It’s no secret that people today are always on, and always on the go. Professional development competes with meetings, travel, deadlines, and the constant pull of email, instant messages, texts, and more. It’s no wonder today’s employees have so little time for learning! For L&D teams, it’s a challenge to reach people, much less engage them in meaningful experiences. A team at Capital One’s Tech College discovered how to engage their audience with microlearning content that’s relevant, always on, and built by in-house experts. Their microlearning strategy meets a broad range of learning needs—from teaching foundational tech concepts to all employees, to offering hands-on practice that applies interpersonal skills in the Capital One Developer Academy (CODA).

Nobody seems to like compliance training—neither people at work nor L&D professionals. But at the same time, everyone wants the people and organizations that serve them to be compliant. Learn how to handle this compliance training paradox and find professional ways to make the best of it.

How do you reinvigorate a legacy, but lagging, training program and get stakeholders to believe in the potential of training? Many in L&D experience the challenges of a rapidly growing company: loss of focus as training needs expand, distrust and fatigue from SMEs and internal stakeholders, pressure from sales and go-to-market teams. Come learn about how one team experimented with core DevOps concepts to address these challenges, and find out how to reinvigorate your team, your content, and your audience.

Agile is a decentralized strategy in deeply centralized organizations. This conflict is made worse when the people in agile can’t adjust to the mindset. Transforming skills, culture, leadership, talent, and perception of quality, ambiguity, bias, and skills creates struggle in new agile practitioners.

As xAPI gains traction in the learning space and is incorporated into more authoring tools, apps, and enterprise systems, the specification is making a transition into easy, widespread use. However, if you’re looking to better use it at your organization, you may be wondering how to develop a strategy to implement meaningful xAPI.

Video, while an awesome medium for conveying information, isn’t usually the primary delivery method in L&D. It takes time, effort, and a particular skill set to make it effective. However, there are benefits to video, including a vast of amount of complicated information that can be conveyed in a short amount of time. But is it feasible or realistic to take a video-first approach to learning? What are the challenges that need to be overcome? What are the gotchas that will bring a video-first strategy to a grinding halt? The path isn’t just challenges—there are benefits as well.

It’s that Herculean challenge, the digital makeover. Take a biweekly face-to-face simulation, costing the firm millions of dollars in travel, expenses, and staffing, and turn it into a rich digital experience. Prepare learners with tools, resources, and training to begin their career. Also, make sure they feel welcomed, understand expectations, and are grounded in the firm’s structure, priorities, and methodologies. Oh, and you have four months to do it!

Onboarding new employees is a critical step in preparing them for their new job. It also can be key to retaining talent, as a recent report by SHRM notes that half of all hourly workers leave new jobs in the first four months. Many organizations solve the onboarding challenge by relying on eLearning for policy, procedures, and other topics, but this approach often is not effective and does not truly prepare new employees. What about familiarizing new employees with an organization that has multiple buildings? Or showing them how to navigate a large warehouse, hospital setting, or manufacturing facility?

From classroom to CMS, LMS, mobile, LXP, VR, AR, AI and beyond, the delivery mechanisms for training content have never been so varied. To what extent should the ultimate distribution channel guide content development principles? In a culture of instant gratification, does learner convenience come at the expense of content quality?

The virtual environment is rapidly changing and participant expectations are high. Are you keeping up with new ways to communicate and connect with your remote audience? Are you presenting yourself as a virtual professional? For example, do you know when to turn on your webcam, and when to leave it off? And does your virtual voice convey the tone and meaning that it needs to get your point across? Are you preparing enough for your online events to avoid technical meltdowns? These important items seem subtle yet they are often overlooked, and can make or break your virtual presentations.

Sometimes there isn’t one correct answer. Training is straightforward when teaching a set way to do a task or explaining the best way to handle a situation. It is not so easy when even subject matter experts disagree about the right course of action. When your SMEs lack consensus, what do you teach your workers? Should you include the ambiguity that naturally occurs in complex situations as part of your simulations? How do you create computer-based simulations that are realistic, but not too complicated to develop and manage?

