No formal eLearning background or training? Don’t have the time to slow down and learn the basics? You’re not alone. If that sounds like you, you may feel like you’re always a beginner—struggling to catch up with books and articles filled with academic and technical terms that don’t align with your practical experiences.

Comics for learning have a long history of telling stories to teach concepts and processes. A one-page comic scene can describe a complex process, or a comic scenario with characters and dialogue can help explain more difficult situations by telling a story. Unfortunately, L&D professionals often discard the idea of using the comic medium in adult learning, seeing it as either an unacceptable medium or too costly both in time and budget. These misconceptions can lead you to bypass an effective medium for learning.

Often, the traditional mandatory training required by regulatory agencies does not adequately prepare staff to perform the tasks as expected. Reviewing the information once a year, staff forget the information before they are required to complete the task on the job. It’s no surprise, then, that when surveys or inspections occur, staff are unable to perform as required.

Do you like to learn from extraordinary people? Vincent Van Gogh is one of the most admired artists in history. He reached his high level of mastery with almost no formal training at all. So what are the secrets of his learning journey? His letters give clear answers on the principles of learning that he applied. These principles are not just useful for the time when he lived—they’re also applicable for learning design today.

The Houston Food Bank delivered 79 million meals in 2016 and had a goal to deliver 100 million meals in 2018. With this massive expansion, training was required in a number of areas, from leadership development to food safety and compliance. Delivering this training while keeping operating expenses low, however, seemed difficult—that is, until they got support from the Houston L&D community.

Many organizations want to provide on-demand, just-in-time performance support that requires minimal technical skills to create. Likewise, capturing and sharing tacit knowledge is becoming a top priority. Is it possible to create this kind of solution both in a way that will engage the learner, and in a way that can be measured and evaluated? Yes—with YouTube-style videos.

Games can be a powerful tool for improving business performance. With advances in technology and expertise, new opportunities are opening up to use games to meet all kinds of workplace challenges. From increasing sales to upskilling managers to preventing compliance breaches, eLearning games are versatile and full of potential. But how do you match an eLearning game to a business problem? And can you balance playability with practicality in a corporate setting?

The requirements for effective enterprise user experience design seem to change on a daily basis. With a myriad of devices, software and cloud solutions, AI, machine learning, and AR/VR all impacting the way people receive and interact with content, it is difficult to know how to effectively integrate training into an employee’s work life. And to design it as a powerful and useful experience is even more challenging.

Do you fear that your employees lack a single place to go when looking for the information needed to do their jobs? Do you worry about delivering consistent customer service experiences? You’re not alone: Allstate had these same concerns before they set a company-wide initiative to build a world-class training environment and knowledge repository for their employees.

You can create interactive video in a number of ways. There are tools for developing this kind of content, but they can be complex, expensive, and may not adapt to users’ various screen sizes. Another option, particularly if you want this content to be responsive, is to code it up yourself. If you’re not a strong coder this may seem too complex, but it’s actually much easier to accomplish than you might expect.

You’ve put hours into analyzing content, spent days painstakingly storyboarding your product and drafting the scripts, and carefully thought through navigation choices—and yet, when you show it to your client or stakeholders, you’re still met with “Great, but can you make it look nicer/better/modern/pretty?” What more can you do when you’ve utilized sound learning theory and development strategies, but you’re still expected to be a graphic designer on top of it all?

Most of eLearning is deadly dull. The prose is turgid, the dialogue is worse, the stock photos are gratuitous, and the practice items are rote if not outright silly. Not only is this not fun, it’s not effective. There are plenty of reasons why: limited time and resources, and stakeholders who believe eLearning must be seen as serious. Yet, the outcome is unfortunate. And you can do better!

When you create a scenario, you work hard to make it realistic and relevant for your learners. Unfortunately, even otherwise engaging scenarios sometimes include abstract feedback like “Incorrect. Please try again.” Simply saying the choice is right or wrong can make learners lose interest and focus, and it doesn’t help them learn from their mistakes.

There is a growing disconnect between the supply and demand of skills required to fill some of the most essential jobs globally. A “one size fits all” approach to learning and development is simply not working, putting business performance and innovation at risk. How people learn, where people learn, and what people learn must change to allow individuals to experience a specific pathway that fully meets their individual needs.

As adoption of xAPI takes hold, the convergence of working and learning offers instructional designers the opportunity to do more than ever before. xAPI allows for more robust tracking of the learning process, including learning that happens outside the LMS and on the job. As actual data is integrated with learning metrics, you can tailor the process to individual needs and draw useful conclusions about the learning as a whole.

Adult learning principles state that adults learn best when content is relevant. So why do most virtual classroom lessons rely on lectures and slides? Unfortunately, virtual classroom sessions tend to focus on getting as much content out there as possible, and leaving it up to the learners to figure out how to make it all work. 

