Corporate descriptions of integrity, ethical decision-making, and other policy objectives are often written in dry, lofty, formal language that few employees truly read. Complying with a code of conduct can become an annual checkmark and not a mode of behavior. The Canada Revenue Agency used short animated videos to relate workplace ethical dilemmas where employees could indicate their responses and engage in conversations about the right course of action. A series of videos, with one released every two weeks, supported an agency-wide awareness campaign that is still yielding high results in repeat views and is being shared with other federal departments.

Onboarding shouldn’t be an impersonal and disconnected experience. But today’s workforce is diverse and often dispersed globally, making it difficult for new employees to feel connected. At HDR, an engineering firm, new employees felt isolated and unable to make meaningful connections during onboarding. The result was a lack of engagement and motivation to complete required training. HDR needed a way to build connectivity and accountability into learning and onboarding.

You’ve built great content, but your learners don’t seem to care. They’re not engaging with your learning. Why? Companies spend billions of dollars trying to understand consumer behavior, resulting in marketing strategies aimed at getting consumers to buy their products. In those same organizations, there are L&D groups that may not be leveraging the same insights and strategies to reach their learners. Treat your content like a product, and eliminate the friction between your solutions and your learners.

Today’s L&D teams are democratizing learning through social learning platforms: the “un-LMSs.” Yet, you still need to drive formal learning agendas for the organization. The paradox becomes how to both push and pull learning. Capital One’s Tech College team set a goal to drive an organizational learning agenda by tapping into the “maker” energy of Tech College learners. To achieve this, they implemented a social learning platform that gave any learner the ability to contribute content. While they saw learners endorse and create content, the system didn’t offer a way to align creators with Tech College’s learning agenda. To remedy this, the team built an app to connect experts to Tech College content creation, teaching, mentoring, and speaking opportunities.

Bad data creates faulty decision-making. To improve your learning designs, you need good data. Unfortunately, many learning-evaluation methods are seriously flawed.

You may have heard it from your high school math teacher: You can't use a calculator on the test. You think you'll have a calculator in your pocket at your job? If only my cell phone could fly back in time and have a chat about that!

Adobe Captivate is a commonly used tool, but a surprising number of its features are just a bit hidden and not well known. The layers of sophistication these features add can enable you to save a lot of time, deliver more engaging and personalized learning, and tap into resources more easily. It’s just a matter of knowing where these features are and how to use them effectively.

In many companies, all the most important data and technologies sit inside high-security locations that most employees can’t ever access. But the data and equipment represent a direct link to the customer experience, and it’s important for employees to understand what is inside these centers and what it means for their services. How can you give employees a realistic and immersive view inside what is typically unseen?

In telecommunications, the term “last mile” is used to describe the challenge of connecting the final leg in a communications network, typically describing the distance between the last hub and a consumer’s home. The “last mile,” although the shortest leg, is often the hardest to put together. In the world of performance support, the “last meter,” the distance between a learner’s eyes and their computer, is an appropriate comparison. In theory, creating a great resource library should be the bulk of the work, but too often, overcoming the “last meter” ends up being the ultimate nemesis. The challenges are to get the learner to recognize the need for support resources, remember where to access them, and utilize them as necessary.

While onboarding involves different activities and programs depending on your organization,  some aspects are universal. Typically it involves a limited period during which new hires are expected to read company policies and procedures, get settled into their work spaces, and learn about do's, don'ts, and how-to's. If your onboarding isn’t working, you might struggle with retaining employees, accelerating learning, improving performance and team engagement, and making your staff happy and proud to join in. We must turn staff onboarding into a transformational experience.

You know that making your online training more interactive could produce tremendous results. But maybe your company is very conservative, maybe a previous gamified training went horribly wrong, or maybe you’re just not sure how to make existing material more engaging. How can you get the leaders and learners at your organization to trust you to turn training content into meaningful game-like experiences?

Choosing your organization’s first learning management system is a daunting task. What features should you be looking for? What questions should you be asking? How much is too much to spend? And what happens after you make the decision? In many ways, implementing the LMS you’ve chosen can be even more daunting than making the initial selection.