Training departments often are asked to serve more than just internal employees when it comes to product training efforts—from channel partner training to customer education. Creating, sharing, and maintaining valuable and accurate product training is critical, but managing this can quickly become more time-consuming and labor-intensive than you realize when you’re working with multiple LMSs and people that use other training systems. Sharing training across learning platforms can get complicated quickly. Is your content compatible with each LMS? Can the systems communicate? Is there a single source of truth for reporting?

When designing eLessons, job aids, and more, you may have photos or illustrations to incorporate into your designs. And while it would be great to further edit or add some effects to those pictures, you might think it’s not possible without a lot of time and a working knowledge of an expensive photo-editing software.

When you’re faced with the difficult task of engaging learners, one of the best ways to drive that engagement is interactivity. Chatbots offer a way to easily create and deploy interactivity and adaptive learning sequences in learning engagements. While new technologies like chatbots may seem daunting and inaccessible at first, they don’t have to be.

As an L&D professional, your responsibility is to practice based on sound empirical data. Yet too often practices are based on myths, superstitions, misconceptions, and hype. You’ve heard the claims: “scientifically based,” “addresses the modern learner,” and “this is the future of learning” are just a few of them. And this matters; you not only could be wasting time and money, but actually undermining your own objectives! How do you cut through the fog and find the real value?

Learning experiences are born from content, and your organization invests heavily in building that content. This material is developed by different departments that often aren’t communicating, decreasing its impact and potential. Without an enterprise-wide content ecosystem that connects multipurpose content, these assets get locked up into learning, marketing, and support content “pickle jars,” unable to electrify your connected customer and learner journeys. Today, there’s so much inefficiency, waste, and copy/paste in content creation. But the landscape is evolving! In the near future, all of your content may be united by a content ecosystem. What can you do today to prepare for this?

Why do organizations train, and why do they train so much? Simple questions; complex answers. Despite all the L&D industry knows about performance improvement, people still tend to throw training at problems, or accept client requests for courses even before they know why. And, too often, the courseware doesn’t even work. This isn’t because the training is necessarily bad, but because people shouldn’t have done as much of it in the first place. Organizations train to compensate for bad documentation or teach workarounds to bad processes. They train to fix culture and morale problems. They train to meet compliance requirements and then report attendance over competency. They train repeatedly to be sure everyone “gets it.” They train to “CYA.”

Software training lacks variety, and offering only ILT and outdated HTML tutorials didn’t help Shoptech Software’s case. Training was boring, lengthy, and costly to attend. Participation was stagnant, and customers were utilizing phone support more than training. Shoptech needed a better solution for their manufacturing clients. They needed a learning system with a combination of technologies and resources designed to solve clients’ immediate problems.

L&D has wrestled with the idea of measuring impact for decades. Unfortunately, most of the methods used as “proof” of impact are simple correlations. And most people know the adage “correlation does not equal causation.” This session will help participants understand different, more practical types of analytics, and how they can provide much more impactful insights than simple correlations.

Most of the training videos produced by trainers are for software. Some of them are really engaging, but many are boring and turn people off rather than helping them learn a new program. Sometimes the training videos are nothing more than nasal voice-over with a mouse moving on the screen. But it doesn’t have to be this way. Many editorial and production techniques that media professionals use to make television interesting can be applied to software videos to make them more engaging and better support learning.

Talent development professionals want to get the best results from learning programs. Yet, most experts agree that only about 20 percent of learning is implemented in the workplace. And this percentage has held steady for decades. Would you accept, as a client, a 20 percent transfer rate for a service or product? In an era of growing accountability, it’s the mission of talent developers to increase the rate of transfer. Because in the end, it’s only on-the-job behavior that matters: The business only benefits when learning positively impacts performance. Ensuring learning transfer is therefore an important challenge facing talent developers today. But how can you make sure your learning programs have a high rate of transfer? What makes learning really work?