Developing a mobile learning strategy involves a lot more than great instructional design. A clear path for implementation makes sure your products aren’t just another app on your learners’ mobile devices. This means making sure your learners have easy access to the right content at the right time, but it also means giving learners an experience that inspires trust in both your content and your organization.

As the lines between marketing, communication, and training are blurring, L&D is being asked to think “like a marketer” and develop or promote creative new learning solutions. So how do marketers engage their audience and change people’s behavior despite evolving technology and consumer preferences? The secret is their strategy. How can L&D professionals apply these strategies to change learner behavior and engage participants?

Many professionals struggle with providing clear recommendations to their organizations on what approach to take with courses. Simply putting things online because it is the trend does not seem like a very educated way forward. This often leads to disappointing results that are costly and do not deliver the expected outcomes. Many learning professionals remain unsure of how to formulate an answer to the question they are asked.

Structured, classroom-based training can take a long time and add additional costs, and it can be very frustrating to create resource documents. Who wants paper references that have to be updated constantly, or to use a homemade reference system that is just as painful to maintain? Are you losing good people during or just after their new-hire training? There has to be a better way!

Interactive video for training and learning is an extremely beneficial method of engaging viewers and increasing knowledge transfer. Many people have heard of interactive video but might not know how to get started, what the best practices are, what’s possible, or how it works with tools they already use. This session will help companies and institutions add an engaging asset to their toolbox and be better informed in their video strategy planning.

Gamification is an important and powerful strategy for influencing and motivating people. Unfortunately, many people think that gamification means 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, many learning professionals do not understand how to deconstruct games to effectively drive the learning and behavior they need.

Deciding when to incorporate new standards and tools into your learning ecosystem can make evaluation difficult. With the ADL’s release of cmi5 in June 2016 as the xAPI profile for LMS/content communication, a wave of LMS and authoring tools have embraced the specification. Other authoring tools have been slower to adopt cmi5, opting to rely on xAPI-enabled SCORM modules to extend tracking beyond the limited data points of SCORM.

Do you want to introduce more interactivity into your eLearning courses? Do you want to provide a safe space for your learners to explore through trial and error? Have you heard about branching scenarios but not known how to go about building one?

Do you have a story to tell? A lesson to teach? A product to market? VideoScribe lets you do all that. Rapidly. VideoScribe lets you create whiteboard animations that you can post online or include in eLearning or presentations. No drawing talent needed!

High-quality visuals are crucial to the success of eLearning courses and videos. Photoshop lets you create these quickly and easily, but many eLearning developers find Photoshop too complicated and either avoid it altogether or don’t take full advantage of the features available.

Learning content is often walled off from other categories of content developed in the enterprise. Learning content is often considered inappropriate for audiences outside the organization because it’s designed to talk to employees and has a tone (and, most often, a quality level) that is not appropriate for consumer communication. Due to this attitude, loads of quality content is wasted that could have an impact on the organizational bottom line.

You’ve spent lots of time and money on your most recent L&D project. Now executives want to know: “Was it effective? What’s the ROI?” Do you know how to answer? If the answer is “no,” you’re not alone. One of the things many instructional designers struggle with is the dreaded evaluation. Even those who know the theory inside and out often struggle to put it into place.

Every session and course you build is intended to improve people’s work performance in some way. So, before jumping into building the content, it is vital to find ways of seeing things from the learning audience’s point of view. Doing this well improves their learning experience, ensuring they get the right content and just what they need.

Scrum has quickly become a preferred methodology for developing educational content in a fast-paced world. But how do you take those agile concepts and apply them to an existing development team deeply rooted in linear processes? MedStar Health had a patient education video production team that was buried under projects. They needed to implement Scrum, and fast, but quickly found that the out-of-the-box process needed some customization.

The time was right for The Predictive Index to adopt a performance support mindset. The only problem was, they hadn’t done it before! In spite of the challenges posed by an agile software environment, over 20 languages, and no hint of which tool set to choose, performance support is now alive and well and growing in its adoption around the globe throughout the PI Network. So how did they accomplish this?

Sales. Complaints. Stocking. Theft. These issues dominate the retail day-to-day, leaving little time for development. Distributed stores, varying experience levels, and the growing complexity of omnichannel are making it more difficult for L&D to support retail employees. Although this audience is underserved by L&D, they are at great risk for injury, they interact with customers, and they have the power to make or break your business—one decision at a time.

Many learning and development professionals are shifting away from an overreliance on outcome-based evaluation models, such as the Kirkpatrick evaluation model, in favor of advanced evaluation models that drive actual use of findings and organizational learning. If you’re in the beginning stages of this transition, though, you may be wondering what other approaches are out there and how best to translate them from theory to practical use.

Enabling course accessibility is a common task for developers, but it also creates many questions. What makes a course accessible? How can you use Storyline to make courses accessible to a variety of audiences? What are some best practices when planning and developing WCAG or 508-compliant courses? How can you test courses to ensure accessibility?

