Digital badging is gaining traction in varied corners of the learning and development space from traditional academic environments to organizations and more. However, due to its relative novelty, there are some significant adoption barriers to those incorporating badging strategies.

Taking the plunge and deciding to create a serious game is an exciting and daunting task. Critical for Checkers and Rally’s was to find the right partner to help the company realize the benefits of this learning method. Other companies had tried, failed, or abandoned their investment. The mission was to realize the significant benefits by developing a serious game that could drive results by reducing costs, improve proficiency, encourage engagement, and deliver effective learning.

Did you know that the visual design of eLearning, slides, and other instructional materials have a big impact on learner success? Well-designed materials can motivate learners, improve comprehension, and assist retention.

Too often, content is cranked out without understanding the audience and looking at the best options for delivering solutions. Everyone wants to be more creative, but time, budget, and resources are frequently used as a crutch.

L&D practitioners face three significant challenges: adding context to their mobile learning and performance support challenges, understanding the possibilities of new technologies, and opportunities to see real-world applications.

As futurist Ray Kurzweil noted, “We are destroying jobs at the bottom of the skill ladder, we are adding new jobs at the top of the skill ladder. To keep up with that rising skill ladder, we need to make people more skilled. One methodology to do that is education.” To be enablers of the skill sets of the future, jobs in the learning profession will change.

Is your organization employing a workforce of motivated and vibrant human beings? Or is the office full of lumbering zombies barely able to pillage snacks from the kitchen and groan in meetings? Many organizations have employees that are so disengaged that it’s like they are becoming the working dead. But there’s hope, and you can save them!

Learning and development managers are faced with an ever-changing technical environment and a marketplace requiring cost-effective, competitive solutions. Questions most managers face include: how to ensure that an appropriate mix of training professionals are hired to meet customers’ educational and technical needs, while keeping prices competitive; determining the correct toolset needed to reach a training audience; considering if there is a one-size-fits-all solution appropriate for a team; and how to maintain an eLearning team’s relevance in a fast-moving training world. Staying ahead of new technology while keeping price in check is a challenge.

Mobile is the new way of learning. Learners want it and companies want to provide it. However, app development can be expensive, especially if you are starting from a mostly print or standard eLearning model of training. Finding a way to give learners and organizations the mobile learning they want without breaking the bank is a must in today’s training market.

Social learning is the latest trend in eLearning and corporate L&D—for good reason. As organizations move from hierarchies to wirearchies and communities of practice become the new content management solution, building meaningful connections between colleagues is critical. However, most organizations are going about social learning the wrong way, and technology vendors aren’t helping by bolting on discussion forums and adding integrations into social media which are not enough to capture the benefits of social learning.

Microlearning video is the creation of video-based content under one minute in length that is primarily consumed on mobile devices. The rise of user-generated micro-content has required the use of rapid storyboarding and predefined video content structures. As the length of the video decreases, so does the optimal format of the video.

Storyline 2 is Articulate’s most powerful tool yet, but many are not using it to its fullest capabilities and producing the level of engagement and interactivity needed in many eLearning solutions. Storyline 2 is laden with such a wide variety of features that it is easy for users to lose track of some of the key, lesser-known features that provide an opportunity to create dynamic eLearning.

In recent years, learning has moved closer to the workplace. Classrooms have moved out of corporate learning centers and into training rooms co-located with offices. Online learning is delivered directly to the desktop more than ever before. The next challenge is to move learning directly into the workflow. To do this, there needs to be a move beyond course delivery and into a broader, more comprehensive, and strategic approach that focuses not just on learning, but on performance and productivity.

Employees today don’t just use the Internet—they live in it! And they expect their online learning experience on the job to match their online experience in their digital, highly connected life. Is your ecosystem up to the challenge, or does it seem boring and limited to your learners? We’ve been reading about the wave of new employees in the workforce for years, but have we built the learning and performance support environment that will engage them and help them thrive?

In this interactive session, we will explore how the brain operates and how it expects to seek out, receive, and apply information. Then you’ll learn about specific ways to evaluate your current ecosystem and identify ways to tailor it to meet the needs of your connected employees. You will be able to immediately use this information to evaluate your own ecosystem’s readiness and the five things you can do right now to make it more effective for all.