In the 2018 LinkedIn Workplace Learning Report, employers reported leadership, communication, and collaboration as the most crucial skills to learn from L&D programs. Yet when it comes to developing these complex skills, many current offerings may teach what to do but lack opportunities to practice and apply them. Learners may try games, role-plays, or pre-recorded simulations, but are you truly moving the needle on performance? In light of shrinking budgets, limited time, and lack of effectiveness, how can you demonstrate impactful gains at scale?

The best communicators frame their ideas in a story. Unfortunately, as effective as storytelling is, it remains one of the greatest struggles in the business world. L&D professionals often “firehose” their audience with data and fail to communicate strategic insights. The result? You lose your audience to boredom, confusion, and misinterpretation. And worse, you’ve lost your chance to provide value and connect with your audience. But weaving tales alone isn’t enough to spur your customer, prospect, or manager to take action. It’s the arc of story combined with powerful data and visuals that infuse the right balance of logic and emotion to generate decision-making.

Course accessibility is a common task for developers and creates many questions. What makes a course “accessible”? How can you use Articulate Storyline to make courses accessible to a variety of audiences? How can you easily create closed captions and alternate text for your courses? What are some best practices when planning and developing WCAG or 508-compliant courses? How can you test courses to ensure accessibility?

Augmented, virtual, and other emerging “realities” provide opportunities, and challenges, for assessment of human performance at individual and team levels. These tools introduce endless possibilities for observing learning behaviors, but it can be tricky to align those behaviors with precise learning objectives for clean assessment and data collection.

With over 1,300 learning systems around the world, it is no longer easy to find the right one. As a result, buyers look at various resources for information but may be unaware that the right system for them exists. This session identifies the 10 best learning systems around the world, based on 19 criteria. Find out who ranks high for next-generation learning, learning engagement platforms, and skill-based learning.

As tools and strategies emerge that enable us to better support learning in the flow of work, more and more organizations are looking to focus on workflow learning solutions. But like any new approach, it’s important that we don’t just assume that something is effective because we believe it will be, or that it feels right. Measuring the effectiveness of our efforts is key to understanding our work and to reporting the benefits of our programs, and that includes workflow learning programs.

The project deadline is upon you, and you’ve just received the approved content for final development. As a team of one (or a few), it’s once again time to shift from instructional designer to graphic designer to get your material out the door. The content is text-heavy and there’s plenty of it. So how can you level up your content to achieve effective visual design and user interface in a short timeline, with limited resources and personnel?

Your employees did the compliance training, the required certification, the new module, etc., but a week later you realize that they retained nothing. They were watching Netflix on their other screen, or they only remembered the content long enough to take the quiz at the end. Companies often overlook content that begs to be gamified—the very niche, complex, or boring content. Your new-hire orientations, compliance training, required or annual certifications that your employees are completing because they have to, are the exact trainings that require your game design investment to ensure the content isn’t glossed over—and that your employees actually learn and retain the content and skills they need to succeed at work.

Recent job numbers show that unemployment is moving toward all-time lows, which means the talent wars are getting increasingly competitive among businesses fighting to attract and retain top workers. Even flashy perks like ping-pong, free food, and wine o’clocks are not enough to gain a true talent advantage. New research proves the most coveted benefits are those with substance, that aid professional growth and personal well-being. Not only do development perks provide a competitive hiring edge, but employees given the opportunity to learn at work are also more engaged and interested in their jobs.

Successful onboarding for remote employees requires a lot of managerial time, team time, and resources. New team members can feel isolated and unsupported, especially if they are inexperienced with remote work. Remote employees may not receive information necessary to their job due to lack of consistency in the process, or the absence of support that office-based employees typically receive. Stakeholders may express concern at the length of time required for new employees to become independent and productive. This often results in new employees impatiently pushing through onboarding material to become active in the field quickly, without proper assessment of performance gaps and future developmental needs. Managers, who are also often field-based, can miss signs of employee distress or disengagement until it’s too late.

Your company does not pay for the rest of your team to attend conferences, courses, or outside development. Reports show that employees leave due to lack of training and development opportunities. What will you do? Your people are great! You don’t want to lose them. Without any budget dollars, how can you provide learning experiences for your team so their skills grow instead of getting stale?