Gamification and game-based learning are both buzzwords in the education and training industry. Although both are innovative ways to train your learners, they cannot be used interchangeably. While both relate to education, how they do so varies considerably. Organizations are warming up to the idea of using gamification and serious games to train their employees. However, many organizations are still unsure of the benefits of gamifying their training needs.

Selecting the wrong LMS can lead to years of frustration – missing features, bad support and bad contracts can be maddening. So how can you avoid picking the wrong LMS? Problems with RFP’s, being too trusting in marketing slogans, sticking to selection rules rather than product fit, and weak negotiation tactics are just a few of the stumbling blocks you’ll want to consider in detail, and be prepared to avoid.

Due to cost and time constraints, only a small percentage of John Deere’s dealer technicians had the opportunity to attend offsite instructor-led training. The company needed to reach more technicians with training that would go beyond what asynchronous training could provide in a format that could be taken with just a computer and internet connection. The training needed to be globally accessible, highly engaging, and encourage the development of strong diagnostic skills.

Gamifying your courses can be a real creative challenge. However, it becomes a little easier when you can add familiar game elements to your web-based courses like timers, health meters, progress trackers, navigation joysticks, etc. The good news is that Articulate Storyline 3 and 360 make it easy to create all of these things by leveraging the new dial interactive object functionality.

Delivering short bursts of lessons over time is a solid approach for helping people learn and retain information, and one great approach for this kind of training is microlearning video. If you’re not producing one- to three-minute videos for your audience, it’s time to start. It’s not expensive, and you probably already have the tool you need on your computer: Microsoft PowerPoint. If you can create slides in PowerPoint, you can create microlearning videos, too.

Augmented reality (AR) allows you to create an immersive experience for learners. AR combines the web, images, sound, movies, games, search engines, databases, and social media and explodes them across the physical world, revealing invisible stories around product, process, and operation. But what makes a compelling AR experience that makes learning stick, and how can you get started?

Many learners want shorter nuggets of content. It can be challenging, however, for instructional designers to fit everything they need to do into five- to seven-minute chunks. If you’re not careful, the lessons can end up being mostly teaching, and what gets lost is the chance for learners to practice the skills being taught and the chance to apply the new skills to their own situation.

Is your L&D program short on dollars but big on expectations? Most learning and development professionals feel under-resourced given the learning needs they face, the vast number of tools and approaches available, and their overall ambition to do great work. Today’s L&D professionals need to do more with less, but how?

Is your organization interested in moving beyond course delivery to a broader, more comprehensive and strategic approach that focuses not just on learning, but on performance and productivity? How do you justify your L&D budget? What metrics do you track, and how compelling are they to your funders? Are your sponsors asking you to give them courses or improve the productivity of the organization?

eLearning teams are consistently tasked with completing large projects under impossibly tight deadlines. Often, this feels like eating an elephant. How do you map out the project? How do you hold SMEs, designers, and developers accountable? How do you display progress to stakeholders? The eLearning team at Karmak struggled with these questions and consistently failed to meet deadlines. They wondered: Could borrowing an internal development model be the answer?

Despite technology promises, developing content that is meaningful, accessible, and maintainable in a world of multiple devices and varied platforms remains a huge challenge. Responsive design still holds the key, but to unlock its real power, instructional designers need to differentiate between “true” responsive and many of the “pseudo-responsive” approaches in use today.

70:20:10 is a popular concept in our industry. The framework provides structure that should exist in our efforts to support a workforce. However, what does 70:20:10 look like beyond just the ratio? How are organizations using the framework and, more importantly, what benefits are organizations seeing from using this approach?

You’re excited about the promise of an xAPI-enabled world, but you’ve got a learning management system, a catalog full of SCORM-based courses that you need, and a handful of learning tool vendors that don’t use xAPI. What if you could get the most out of an LMS and an LRS at the same time as you move to your next-generation learning and performance infrastructure?

What if you could get your learners out of their seats and spinning in circles? This presentation will demonstrate a game that does just that. Then you will learn about the advanced actions and JavaScript that made it possible.

Many organizations see virtual reality as too expensive to create and implement. However, cost barriers to VR entry can actually be fairly low, and introducing VR into organizations can be more cost-effective than you imagined.

TechSmith Camtasia is an amazing tool for capturing and publishing conceptual videos and procedural demonstrations. Used properly, Camtasia’s advanced animation features can turn your video from boring to amazing. But the seemingly high learning curve and production time often dissuades Camtasia users from taking advantage of these important capabilities. It doesn’t help that your organization increasingly expects your team to build more videos in half the time.

You think your content is important, but does your audience? Stories provide context for facts, and a narrative is an effective way to capture your audience’s attention, change a perspective, or explain something well; and yet, many L&D professionals are not using storytelling enough during the learning and development process. How do you add more narrative to information you need others to understand?