The current learning environment is massively disruptive, with new learning technologies appearing daily. Focus has shifted from content to experience, and learning strategies now call for a new emphasis on informal learning, collaboration, and user-generated and curated content. Throw into the mix a wide variety of devices and approaches like gamification, and organizational learning has become a very confusing and complicated state.

Agile processes are all the rage due to their ability to create products faster and more efficiently. This means that instructional designers and other learning and development professionals are being challenged to approach their work with speed, flexibility, and accuracy. However, typical design and development processes fail to support this challenge.

eLearning and instructional professionals often have questions surrounding design vision, which is the range of motion of creative design ideas that they can incorporate visually into learning projects. Many find themselves struggling to be more creative and seek to extend their visual approaches to type, images, and composition. For the designer, more methods mean more opportunities to create better visual solutions for learning materials and content-driven courses.

Your company is growing fast. Your team has expanded way beyond the small, intimate group it once was. Demands are increasing. Development tools are changing. The new people have to be brought up to speed, now. And your industry is heavily regulated, so it has to be right. How do you maintain the independent spirit that made your company successful and still get all the work done?

Designing open and digital badges for evidence presented in curated learning ePortfolios, endorses and verifies the claims that a learner makes in this digital narrative—these claims are made against badge criteria and standards that have been co-designed by key stakeholders in the learning journey. Dartmouth College designed and developed badging to track the portion of a course that focused on digital scholarship skills where students could receive both a grade and a badge for each assignment, which would earn a progress badge, and completion of an entire training sequence or practice sequence would earn a completion badge.

Let’s face it. Learning proposals rarely elicit enthusiastic responses from clients, except when the solution includes video. Suddenly, the decision makers are paying attention. But those nods of approval start disappearing when the discussion turns to the cost, timelines, and sustainability of outsourcing video production. So you have two options: get out your wallet, or find a cheaper, faster, more flexible way to produce the videos you need.

How do you know if the money spent on training and development is worth it? One of the ways find out is by using analytics to assess who is using content: where, when, and how. Deciphering the ways to analyze a program’s effectiveness can be confusing. There is a lot of talk about big data, but what does it all mean? And just because there is a lot of data, does that really make any of it valuable?

During design and development SMEs, stakeholders sometimes suggest ideas or practices that are antithetical to good instructional design. For example, a designer might have a stakeholder who believes it’s best to simply film a daylong stand-up training session and deliver it as one video. In this case, like so many others, it’s helpful for the designer to identify research findings to help them understand why learning should be designed differently.

Despite its growing popularity, online facilitation remains a mystery to many faculty and workplace learning professionals. Often restricted by learning management system platforms, online facilitators feel constrained when designing, developing, and delivering high-impact, high-engagement learning events.

Performance orientation and discovery efforts should be a priority before making any decisions about what kind of training should be developed, if any, and how to design, develop, and deliver training using embedded performance support assets.

In today’s device-rich world, it’s absolutely essential to make your eLearning courses available on all types of devices, irrespective of their varying screen sizes, in the best possible manner. Creating responsive courses helps you achieve this goal and helps meet learners where they are.

Many speakers have aptly discussed the need for experiential, problem-based learning. These talks leave educators, consultants, and designers excited and motivated for change. But still, they are left wondering what makes experiential learning successful? And, even more, they don’t know how to effectively use technology when implementing experiential learning.

Organizations are increasingly looking beyond the confines of learning management systems. Where organizations were once focused on content delivery, they’re now switching to user-generated content and more social, connected learning experiences. As devices and sensors are added to the learning environment, datasets have marched toward the realms of big data. Yet, as is so often the case with data-driven strategies, connecting data with action can remain a mystery.

Training events often fall short of delivering results in the workplace. Training can be too far removed from application on the job, and in many cases there is a reliance on outmoded models that fail to take into account the dynamic environment of the modern workplace. The demand for information and action is accelerating. This paradigm requires a different approach to supporting performance and development, including real-time access to people, process, tools, and content, linked to the unique needs of the individual.