Branching scenarios can engage learners and provide relevant decision-making practice. They can help learners become competent at skills faster than other training approaches. While branching scenarios can be very valuable, nothing is the right solution for every training problem. Branching scenarios can be challenging to design and time-consuming to build. That might leave you wondering: When is it worth the time and effort to create a branching scenario? When do the benefits of branching scenarios outweigh the costs to create them? Are there any easier alternatives that could work, or might even work better in some situations?

You’ve heard about xAPI but wonder what comes next. Getting from this initial position of interest to widespread organizational buy-in can be a huge challenge. How do you justify taking resources away from creating and curating learning experiences to build something new and unproven? It can be a challenge to identify the first steps needed to start convincing stakeholders that the investment is worth it. xAPI is a complex solution, and there is no road map that an organization can follow. Everyone is looking for the best ways to use project management strategies to leverage the resources they have access to, so they can achieve those first “wins” in the process of implementing xAPI.

You probably have suffered through online learning content that featured poor audio or video. You suffered through it because the material was valuable. But have you ever stopped and asked yourself why? Why would anyone sit through this? Why would anyone come back for more? And as an L&D professional, how can you improve the quality of your audio and video content for your learners?

You’ve created great training, but you hear complaints that employees still can’t do their job after passing your class. That’s frustrating! Many customers believe that if employees knew how to do their job, they would do it. After all, that’s why they get paid! Those are the same people who think that the best way to improve performance is by offering and conducting more training. The truth is that employee performance is influenced by several factors, one of which is closing the skills and knowledge gap through more training. And even the best-designed and best-delivered training will fail if the other five performance barriers (including training) are not addressed.

Artificial intelligence is gradually taking over significant aspects of many people’s lives. From virtual assistants to self-driving cars, from chatbots to the Internet of Things, AI seems to be spreading its wings. The eLearning domain is no exception. In theory, today’s machines can create eLearning content with the help of artificial intelligence. What does this mean for eLearning professionals? If AI will create eLearning courses at the click of a button, what will instructional designers do? Will they be out of jobs? Such a fear is understandable, but this session will explore whether or not it is reasonable.

You know that most media—including eLearning—is failing at representation. You see it every day. And not only is it leaving people out of the picture, it’s less effective as a result. Maybe you’ve tried to make your work more inclusive but haven’t been able to find great media, haven’t been able to convince your stakeholders, or simply aren’t confident in navigating how to respectfully represent different genders, ethnicities, orientations, and abilities.

Zoom is one of the newest and fastest-growing virtual classroom platforms on the market today. If you are using it, or thinking of using it, you are not alone! But are you effectively using its tools and features to capture your remote audience’s attention? If you are like most virtual class designers or facilitators, you want your participants to be more involved in their learning and more engaged in the virtual classroom. Zoom provides the tools for interactivity, if you know where to find them and how to use them.

Once we selected a new LMS, there were still a lot of questions to answer as we went about implementing it. How long does the average implementation take? Did we budget enough for cost? Who needs to be involved? How do we handle historical data and content metadata? Who is held accountable for meeting milestones and for ensuring a successful launch? All these and more were questions we had to think through to ensure a successful implementation. We had one shot at this and couldn't afford to fail.

Take a look at these situations: (1) Your client insists on having at least one image per page. They don’t care which images you choose. (2) You realize that the course you are developing is very text-heavy, so you decide to add some images to break it up. (3) You find a really awesome image, so you add it to your next course. Sound familiar? Probably. So ask yourself two questions: “Did I really think about the images before using them?” and “Were any of the images confusing, ambiguous, or irrelevant?” Be honest with yourself. How do you choose the images that will convey meaning for your learners?

While many instructional designers strive to create content that is effective for all learners, in reality, their designs often don’t accommodate students with abilities that are different from their own. One way you can ensure that your learning content facilitates learning among all learners is by designing to ADA compliance standards. Not only will doing so result in quality learning for everyone, it will also satisfy a legal requirement to which higher education institutions are beholden.