You have a slew of tools to choose from to author eLearning, but regardless of the tools, creating a unique user experience that engages learners is important and often relies on your skills as a storyteller. One way to improve your eLearning storytelling skills is through comic book theory. Using special tricks and tips from comic books and graphic novels, you can create a unique user experience—no matter which authoring tool or platform you use.

It’s not uncommon for many projects to be organized through chains of email after email. But it’s hard to keep track of all the answers to questions, reviewers’ comments, and version control of the documents you need for managing a project. Is there a way to streamline your project management processes to make them easier to manage and follow?

We’ve all been there: the dreaded project meeting where stakeholders tell you exactly what to create and how long it should be. You work very hard over several weeks crafting the product they expect. The result is a training solution that is late, bloated, over budget, and failing to change employee behaviors. With scenarios like this one, it’s no wonder that, according to Harvard Business School, only 10 percent of corporate training is effective. This problem led one team to hunt for a solution that would revolutionize the process of designing learning experiences.

Conventional wisdom says that people can self-provision their learning and professional development through internet-enabled access to resources and social networks. But studies indicate that employees are not necessarily skilled at managing their own professional development and leveraging digital tools for learning. With an abundance of resources available, people may become paralyzed by too much information and too many choices. And they may not have the time or savvy to find what they need and use it to develop their knowledge bases and skill sets. Nonetheless, you don’t want to resort to structured training programs as the only path for learning.

As teams compete for scarce resources, investing your current resources in activities that have a high rate of return is critical to not only surviving but using learning to solve your business’s biggest, baddest problems.

It's not every day L&D professionals get to spend time in the trenches conducting a true needs analysis, learning firsthand about the needs of leaders and the barriers that impact their performance.  We did and survived to share what we learned, translating this analysis into customized yet scalable performance-based solutions. The strength of leadership at the mid-level is critical to employee engagement and organizational success.

A recent survey by Donald H. Taylor, chairman of the Learning and Performance Institute, revealed that L&D is falling out of love with enterprise collaboration and Forrester Research has shown that roughly 80 percent of enterprise social platform implementations fail. In recent years, social technology has fractured into social intranets, enterprise social networks, and chat platforms. What are we to make of this? Has social lost its way? Have expectations been over-inflated? Should L&D let go … or do more?

Artificial intelligence technologies are transforming homes and workplaces. The World Economic Forum has started to talk about what is happening as the fourth industrial revolution. When you start to think about AI and L&D, it raises many questions: What do AI technologies mean for L&D? What is the impact on the capabilities that organizations need to be developing in people now and into the near future? How can you use AI technologies to enhance and automate L&D work? What is the reality of what you can do now? What is really happening with AI in workplaces now? AI can be a confusing area with jargon like decision trees, k-clusters, and regressions. Even most technically focused L&D people are not math and data experts.

The majority of what people learn comes from practical experience on the job. However, they don’t learn everything they need just by doing their jobs. You have to be ready for exceptions when they arise. Learners need reinforcement of important topics to help avoid bad habits. They look for opportunities to expand their knowledge and skills beyond their current roles to further their careers. Unfortunately, with limited time and competing priorities, employees often are unable to make continuous, targeted learning part of their work.

People are constantly bombarded with requests for their attention, many of which unfortunately go ignored. It’s frustrating to consider that when you share educational content, most people will forget 90 percent of it after just two days. Why go through all the trouble of painstakingly developing content, if most of it won’t be retained for the long term? With the brain more likely to forget something than remember it, it’s critical to understand how the brain processes information and tends to remember it, and then to apply that knowledge when designing instructional content.

Disasters happen when teaching in a virtual classroom: connections fail, audio echoes, and files crash. In order to get the problem(s) solved and get the session back on time and on track, you’ll need more than a good idea. You’ll need a plan.

Infographics are great tools to convey complex information in an elegant way. They can be the basis of engaging classroom training, interactive eLearning, or intuitive resources. And you can repurpose them for sales, marketing, HR, and conferences. But, creating a good infographic can be hard. You don't want it to just be nicely designed bullet points. To be effective, it must tell a story.