If you taught them this, why don’t they do it? Educational services 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—Saint Vincent is able to significantly impact job performance.

It’s a daunting challenge to transition from individual contributor to frontline leader; a challenge that requires new leaders to develop what can be a bewildering variety of new skills. To succeed, new leaders must practice those skills on the job, but few actually do. As a result, many leadership development programs focus on providing great training events only.

Over the last decade, there has been an industry-wide emphasis on developing learning objects with embedded gamification elements. However, taking the concept of gamification past the singular learning objects to the more global, overall learner experience is more of a rarity.

As adoption of the xAPI begins to take hold, the convergence of working and learning offers instructional designers the opportunity and the challenge to do more than ever before. The xAPI allows for more robust and interesting tracking of the learning process, including learning that happens outside the LMS and on the job. As an instructional designer, are you ready to step up to this challenge?

In early 2014, Jane Bozarth’s husband was diagnosed with a large tumor perched atop his brain stem like a golf ball on a tee. The story of his surgery and recovery—“Performance Matters,” which appeared in The eLearning Guild’s Learning Solutions Magazine—became the most popular piece she’s ever published. This session will explore the story, its associated observations, and issues learned throughout relevant to L&D.

Subject matter experts (SMEs) are the lifeline of work for instructional designers, trainers, and facilitators of learning. SMEs bring the content to life and provide both relevance and context. However, it can often seem like you and your SME are speaking two different languages, causing the instructional design process and, more importantly, communication to break down. How can you work better with and coach SMEs through your design and development processes to better ensure a positive working relationship and, most importantly, a successful learning initiative?

Have you ever wished you could wave a magic wand to make your narrated voice work sound clean and crisp? Well, there is no magic wand, but a digital audio workstation (DAW) comes close. Broadcast professionals spend hundreds if not thousands of dollars creating their ideal audio post-production environment, but with careful planning you won’t need to spend a penny.

Video has long since been a medium that evokes emotion and sells products through dynamic storytelling. In the past, however, it has been a passive medium. Fortunately, new knowledge and advancements make it possible to create more interactive video outputs.

Producing virtual sessions can be a technical challenge, especially when some participants are located in areas with low or sporadic Internet connections, either domestically or around the globe. Virtual learning professionals located in such environments require effective, simple, on-time support: before, during, and after training deliveries.

Feedback not only serves to inform learners completing eLearning modules, but it can also motivate or demotivate if not properly constructed. How feedback is targeted, displayed, and conveyed can greatly impact any eLearning course’s success. Are you doing all you can to provide your learners the insights and information they need to learn all they can?

Including media in the training you create can be a fantastic way to make your content easier to understand and remember. But you don’t always have the time and budget to hire someone to create these design assets for you, and sometimes stock media just won’t cut it. There is another option, however: creating media yourself, as you likely already have with two tools that can help you out—your smartphone and tablet. By knowing more about the apps and tools that can help you create some of the media needed, and using a device you already own, you can be more efficient and keep project budgets down.

Many learning and development (L&D) organizations today are well positioned to enable executives within their enterprise to drive change—rapidly capitalizing on emerging changes in technology, process, and skill. However, not all executives outside of L&D view it as an essential, foundational partner. In fact, according to a recent survey of senior learning professionals conducted by the Human Capital Institute, a great challenge facing CLOs today is gaining executive buy-in and overcoming the view of L&D as a cost center.

The Experience API and emerging technologies afford organizations the opportunity to create adaptive learning ecosystems of functionality to support learners. Designing learning ecosystems and adaptive systems requires a shift in design approaches. While the Experience API can provide common tracking similar to SCORM for a learning management system, it really extends the ability to collect data with value between systems. This intersystem data value, combined with new design approaches, unlocks a number of use cases.

There’s lots of talk about replacing training with performance support, and in many cases, it’s a great idea. But what about the times when you need both? How do you incorporate performance support within a training context? How do you use instructional design to get the best of both worlds, and why should you do it? Ideally, your clients should be clamoring for performance support. But in reality, if an independent strategy can’t get traction, perhaps it’s time for a more unified approach.

