoint master slides. A true eLearning template is so much more, and has many elements and components. While a set of master backgrounds is a great start, there are often overlooked aspects of a template that are never considered. Designers and developers often begin with raw content and begin a project in their chosen authoring environment, rather than thinking through the overall user experience. For those projects that involve multiple modules where it’s important to keep a consistent look and feel, a template approach helps keep all assets organized across modules.

There is pressure on everyone in learning and development to stay ahead of the curve when it comes to new technology. Knowing the right questions to ask and getting clear information on how to educate clients enables you to switch gears from a reactive order-taker to a consultative partner. Instructional designers and managers need to be grounded in the fundamentals of mobile learning strategies.

We’re all hooked to our devices and our technology. Most of our work can’t be done without it, let alone the scheduling, management, and communications of our personal lives. Likewise, technology is an essential part of today’s training toolbox. So what does the eLearning landscape look like today? Where have we been, and where are we going?

In this session we will take a look back to better understand the current trends in eLearning in order to help us project what the future will bring. We’ll explore the changing nature of courseware; what mobile technology brings; simulations; and social tools. We’ll define some key terms being used and you will gain both ideas and inspiration for how you can incorporate eLearning into your training plans. You will leave this session better informed and motivated to try something new in your next learning initiative.

Onboarding is arguably one of the most important learning events in the career of a new employee. Many organizations, however, fail to set up a true learning-focused onboarding program. Instead of inspiring new members of the team, they kill motivation by using boring presentations and eReading instead of eLearning. In today’s workplace, there are many tools and technology that can add value and that will greatly improve this critical learning moment.

Everyone sees the power of gamification—a trending concept in the learning and development industry—in the workplace, but is either too expensive or no one knows how to implement it. Learning professionals are being asked to do more with less every day. So if you have already created a catalog of eLearning courses for your organization in Articulate Storyline, how can you make these more engaging? How can you save thousands of dollars by adding basic gamification elements to your existing and new courseware?

Research proves students learn best when doing; information strengthens schemas leading to long-term retention. Yet instructors often feel bound by the constraints of an online classroom. Since they do not meet face-to-face, it can be hard to find ways to encourage active application of information and combat the student fear of failure.

As the Spectrum Health University adapted to an ever-evolving health care landscape, the programs and offerings from the organization needed to change as well. Through an analysis of brand, audience and offerings, and a desire to more closely align with the organization’s new strategy, a sizable challenge was undertaken to reimagine the corporate university with the use of social collaborative platforms and the deployment of micro-learning resources.

The performance ecosystem is about more than just helping people do what is known that they need to do. In this era of continual change, the only sustainable differentiator will be the ability to adapt, deal with ambiguity, and innovate. This comes from a rich ecosystem, but it takes more. Where the culture doesn’t support sharing, where it’s not safe to contribute, the ecosystem can’t flourish, and organizations can miss out on the opportunity.

Today’s market requires faster onboarding; often there is overlap or confusion between process and training. Staff are overwhelmed by information in the initial stages of their performance and often forget or don’t have the opportunity to apply the why and the how of what they have learned in an appropriate timeframe.

Most people in the learning and development field didn’t choose the profession because of a deep love for statistics, and few have ready access to data scientists for consultation. But the availability of an ever-growing body of data highlights the value of a fundamental understanding of data collection and analysis. Learning data will only provide valuable, actionable information if curated and evaluated strategically.

You live and work in a world of democratized video production. What once required hired professionals, specialized work, and thousands of dollars can now be accomplished by self-taught amateurs in hours with little to no resources beyond what’s already in their pockets. Video technology is ubiquitous. However, many professionals become so preoccupied with whether or not they can make a video that they often don’t stop to think if 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.

As Cammy Bean states, “Good writing is the single biggest factor that can make the difference between an eLearning program that bores people to death and one that gets them to pay attention.” Yet many eLearning scripts are written in large part by subject matter experts whose prose is wordy and lifeless. Developers of eLearning must often revise the scripts and storyboards of subject matter experts, most of whom are not skilled writers and who often think everything they have written should be included in the course. It can be a frustrating and time-intensive experience to revise such prose—unless you know certain techniques.

Many client training models are geared to an onsite visit that compacts training into a deluge of information and often does not allow for the interaction of the client to effectively make the change they need to make. Many learning professionals are confronted with the problem of delivering instruction to clients or others who have a hard time understanding the process, the system implications, and the specifics of the content that is being delivered.

From its inception, distance learning at Infectious Diseases Institute (IDI) has covered three priority areas: creating distance learning and blended learning courses, providing post-training support for IDI alumni, and integrating education technology tools into face-to-face courses. However, IDI has faced the significant challenge of battling an environment where prospective trainees have little-to-no access to fast, reliable Internet. To deliver full-fledged, online courses, IDI has used the open-source software Poodle.

Anyone with a camera can post learning content on YouTube, but television and other media have raised the expectations of viewers, who demand highly engaging, interactive content. If it isn’t immediately relevant to their task at hand, they’ll click onto something else. At the same time, corporate budgets are tight, so instructional designers have to find creative ways to produce high-quality, professional content on a budget.