Though there’s been great interest in learning personalization in recent years, the truth is that we have been trying to use systems to adapt teaching to individual learners for decades. The key to successful implementation of learning personalization is not through the use of the best learning management system or latest technological trend. 

Working with different subject matter experts (SMEs)—each with their own working style, personality, and expertise—can be a challenge. And that challenge can be amplified further when you need to work with multiple SMEs at the same time. How do you, as an instructional designer, know how to get the content you need from your SMEs to create effective and engaging learning experiences?

As adoption of xAPI begins to take hold, it allows for more robust and interesting tracking of the learning process. As actual performance and results data are integrated with learning metrics, L&D professionals will have the data they need to tailor the learning process to individual needs at the same time that they can draw more useful conclusions about the learning as a whole across a wider population.

The eLearning development requests keep rolling in, and everyone wants their projects completed as of yesterday. Working on a busy team can get tough when you’re managing various SMEs, reviewers, demos, feedback, and LMS configurations. This is especially true when you have multiple projects and you play many roles—or every role—on each of them. How do you keep your creative flame burning from project to project without being bogged down by all the project management work that goes along with each one?

Do you ever worry about hiring independent contractors to support your learning projects? Are you realizing that the typical interview process needs to change a bit to ensure you make great selections quickly? Are you considering how you can market yourself as an independent contractor and increase your chances of being hired? Learn some insider tips on how to identify great learning support contractors or become one yourself.

Demonstrating the value of training and eLearning is a common challenge for instructional designers and eLearning developers. ROIs and cost-benefit analyses are almost never done, and KPIs often aren’t used to measure performance changes. However, using data to understand the results of your projects and approaches and then share them with others can do a lot to help others see what benefits come from your team’s work.

Every day you interact with various websites and mobile apps. Each is designed to deliver a certain experience, set the stage for what’s to come, engage you as a user, and keep you returning. They’re also created to surprise you with their flashy colors, interaction, and ease of use. If you want to go beyond simple next/back buttons in your course designs, finding inspiration within these cleverly created user interface (UI) and user experience (UX) interactions is a great place to start.

There is a lot of subjectivity when it comes to interpreting 508 compliance for eLearning. Although the law, originally amended to the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, was enacted in 1998, the interpretation and implementation varies widely across organizations. This can cause much confusion and distress among developers and project managers as they zigzag across what can be an accessibility landmine hoping to come out whole on the other side.  

The conversation around 70:20:10 has been growing in popularity in recent years—with good reason. People are learning and getting support in a host of different ways, and 70:20:10 helps us see our work through a lens much broader than just traditional training methods. But in order to really be impactful, 70:20:10 needs to be more than just an idea. How do organizations put the concept of 70:20:10 into action?

Do you experience skepticism from stakeholders about the validity of the L&D function? Do you miss out on opportunities to demonstrate your value as a business advisor because you’re left out of the conversation from the start? And does this cynicism in the field lead to self-doubt and impact your career mobility? Many people can relate to this uphill climb and even experience impostor syndrome: the self-belief that you are not as skilled as people think you are and that you’ll be called out as a fraud. Because L&D is so often ill-defined and misunderstood, it provides fertile ground for impostor syndrome. So how does an L&D professional demonstrate value despite constant roadblocks or when impostor syndrome hits?

Adult learning principles state that adults learn best when content is relevant. So why do most virtual classroom lessons rely on lectures and slides? One of the most effective ways to ensure learning sticks is by getting learners involved, and scenario-based learning design does just that. Join this session to discover ideas for producing appropriate scenarios that resonate with your learners in the virtual classroom.

Gamification is an important and powerful strategy for influencing and motivating people. Unfortunately, many people think that gamification means just adding a game to their learning program or making a computer or video game. Because of this confusion, combined with a lack of real-life case studies of gamification successfully applied to learning programs, most L&D professionals do not understand how to deconstruct games to effectively drive the learning and behavior they want or need.