Conventional learning methods were quite simply not working for Bloomingdale’s. The learning tactics at Bloomingdale’s were not driving the correct behavior with their 15,000 associates, and as a result the company turned to microlearning as a way to change behavior and drive bottom line results.

In this session, you will learn why Bloomingdale’s decided to break away from conventional practices and try microlearning in 2012—before microlearning was a known term. You will explore the issues the company faced when it was decided to take the organization down the microlearning path and what the dramatic results have been. You will learn from the pitfalls and successes that were encountered along the way. For some, this session will provide a wake-up call for how learning professionals need to adapt their approaches to better meet the needs of a business and its employees. For others, it will help them gain a better perspective on the true benefits of taking a microlearning approach.

In this session, you will learn:

Most organizations operating in the modern training space ask many irrelevant and/or misdirected questions about mobile and social learning, e.g., “Will this be on an iPad, iPhone, or Android?” This question leads to discussions about screen real estate, etc., but misses the critical point relating to the learner experience in mobile and the equivalence of experience for others in non-mobile environments.

Technology has completely changed the way we live, work, and learn. Technology has brought us the Internet, smartphones, tablets, and many more tools that have changed our lives forever. Of course, these same technologies have also brought us memes like Socially Awkward Penguin, Success Kid, and yes, Grumpy Cat.

Learning in an eLearning module is generally assessed through multiple choice questions, rather than measuring demonstrations of target behaviors. When you design eLearning, you build in knowledge checks. All too often, these quizzes are reading comprehension tests rather than authentic assessments of skills. You need to test the target objectives to ensure you meet the goal of the program.

There is plenty of research about the increasing use of video to engage learners and drive performance. The thirst for video content is effectively shown in some startling stats: YouTube is the second-most used search engine with over 1 billion-plus unique users every month; and online video is forecast to account for 60 percent of all web data by 2020. When video is the most popular, shareable form of media content, how can you explore the learning opportunities the technology affords?

If you look at the learning solutions that are being produced today, there is still an issue with the solutions hitting the mark and moving the needle for a learner. You need to take a step back and focus on the learner, the experience you want them to have, and how to convey the information in a way that moves a learner to action outside of the learning event.

How often are you faced with the dilemma and the questions: “Can I use this?” or “Where can I find images, video, music, and audio I can actually use without violating copyright?” With so many media assets, such as images, video, and audio readily available online, it can be a headache to figure out what you can use for a project and what is restricted by copyright. How can you ensure you are working within the legal guidelines, but still get the job done?

Shrinking budgets and accelerated production schedules can make it difficult to leave room for professional voiceover narration for eLearning projects, and it’s often one of the first things cut. Unfortunately, skimping on quality narration can leave learners confused or distracted, which has a direct negative impact on their attention and retention.

The difference between a novice and an expert Captivate developer primarily falls in knowing things like when and how to create user variables, system variables, and shared actions. Impossible, you say? You’ll never be able to wrap your head around these topics?

Video can be a highly effective form of media for learning. However, adding video to an eLearning course has historically been expensive and something that required a large amount of time and skill to create. That’s not the case today, with the tools for creating and editing video becoming both easier to use and less expensive.

Choosing an LMS can be wrought with peril. There are many decisions that go into selecting the system that provides the best fit for your company, and there seem to be no end of things waiting to trip you up on your path to your new system. But if you know what to look for, you can avoid the hazards!

Your learning ecosystem already exists in the resources scattered across your intranet and beyond, but your learners don’t know how to find them. When they are able to access this wealth of information, they are often overwhelmed, leaving the resources underutilized and the employees frustrated and still unable to meet their performance improvement needs. Many organizations have platforms such as an LMS and the content that they want to highlight, but they lack middleware and associated processes to connect the dots.

The struggle of managers to identify the best candidates for the roles within their learning and development (L&D) ecosystem is always an issue, as is cultivating the development of valuable skills and knowledge within the existing ecosystem. The problem can be addressed by detailing the capabilities and competencies that are of the most value and importance in the L&D ecosystem, given the range of experience, degrees (formal education), and certifications available for professional development within the industry.