Have you been thinking about leveraging virtual training? Are you trying to get started, but unsure how to convert those old facilitator guides into an engaging virtual classroom experience? Or maybe you’ve been training virtually for a while, but are stuck in a rut and looking for some new and creative ideas.

Curation is a hot topic in learning. No longer is L&D expected to create all training materials. To remain competitive, you need to explore and leverage multiple types of training resources. But how do you find targeted content? What is the right mix of training resources? How do you decide what to include?

The mantra these days is to increase learner engagement, because if learners aren’t engaged, then they’re not learning, right? So learning designers have spent a lot of energy adding bells and whistles—anything to increase engagement. But while learners seem to like all this engagement, is L&D actually seeing any measurable results? According to CEB/Gartner, traditional training only creates 37 percent learning transfer back to the workplace. That’s a problem!

Rolling out new training is rarely easy, but it can be even more tricky when that training needs to be designed for and delivered to a global audience. This was the case when the Sherwin-Williams Company needed to create and share a new global code of conduct training. With the CEO and board of directors as stakeholders, this high-profile rollout had to go smoothly.

Virtual classroom tools, when used thoughtfully, have enabled us to increase the audiences we can reach and the learning experiences we can provide. However, the tools we use and the ways we use them are always evolving. What was once considered cutting edge even a few years ago has shifted, and we can only expect it to evolve as technology advances.

There are benefits to off-the-shelf learning management systems, but in some situations the drawbacks outweigh the benefits. They often give you less control over the learner experience and may not provide the meaning from your learning metrics that you need. Sometimes the best solution for your LMS needs is a custom one. But custom LMS solutions are complicated and expensive to create, right? Actually, they don’t have to be.

Good courseware will use multiple elements such as video, audio, interaction, and good old-fashioned reading. You struggle to balance all of it until it’s a finely harmonized symphony of information, waiting for a person to take it all in. But are any of those activities or videos you’ve worked on actually helping anyone learn? How can you show the relationship between the activities and performance?

It’s so easy to get caught in a rut making the same type of video, or to just go with the standard talking head video, but this can easily bore your audience and your developers. Furthermore, this lack of breadth in video types doesn’t allow for the video to really meet the needs of your audience.

Performance support is a methodology that has been around for decades. However, recent years have seen a resurgence of interest and possibilities for performance support as technologies have evolved, which has opened new pathways for supporting workers in their moment of need. While promising, performance support is also a deviation from traditional approaches to training and development. How can you and your organization successfully add performance support to your strategies?

L&D professionals often think about one single training program only, instead of looking at the entire journey their learners take. Mapping out the learner life cycle and assigning content that engages them along the way not only helps create unforgettable learning experiences and drive individual performance, but also helps with the transfer of knowledge after a training session ends.

Looking for ideas of how to create more interesting learner experiences in Storyline? Wishing your eLearning projects could be more interactive and engaging, perhaps even including gaming elements? If so, then you’ll want to explore what you can do using variables and triggers. This hands-on session will provide you with tips, tricks, and techniques you can use to put them to work immediately and unleash your creativity.

Something big is missing from the L&D field: design critiques. Critiques are collaborative sessions that help designers find solutions to design problems. Many creative fields use design critiques to improve the implementation of their products. Input from others brings new perspectives and insights to one’s work. Feedback makes designers more effective and creates a positive work culture. Yet, in learning experience design, critiques are vastly under-used.

All businesses need to provide learning that is relevant and timely to their employees, while attempting to maximize learner receptivity by providing it through one of learners’ many available devices. This can make it difficult to create eLearning that is engaging, flexible, and responsive as well as being accessible across multiple devices seamlessly.

The Experience API is a marvelous enabling technology that can give you a rich picture of an individual’s learning path. Since it captures experiences in a consistent format, it opens the door for mobile, social, or offline learning. But xAPI is a terrible place to start when writing an RFP. It should not be the reason you’re buying software. xAPI is a feature—you should be buying a solution.

In this session, The eLearning Guild’s director of research, Jane Bozarth, reviews the Guild’s most recent reports on video, microlearning, and social tools for learning. We’ll look at what’s happening—or not happening—industry-wide, with an emphasis on what works, such as what factors support success and what content lends itself best to particular approaches. 

This review of research is designed to familiarize you with what’s happening in the field and to help you find ways to be successful with approaches you’re considering or are already using and would like to enhance. You’ll leave with practical, evidence-based advice to help you engage in conversations and apply new ideas back at work. 

Why are most presentations so bad? Truly terrible? They’re too wordy, text-based, and generally dull. They don’t tell stories that engage, excite, or inspire. And they generally do little to actually help people learn. They are linear and non-responsive, with no interaction—pretty much everything you know doesn’t work to convey information effectively. Few people enjoy creating, delivering, or watching PowerPoint presentations, so let’s change that.

The demands of the modern organization require you to look for more efficient ways to help people build their skills. Because of this, organizations are looking beyond traditional classes and courses that take time away from the job, and they’re also focusing on performance support: providing help directly in the flow of people’s work. These just-in-time options include more than just the job aids you’ve used in the past. Resources such as social technology, EPSS, video, and augmented reality offer new ways to provide employees with instant access to the answers they need.

