It’s estimated that 50 to 90 percent of training is “scrap learning”—content that is delivered but never actually applied back on the job. Scrap learning serves no practical purpose and is essentially a waste of everyone’s time. L&D professionals can’t help but be uncomfortable with those figures, but nothing in their traditional training bag of tricks has proven capable of eliminating that waste. It’s time to alter the training paradigm.

Training professionals typically fall along a continuum with varying levels of access to their target audience. That amount of access often influences, consciously or not, the techniques they use to analyze their audience. Without adequate awareness of this continuum and where they fall on it, designers risk depending on their own assumptions about their target audience and may end up overlooking more effective analysis strategies that can improve training.

Agile design processes are beginning to change the ways that people create training content. While agile design appeared in the L&D space only in the last few years, they took hold in the software industry much earlier, starting in the mid-1990s. Clearly there is overlap between L&D and the software industry, and if agile design works in both worlds, what other practices used by software development teams could help L&D create better training and work more effectively?

Serious games and simulations have the potential to bridge abstract concepts and real-world applications. But too often, simulations limit themselves to lower-level skills like memorization, resulting in glorified quizzes that are expensive to produce but feel disconnected from real decision-making. And when serious games try to engage higher-order skills, they often do so ineffectively. The decisions that are rewarded may be subjective and arbitrary, leaving learners frustrated and disempowered.

The Experience API (xAPI) can improve the ways you create and deliver content, track interactions, and measure performance—and not just in theory. Years of momentum have resulted in numerous use cases for teams seeking to leverage xAPI to better track, measure, and manage their learning efforts. The challenge now is not whether xAPI can be used in your learning environment, but which ways you will choose to use it out of the multitude of options available to you.

How many times have you had to redo a project because you thought you understood the challenge, goals, or requirements but the final product didn’t work as expected or fully solve the issue? As we start to build more complex interactions and applications, we need to improve our process to allow us to test a concept, measure its results, and iterate over and over until it meets the needs of our audience. Thankfully, software development already has a fantastic process for doing this that we can borrow from that field: prototyping.

Virtual reality (VR) is a hot topic in technology that offers potential for increased immersion, interactivity, and engagement for your learners.

Do you have a difficult time estimating how long a project should take? Do you typically go over your project time estimates, or have some projects that take a lot less time than you thought they would? Would you like to hold your team accountable to realistic time estimates, but don’t have the data to support it? If so, you need a new time-tracking approach so you can more accurately determine your time estimates for training projects.

Microlearning videos under one minute in length require rapid storyboarding and predefined video content structures. As the length of the video decreases, so does the optimal format of the video. Leaving out too many details will have a negative effect on your learning strategy. Every second counts for your learner!

Autodesk’s learning ecosystem is vast, extending far beyond the walls of the corporation to help customers use its tools most effectively. It’s no surprise, then, that driving this change internally at a company-wide scale has been a complex undertaking. There are lots of silos to bridge in order to serve customers well, holistically, and seamlessly.

Traditional training requires an event mindset and often stays in the learners’ brains just as long as the event. Hilti needed to find ways to transfer knowledge that builds skills, and then to retain that knowledge until the point of application.

In nature, an ecosystem refers to the combination of a community of living things, the non-living elements that make up their environment, and the many ways in which those individual elements interact. In order for an ecosystem to thrive, the individual components must connect and support one another, balancing each other so that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Ecosystems exist in the workplace as well. Understanding the structure and dependencies of an organizational ecosystem can help you build a better learning and performance strategy.

Responsive eLearning design is becoming less of a nice-to-have feature and more of an absolute must for many organizations. As a result, the most popular authoring tools, like Captivate, Storyline, and Lectora, have been adding more features for integrating responsive design, while some newer tools have been designed right from the start to accommodate the needs of this design concept. That said, these tools each take a different approach to making content responsive, so you’ll want to make sure you’re using the right one for your needs.

You’re faced with volumes of complicated content that you must translate into effective training. Your SMEs are pushing for delivering it through hours and hours of web-based training, which you know your audience will dread. You’ve heard of the benefits of using a micro format, but how can you possibly use it to cover all of that content?

While human narration can add warmth and help connect the learner to your eLearning course, hiring a professional can be costly and time-consuming. Recording yourself can be a more budget-friendly option; but have you tried to record yourself only to find that you sound more robotic than the text-to-speech software? Great voice-over work takes strong delivery and assistance from recording software—and thankfully, it’s actually quite easy to learn the basics of both.

When you say the word “game,” you might think of first-person shooters, slaying dragons, racing cars, and fighting battles—all of the things that your manager does not want to hear. If you are uncertain of how to plan, design, and develop a serious (business) game, then this is the right session for you. Making a “serious game” acceptable to management and fun for the player is the goal.

Status update. Touch base. Weekly meetings. Scope creep. Project plans. Tasks. Milestones. Deliverables. All these things can overwhelm you when managing projects—but they don’t have to! It turns out there are ways to juggle and advance your numerous projects while at the same time maintaining a semblance of serenity.

You use online video, but do you know how it works and why videos uploaded to YouTube may behave differently than those uploaded directly into an LMS? Online video use is growing for training and learning, but many people don’t know what happens and what’s possible after a video is uploaded.

Rapid eLearning development tools are incredibly helpful, but they may leave you scratching your head, wondering “How am I going to do that?” You know there has to be a way to make the idea you have in your head work in this tool, but you’re just not quite sure how. That’s when it’s time to shift your creativity into high gear and find a crafty solution for things that aren’t default processes.

It’s a common problem: You’ve been handed the same old content, but you just can’t bear the idea of creating the same old learning experience with it. But even if you’re limited in the changes you can make to the content, you do have two great tools for enhancing it: storytelling and visuals. By applying powerful storytelling and graphic design techniques, you can transform that tired content into engaging eLearning and leave your audience amazed at how much more entertaining and useful their learning experience has become.

Most eLearning tools out of the box publish to xAPI, but you still have to package up the course and upload it to your LMS, not really taking advantage of xAPI’s true potential of tracking learning no matter where the learning content may be.

It can be difficult to motivate employees to learn. Often, they either don’t think the materials apply to them or they believe they don’t need to know anything more to succeed.

Global. Digital. Mobile. Agile. Disruption. The business landscape is changing rapidly. New technology, new industries, new entrants, new customers, and an evolving workforce are sparking new expectations for every company. How do you respond? Can you advance human performance through innovative design?

Are you overwhelming new hires with thousands of policies, procedures, and fact sheets in your knowledge base? New hires rarely even know what they’re looking for, much less how to find it. This frustration prevents them from gaining confidence and delays achieving mastery in the job. And let’s face it—even experienced employees can struggle from time to time finding the right piece of information in the knowledge base.