The learning and talent development consulting field has been growing and evolving over the last 15-plus years. With more professionals deciding to become consultants, there are underlying issues that arise and interfere with the day-to-day life of the consultant. Issues can include: finding opportunities to consult, knowing how to price one’s services, invoicing and getting paid, managing client expectations, negotiating changes to the work while it’s in progress, and protecting one’s own intellectual property when licensing it to clients.

Adopting the discipline of an embedded performance support (EPS) strategy has become an increasing imperative for many organizations. EPS remains a curiosity for many more wrapped in the question: “How do we get there?” Answering that question requires a long, hard look at whether the organization is ready to go there, or if they are in a state of readiness to go there.

There are many function and design issues to consider before beginning to build your online course, and it’s often tempting to begin by downloading a template to save time on the front end by eliminating layout and style decisions. There are many advantages to using templates, but there are a few things to consider, including how to implement the template once it’s created and/or customized.

Gamification is a hot topic, but where is the research to back up the use of gamification? Anyone interested in gamification for learning will be interested in seeing empirical results to be better informed about whether or not gamification is appropriate for their learning environment.

Boring page turner eBooks—often created just to get content out to learners—can be taken to a new level with engaging, interactive iBooks Author books. Learners should be engaged with a review or game to help them learn content by doing, instead of just reading.

Virtual training participants notoriously multi-task during live online sessions, which means they miss out on learning opportunities. In addition, there is a common misconception that an online presentation is the same thing as virtual training—it’s not. So virtual classroom designers and facilitators struggle to know how to capture the attention of their audience and keep participants engaged throughout a session so that learning transfer can occur.

Prior to the integration of its learning information sites into the common learning portal (CLP), the National Park Service (NPS) had over 25 different sites for its various learning programs. This made finding learning information complex for its workforce of over 20,000 employees. Navigation required knowledge of the URLs at various sites and each site had different navigation tools and varied widely in appearance. In addition, social learning opportunities in the form of communities were scattered among various commercial sites.

Have you ever gotten way too much content for a module, but you still tried to squeeze it all in? Do subject matter experts (SMEs) give you too much content and refuse to cut any away, because it’s all important? Do you wish you could just do small modules, knowing it is better for your audience, especially in today’s world of short attention spans and busy participants? You may often get content that others think is easy to put into a module, but there is a better way to please the SMEs and give your audience the best experience.

You’re excited about the promise of the xAPI-enabled world, but you’ve still got a learning management system (LMS) and a host of SCORM-based courses that you need. But what if you could get the most out of both a LMS and a learning record store (LRS) at the same time?

Designing training without an understanding of how the brain works is a lot like trying to get somewhere without a map. Even if you eventually arrive at your destination, you won’t know how you got there so that you can do it again. Once you understand how the brain works, you can use the attention, engagement, encoding, and retrieval processes of the brain to make training that is more effective, takes less time to produce, and delivers more lasting results.

Too often, learning is evaluated based upon one of two measures: whether learners like it, and/or how much it costs to produce. Unfortunately, the former isn’t useful, and the latter isn’t critical. Yet, increasingly, actions will have to be documented, and measurement is key. There are meaningful metrics for learning, but they should be about whether they are helping the organization. Kirkpatrick, ROI, impact—to make sense of these, you need to know some core concepts.

What are some creative ways to develop leaders? Business acumen is typically obtained through experience. Developing learning solutions that grow business acumen in an effective way is difficult to produce. Especially when the content is nuanced or complex. Gamification is one of the topics buzzing around the industry, but if you speak to many people, there is little application beyond putting badges on existing content.

Sketchnoting is a visual language with a hierarchy and structure similar to written language. In order to communicate visually, or in this case communicate to yourself with your own notes, you start with the visual basics and look at the building blocks. Sketchnoting is about listening, processing, and transferring the key ideas into telling a story with your notes.

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 our 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.

Do your eLearning courses need a punch of creativity? Have your users grown tired of the same drag and drop interactions? Would you like to add something new and exciting that will increase learner retention? With the brain processing visual information 60,000 times faster than text, it’s crucial to have visual impact in your courses. The good news is that design tools are more powerful than ever and provide developers with more options for creativity.

Technology continues to advance rapidly, changing how we live and interact with the world around us. 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.

According to Forbes, 61 percent of companies that have LMS systems plan to replace them in the next two years. However, nearly a third of smaller companies still do not have a LMS to deploy training. Many companies are well advanced in terms of online training and development for their employees, but many are late adopters. How do you get from behind the curve? Should you? And if so, how do you go from not much, to state-of-the art?

As trainers, we work hard to create great training. As a result, we are disappointed when our employees fail to learn or don’t transfer learning back to their workplace. We may be tempted to blame our students, but the truth is that we often fail because we don’t understand the mind of the learner. As a result, we build training modules that are not consistent with the brain’s natural means of acquisition. Teaching should be more effective, and it can be more effective once we understand how the learner’s mind operates.