L&D professionals are rarely able to build their ideal learning ecosystem; they often inherit legacy systems and approaches. With so many technologies designed to support specific parts of your ecosystem, it can be difficult to organize them into a comprehensive learning strategy with the flexibility to meet the future needs of your rapidly evolving business and the mobile, social, and global engagement necessary for a generationally diverse workforce.

In 2011, one company had the lowest productivity in its industry in the Asia Pacific, was not making cost of capital, and had a toxic culture. By 2016, the company had the highest productivity in the Asia Pacific, it made record profits, and unions were working happily with management. The organization achieved this by addressing its leadership vacuum and investing in management development that spanned the 70:20:10 in often creative ways.

User testing is one of the most powerful tools in creating solutions that work the way you want—and the way your learners expect. Unfortunately, it’s often overlooked and can even be scary if you’ve never done it before. But solid user testing techniques can actually be easier to start using than you might expect.

Designers often find themselves playing many roles in training development. Due to time or budget constraints, the role that usually ends up taking a backseat is the role of graphic designer. And this is a challenge because solid graphic design makes a big difference in how people receive and process information, which is L&D’s ultimate goal. While graphic design can seem difficult and time-consuming, it doesn’t have to be.

We are facing a knowledge tsunami—the sheer amount of content available is increasing at an exponential rate, while the shelf life of that content is shrinking dramatically. It can be overwhelming, not just to learners, but to us as well. As we look at the content we develop and publish, we have to ask some very important questions. Is it good content? Is it the right content for the right purpose? Is it up-to-date? Is it understandable? And even when we are confident in our content, we have to make sure it gets to the right people, at just the right time.

While the L&D community is increasingly familiar with the Experience API (xAPI) and its value for data collection and interoperability, few examples exist to clarify the value of xAPI as applied within different existing learning infrastructures. This session is focused on sharing the ways xAPI can connect and provide value in any eLearning environment.

Three-dimensional content is phenomenally cool—from basic polygonal models to full human-like characters, buildings, vehicles, and even complete environments. Because 3-D content has historically taken vast resources (i.e., time or money) to create, 3-D resources are often relegated to video games, simulations, and VR only. However, creating, editing, and obtaining 3-D models for everyday use in eLearning doesn’t have to be cost-prohibitive or take a lot of time.

What do compliance training and the play Wicked have in common? What about onboarding and Hamlet? How about project management and stage management? They have more in common than you think. When you are creating a learning experience, you are producing a performance, and you need to think like a Broadway director.

Does the audio in your eLearning presentations sound too hot, too cold, or just right? Does your audio have background hiss or other unwanted sounds no matter how quiet your recording environment? Does your narration have noticeably loud “P” (plosive) or “S” (sibilance) sounds? These factors can distract your learner from the message you wish to present, and a distracted learner learns less.

Is the LMS dead? Can a combination of today’s mobile apps, social interactions, and game-enabled microlearning replace yesterday’s “macrolearning” platforms? Do your training programs need to be so structured and prescriptive when modern adaptive approaches are now a reality? The ever-evolving educational technology landscape presents more choices than ever, but finding the right solution in the deep and wide pool of possibility isn’t always simple.

Fiction writers know that readers expect certain patterns of dramatic tension and resolution, and if those are absent, a work loses its ability to engage readers. These tried-and-true techniques are gaining popularity as more writers bypass traditional publishing channels. Along the way, their applicability to learning design is becoming apparent.

At Catalina Marketing, new employee onboarding consisted of disparate programs across functions and countries. In some parts of the company, no structured onboarding existed at all. When updating this program, their goals were to provide a consistent experience across the globe; break down silos across different areas of the organization; create an environment for early employee engagement; and socialize Catalina’s culture, values, and behaviors globally. So how did they do it?

When you begin creating serious games, it’s not uncommon to wonder what you need to figure out first. One of the best places to start is with the processes you’ll use. You might think you’d have to learn all-new, game-development-specific methodologies in order to plan, prototype, and build your game—but there are business approaches you might already be familiar with that can work equally well for getting started in game design.

Today’s learning ecosystems are evolving. Technology continues to advance, people’s learning needs and preferences are changing, and business needs emerge and expand. In 2016, Choice University embarked on the challenge of evolving the franchisee learning management system and tying it more closely to the business objectives of the company and the hotels it serves. This change required a transformation of the learning ecosystem to maximize business results.

As organizations grow, there is too much change occurring too frequently to rely on traditional forms of communication. Meetings, email, and training are just not sufficient to create organizational alignment at scale. Additionally, leaders in growing organizations consistently strive to become better communicators for their organization, and they crave a more authentic way to connect with large teams.

Many training designers recognize that too much knowledge is lost in the transfer from their courses to the workplace. Performance support and microlearning assets, delivered at the point of need, could solve the problem; but often, the company lacks the tools or infrastructure for delivering just-in-time assets.