As more and more projects are built to accommodate multiple devices, the need to prototype grows. Whether you are creating a new project, developing an app, or simply launching a new responsive course, prototyping can help you better understand what’s working and what needs to be changed.

Often, organizations deliver the same eLearning course to all their employees. This means each learner gets the same course with the same content no matter what they already know or what they have already done. This creates a one-size-fits-all approach without considering learners’ previous experiences.

Designing a learning ecosystem can be daunting. Selecting the right technologies for your business is crucial for long-term success. Attend this session to learn how various technologies, strategies, and partnerships work together to form a comprehensive learning ecosystem. Hear how a global company, Yum! Brands, utilizes an LMS, LCMS, CMS, LRS, and various other tools (including AI) to provide training to over 850,000 learners in 135 countries with 41 different languages. This session will describe the struggles related to system constraints, cultural differences, business strategy, and the constant battle of keeping up with emerging technologies. Discover tips and tricks for creating a comprehensive learning ecosystem!

The stakes were high, and the learning challenge was tough. A major hospital system was building a new hospital. Nurses, physicians, and hospital staff had to prepare to work effectively, confidently, and safely to provide an excellent patient experience on day one. They had to navigate new spaces; implement new workflows and policies; use new equipment, a new electronic medical records system, and a new communications system; and employ new safety and security procedures. How do you enable busy employees to learn a large and complex set of critical skills in a limited time?

Your company is growing, and you need to scale your training delivery but with a similar cost structure. This was the issue facing Tricentis. They increased their annual training completions from 58 in 2008 to over 18,000 in the first six months of 2018. A traditional instructor-led training model could no longer support this growth. They needed a new eLearning- and technology-led approach.

You’re an instructional designer who cares about the efficacy of your course—in other words, you want to make sure your users are actually learning something. You start writing some multiple-choice questions and throw in some true/false questions for good measure. This is just what you do for educational assessment, right? Stop here for a second. Do you understand why you’re doing that? Are you interested in some alternative methods for assessing your learners?

Most people carry around a video camera every day—it just happens to also be a smartphone. If you think video taken on a smartphone won’t be professional enough for your eLearning courses, think again. This session will share essential tools—including apps, a gimbal, lights, and microphones—that can help you produce high-quality video without breaking the bank. In case you’re not convinced, you’ll see how this setup was used to produce video for a Storyline course that was voted Best Immersive/Simulation Solution at the Learning Solutions 2018 DemoFest.

Training alone cannot drive performance, only contribute to it; that’s the root of the problem. L&D already excels within long-held training paradigms to deliver effective knowledge transfer—it’s not wrong, it’s just not enough! The business needs workforce productivity, meaning consistent performance at Point-of-Work, where performance represents the productivity end of a learning-performance continuum. In the current training paradigm, Point-of-Work is out of scope. Traditional training needs assessments cannot inform “intentional design” frameworks like the Five Moments of Need or even 70:20:10, both of which enable convergence of learning with work. Point-of-Work and moments of need are also out of scope for existing LMS technology. Both the conversation and tactics must change, because stakeholders have a blind spot—they expect one thing, training, and it’s not enough.

The eLearning Guild’s director of research, Jane Bozarth, along with contributors to recent research, reviews the Guild’s recent reports on learning styles, evaluating learning, and creating eLearning with limited resources. We’ll look at what’s happening—or not happening—industry-wide, with an emphasis on what works; such as what factors support success, how to counter myths and misperceptions, and what content lends itself best to particular approaches.

Designers experience waste during the development of blended learning curricula. Multiple meetings, storyboards, learner personas, and prototypes create a framework for the finalized product; however, failure to eliminate process redundancies (waste) will produce no standard products. What if there were a methodology that could streamline and standardize instructional development among designers, learners, and customers?

You can’t be available to provide coaching and feedback 24/7, but an intelligent chatbot can! All over the world, people are using artificial intelligence to manage their bank accounts, book travel, and find great products, so why not use this same technology to help people learn new skills and advance their careers? You might have already considered using artificial intelligence to bring the “wow factor” to your next project, but it can sound like a complicated and expensive endeavor—especially for your first time.