Developing eLearning content within a website is very easy if you know your tools, tags, rules, etc. The problem is that the rules keep changing. The way web content was built two years ago does not follow today’s best practices. More and more power has also been given to CSS. Applying some of these new rules can not only be difficult to remember, but knowing how and when to apply these rules adds to the complexity.

Netflix knows what you want to watch because its algorithm interprets audience data and weighs those insights against the content in its library. With each like and click, Facebook continues to build an empire around the idea that social media can be as personal as your name. Every experience is catered to the individual, except the way employees are trained. Calculating the ROI for employee development can be costly and difficult, yet with the 21^st century economy becoming more dependent on knowledge workers, on-demand skill development is critical to success.

JetBlue University (JBU) has recently built a hotel for its employees going through training, and is in the process of implementing a new learning management system with a social learning component. Several of JBU’s workgroups are adopting iPads for use in their workflows. With all of these new opportunities for use in training, JBU needed to look at its current learning landscape, and determine if the current strategy supports where it wanted to go in the future as it relates to training and employee performance.

Students don’t know what they don’t know. This concept applies not only to academics, but to learners in any environment. This means that educators and developers are constantly developing resources that focus on what they anticipate the learner needs. Adaptive learning technologies are now providing the data that allows us to understand specific knowledge deficiencies. This is not only changing the learning environment, but also the process by which content is generated.

Learning professionals all struggle to measure the transfer of skill from the classroom to the job, especially with geographically dispersed learners. Designers need advice on how to solve this measurement challenge and involve managers in the solution. How do you observe and assess your remote employees performing critical job competencies?

The use of badges, points, leaderboards, and other concepts that are commonly found in games have enthusiastically been incorporated into online training by instructional specialists hoping to create a more engaging and motivational learning experience for end users. But is the gamification of learning actually yielding the results that warrant the hype?

New eLearning instructional designers often hear about the need to incorporate interaction into courses and the power of effective simulations. Some find it difficult to get started and the examples they find give a basic tree structure but do not explain how to develop the tree into a full simulation. What can you do if you are feeling overwhelmed and don’t know how to implement the best practices you are learning about?

Writing is an underdiscussed aspect of instructional design. In fact, many people get into the field without realizing that writing is a significant part of a learning designer’s job. It is difficult to do it well, and learning designers may be required to write in at least 10 different forms that involve unique styles. Yet there is no single source of instruction for writing in all of these styles.

Most corporate and adult continuing education eLearning courses include audio tracks, mostly as voiceover, but also for animated characters. As a result, many eLearning professionals find themselves writing audio scripts as part of their work. What are the skills needed to produce better audio?

Habits—the automatic, unconscious behaviors we undertake daily—have historically been viewed as a negative. However, habits, and how they form, have become a hot topic in fields like health care, management, and energy conservation. Positive habit building can have a major impact on organizations and individuals. And app developers are leveraging smart devices as digital support tools for habit formation.

Curation is a term that is becoming more and more common in the learning field. Unfortunately, most people do not understand what curation is, why curation is important, how it will impact their role, and how to leverage it for their organization. And yet it is a critical future competency for those in the field.

Many training videos are not compelling; too many are just shot against a beige cinderblock wall. Video must be visually compelling to hold the viewer’s attention, but most video producers don’t know what tools and techniques are available, or think that they are too expensive.

Taking a hands-on technology class and providing it online can be tough. How do you keep the interactivity of the course? How do you transform the exercises? How do you make the lecture parts engaging enough? When an online session can match the effectiveness of its ILT counterpart, you can reach more learners, lower travel costs, and even generate revenue.

Intellectual property law affects every stage of the development process. Yet it is daunting and complex. Trying to gain a working knowledge can be overwhelming. As a result, decision making is rooted in ignorance, fear, or frustration, none of which contributes to project goals. The continuing struggle to quickly develop content may lead you to infringe on someone else’s work, expose your work to an unpleasant legal action, or miss out on using free media to enhance your projects.

How do we enable learners to practice and improve their ability to respond appropriately in a conversational context? Obvious examples for conversational training are: people who are learning a new language, new hires in call centers or in customer service, or trainees in the hospitality industry. While person-to-person conversational training is ideal, the time available for individual training in person-to-person settings is often limited.

Do you feel stuck in a rut because of outdated learning methods and the limitations imposed on you by your learning management system? You’re not alone. Today’s learning methods and technologies are not adapting quickly enough to keep up with the evolving needs of organizations and the entry of millennials into the mainstream workforce. Though there are many stand-alone technologies available, it can be challenging to know how to organize the various tools under one over-arching learning strategy.

As a learning leader, you want to build a world class learning model. But the problem is you need executive support, funding, IT support, etc. A learning ecosystem that satisfies today’s learner requires changing the conversation with all the stakeholders.

By now, learning professionals are likely convinced that curation should be one of their skill sets, and many articles have offered them advice on essential tools and the qualities of good curation. But the articles assume that everyone knows how to search for material on the Internet and how to find and vet a solid set of learning resources to recommend. It’s usually not as easy as typing keywords into the search box and picking a couple of items off the first few pages of results.