Many people making training videos are wizzes at the technology, but few are schooled in the editorial skills of crafting pictures to convey meaning. As a result, many training videos are boring and fail to engage learners. One reason is that video messages are picture-led. To truly engage learners, you need to create video with a picture-first mindset. You also need to play to its strengths as a modality.

Business leaders expect learning efforts to deliver impactful results while minimizing disruptions to key processes. They expect performance to improve—not for learning to become more effective—and for learning practitioners to demonstrate results for learning. They also expect L&D to seamlessly integrate learning into business activities while effectively minimizing the use of available resources. Because of this, learning practitioners are entering a brave new eLearning world full of creativity and opportunities to drive integrative business value.

Learning happens all around us and in all different forms. You want to reach your target audience in as many ways and as simply as possible. You also face budget limitations, internal IT roadblocks, and enterprises architecture or purchasing challenges.

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. Learning professionals who use web conferencing tools with such participants require effective, simple, on-time support for seamless training deliveries.

Employees want help whenever they need it, but most L&D departments create materials that they store in an LMS or knowledge base. Searching for those materials interrupts your learners’ workflow and takes time out of their day. What if, instead, you could provide help to them in the tools that they use so that all they had to do was simply hover or click a button to get answers?

Interactive video helps with engagement and retention of key elements; it also helps to focus a person’s attention on specific areas of the video. But these learning experiences can be expensive and time-consuming to produce. Or are they? Using some “quick and dirty” tools such as video from a smartphone and Storyline, you can build an interactive video experience in about an hour.

Motion graphic animation is a great way to compress information into a compelling encapsulated video. You could pay an agency to create it for you, but if you don’t have a big budget—or ANY budget—you’ll probably have to do it yourself. Where do you start? Do you need to learn complicated software? And what happens if you, like most people, aren’t blessed with “design sense”?

Creating interactive training content that adapts automatically from desktop to mobile screens—and everything in between—can drag down your development times. By using fluid boxes, a new responsive layout tool in Adobe Captivate, you can accelerate your development timelines and mystify your learners with flexibility so enchanting it feels like magic.

How many times have you had to redo a project after you thought you understood the challenge, the goals, or the requirements? As you start to build more complex interactions and applications, you need a process that will allow you to test a concept, measure its results, and iterate over and over until it meets the needs of your audience.

People get into eLearning from a variety of professions. Some were subject matter experts or trainers; others had focused their careers on media or web development. At some point, though, someone asked or encouraged them to develop eLearning. So, they bought and learned to use an authoring tool, but they likely weren’t given much background on instructional design techniques and how these can help them build better eLearning.

Are your live online training programs designed for a global audience? Do your global participants feel comfortable in your virtual classes? Have you planned activities that resonate with cross-cultural learners? Since virtual training allows you to easily reach your global workforce, it’s easy to include everyone on the invitation. But if your program design doesn’t account for international and cultural differences, then your learning outcomes and results will fall short.

Save That Sale! is an award-winning multiplayer board game that engages the players in resolving the business challenges around revenue capture, profitability, and customer engagement in order life-cycle management in an omni-channel world. This game was designed, developed, and printed in six weeks. You will walk through the steps from idea to completion, and you’ll leave with a process you can follow when designing board games.

People who are working to strengthen and diversify their learning and performance ecosystem are often interested in figuring out how to amplify social learning in the organization. L&D professionals may find, however, that promoting social learning is not as easy as enabling communication technologies and assigning roles. Learning leaders are sometimes surprised by inactive enterprise social networks and weak peer-to-peer support for learning.

Continuous learning is a widely accepted goal, but how do you make this work? How do you keep learners coming back, and how do you structure content over time to keep learners engaged?

Opportunities for practice, reflection, and receiving feedback are essential for improved job performance. Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center (DHMC) found that medical resident training did not yield an increase in the number of autopsies completed. Further, the residents felt unprepared for conversations with grieving family members when seeking approval to conduct an autopsy. The learning team was enlisted to develop a new approach to resident training to boost autopsy rates.

Feeling like you can’t get past gamification? Tired of matching, memory, or Jeopardy-style games? Everyone hits creative road blocks. Maybe you see a great example of a learning game online but feel held back creatively by learning objectives. How do you create a serious game while ensuring you meet your learning objectives?

The organization’s LMS contract was coming to an end. After thoroughly reviewing its effectiveness, the team concluded it was no longer meeting their needs for the following reasons: End users were unable to access content on mobile devices. The system lacked eCommerce capabilities and wasn’t inviting or engaging. They had a limited licensing model. There were limited reporting capabilities and no dashboards. The cost was high. There was limited integration with internal systems.

Finding ways to make learning “stick” with technology is always a challenge. Augmented reality (AR) is one of those “make it stick” technology options available for education and training. Knowing where to get started with AR is a little challenging, but with the right foundation to start from, AR can be an exciting and engaging tool to use in learning development.

Articulate Rise is awesome! It makes it easy to create responsive eLearning by simply filling out a form, and it looks great on every device. But sometimes with simplicity you don’t get as much flexibility as you want. What if you want to hide the page titles or adjust the style of the buttons? Luckily, there are some simple CSS tricks you can do to Articulate Rise courses that give you greater ability to visually adjust the output of your courses.