A company’s learning management system contract was coming to an end. After thoroughly reviewing its effectiveness, the L&D organization concluded it was no longer meeting their needs and decided to replace it in order to improve the end-user and administrative experiences, offer better mobile capabilities, enhance reporting and data visualization, and better integrate with internal systems. Ultimately, they also wanted to accomplish this without increasing spending.

The most expensive instruction is that which doesn’t work. This discussion will look at the actions and behaviors that have been scientifically proven to affect learning. You will explore the ways in which instructional design requires more than content delivery and common sense. You will look at robust, evidence-based principles of learning to discover new ways to build the kind of training that is genuinely effective at creating performance change and helping organizations achieve their objectives.

Alexa is one of the most widely used smart devices in the US today. It’s a disruptive game­changer in the learning and development space, but its integration into the learning ecosystem is drastically low. The number-one barrier today for learning professionals in using Alexa for learning and performance support is fear of the technology. The second barrier, and the one that’s easier to solve, is understanding how to even start developing learning content in this new platform. You cannot leverage what you do not understand, but it may be easier than you assume to learn to create experiences for Alexa.

How often do you read text on an electronic device? (You’re doing it right now!) Research shows that people read digital text differently than printed text. But does your eLearning strategy consider these differences?

Good courseware engages the user with multiple elements. From video to audio to the venerable drag-and-drop, you need to make sure your content is doing the job. But is your audience actually learning anything? More importantly, are they learning the lessons you need them to? And if they are, do you have the tools to prove that to your leadership?

A number of myths persist about people’s allegedly ever-shortening attention spans—but what does the science say? Neuroscience, behavioral economics, and consumer psychology all offer insights into how we manage and allocate attention. Additionally, our ability to manage attention and focus seems to be related to our abilities to allocate willpower and influence how we make decisions.

Learning is an intrinsically human activity that happens in many places and in many ways. It doesn’t matter how great or feature-rich any one learning system is; learning will never happen in just one place. The modern learning ecosystem not only recognizes this reality but also embraces it to support learners wherever and however they learn best.

Developing great mobile content from an existing course is a lot more than shrinking font sizes and stacking everything into a portrait layout. Unlike traditional learning platforms, effective mobile content provides bite-sized, relevant information at the right time. So, how do you design customized mobile content that makes your users actually want to learn? What skills do you need to develop mobile content? How should the design workflow differ from traditional eLearning? What do mobile learning design documents actually look like, and how do you use them in development?

Audio can be one of the most powerful tools in your toolbox when it comes to creating effective and impactful eLearning. Bad audio, however, can be one of the most destructive tools, distracting the learner and making your course feel unprofessional or unfinished. Don't let your courses fall prey to bad audio. There are easy steps you can take to create high-quality audio without big-budget voice talent.

Many learning professionals are approaching video without formal training. While creating video has gotten simpler, it’s easy to make a bad video. This session will look at 7 “gotchas” video creators should know about. 

Experiential learning provides rising leaders in your organization the critical practice in real world environments they need to be successful. As organizations shift to a blended approach to learning, simulations can bridge the gap between virtual and classroom experiences. It is crucial that the integration of simulation-based learning takes into account the objections of the program and leverages the unique environment that this kind of practice provides.

Most organizations have required training that becomes a chore for individuals to complete. Many learning and development functions are ultimately defined by these required trainings. In addition, managers and leaders must resort to fear or discipline to get individuals to complete the requirements on time. This session will provide a unique approach to “flip the script” and actually motivate individuals to complete their requirements while reducing the time spent. This allows learning departments to focus on more elective programs, and reduces the negative impression associated with training.

Don’t be daunted by the white screen when you’re getting started making your own video content. While it can be hard knowing how to get started, creating video content quickly is easier than it might seem.

Do the executives who fund learning and development care how many courses you have? Or how many students? Or the number of class hours you’ve delivered? Actually, they may react negatively to those numbers. Most of the time, when people are in training their productivity is zero. The key question is how to get to Level 4 and measure actual impact.