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?

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.

Businesses understand that the faster customers see value from a product or service, the more satisfied they’ll be, and the more likely they are to renew a subscription or return to buy more. Despite this, many don’t understand how to properly train their customers at the start and ensure that they are giving them the right information at the right time. Furthermore, they struggle to implement processes that scale to support growth.

Social media has changed the way learning professionals manage knowledge on a fundamental level, and shared content—created and curated through collaborative applications and social media—is the future of instructional design. As the sheer volume of learning content continues to grow in this environment of curation, many learning organizations will feel obligated to pore over the information piece by piece, day by day. There’s a better way.

AR and VR present unique challenges in the eLearning space, and because these technologies are so new, many people (both instructors and learners) do not have extensive experience with them. From spatial planning to emotional needs, there is a wide range of factors to consider.

Many training teams end up spinning their wheels because of too many subject matter experts, too much feedback from stakeholders, or too much time trying to figure out the “perfect” solution; all these can lead to drawn-out development that doesn’t create a better product in the end. Spectrum Health University suffered from all of these issues. They needed a way to get training developed more quickly and efficiently.

Live video streaming is everywhere. It’s being used for news events, conferences, birthday parties, and even training—basically, anywhere there is a smartphone and an internet connection. Streaming video is relatively easy, as your phone and social media tools make it simple to get started. Making that streamed video look and sound good, though, is the hard part—as is knowing what to do with it after the video stream finishes.

When you add the increased use of personal devices for work to the increased variety of company-provided devices, as a learning professional, you can no longer work the way you always have. As bring-your-own-device policies and company app stores become more a part of the everyday work environment, you must be able to provide solutions that multiple devices can access.

This session is a step-­by-­step guide to learning management systems for trainers and administrators. Technical knowledge is optional! Basic concepts and easy­-to-­use tips are presented to help you develop your LMS, e­Learning courses, and corporate training program.

Many companies depend on geographically dispersed workforces to succeed. Yet managers who lead global teams are up against stiff challenges. Forming successful work groups is difficult enough when people share the same office, but when team members come from different cultural, linguistic, and functional backgrounds, misunderstandings can arise more easily. Without a plan to help distributed teams work well together, accountability can become problematic and cooperation can deteriorate into distrust.

Extended BYOD (2 Hours)

Multi-state objects in Adobe Captivate offer a powerhouse of possibilities to create interactions with absolute ease. If you have not yet begun using multi-state objects to build interactions, now is the time. You will be delighted to discover this magic mantra to reduce the number of steps to create an interaction, making your timeline look clutter-free.

Extended BYOD (2 Hours)

One of the greatest strengths of Articulate Storyline is its ease of use. Its simplicity does not mean that Storyline lacks a wide variety of features; however, many users never tap into or take advantage of all the cool development features it provides. Also, since Articulate 360 is a subscription-based tool, new updates and enhancements to the software are happening frequently—therefore, many users have not had the time to explore what’s new and different.

Extended BYOD (2 Hours)

Within the last two years, the use of video in corporate education has soared from 77 percent to 92 percent. A cohesive strategy for creating optimal video content must be in place to take advantage of the new contexts in which employees want to learn. Using microvideo for learning as part of this strategy will raise engagement among learners and reduce the amount of time to acquire knowledge. There’s a wide range of other benefits to this approach, including the ease of viewing microvideos on mobile devices. But just because a video is short doesn’t mean it’s effective. What skills do you need to build to produce microvideos that actually work?

This is part one of a two-part session. It will continue with session 1002 from 10:00 AM – 11:00 AM.

With the wide range of tools, apps, and online resources being launched all the time, it’s not always easy to stay on top of what might help you out in your day-to-day work. It’s also easy with this stream of new options to miss out on great new updates or techniques that can allow you to use old favorites in new ways.

Emerging technologies such as virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR), big data, machine learning, artificial intelligence (AI), and advanced learning and organizational analytics are exciting the L&D field. Yet these powerful tools won’t necessarily translate into powerful learning unless they are carefully utilized. The key to this is adaptive learning, a sophisticated methodology that intelligently adapts the learning experience to each individual learner and enables this new generation of technologies.

This is part two of a two-part session. It starts with session 912 from 8:30 AM – 9:30 AM.

With the wide range of tools, apps, and online resources being launched all the time, it’s not always easy to stay on top of what might help you out in your day-to-day work. It’s also easy with this stream of new options to miss out on great new updates or techniques that can allow you to use old favorites in new ways.

Uncovering the need is one thing, but organizing the mountain of content from an SME is an ID’s nightmare. You have to keep the goal in mind. Mind mapping helps you define the goal and align content to the intended outcome.

After the blood, sweat, and tears you put into designing a learning experience, how do you know it made a difference? Ideally, you can measure Kirkpatrick Levels 1 ­– 4 following your education and be confident of your impact. More often, measuring changing behaviors in the real world is trickier due to issues like cost, or access, inherent in many performance environments (e.g., healthcare). What tools can bridge that gap?

You’re sold on the benefits of performance support, but your internal customers don’t “get” it. With an LMS full of eLearning courses, your learning organization isn’t ready to jump full bore into a performance support approach to learning, and your IT department won’t be investing in performance support delivery technology anytime soon. How can you use your existing assets to create working solutions that prove the worth of this approach?

Mobile learning is attractive to learning designers because it offers the convenience of a bring-your-own-device approach and lends itself to trendy microlearning program structures. The popularity of learning apps such as Duolingo has inspired many to adapt or retrofit their content and learning programs for mobile delivery. This session will explore the challenges presented by the South African context (including socioeconomic differences, technology, and staff competency) for the adoption of mobile learning.

Research demonstrates that when learning is embedded in the everyday flow of work, it has more impact on both the business and learners. You should be wary of designing and investing in solutions that increase the barriers between working and learning. Learning must be available at the point of need. Delivering a true holistic learning experience requires modern tools—tools that enable just-in-time content delivery, streamlined curation of critical information, and comprehensive data analytics.

As learning systems mature, there is an even stronger need to personalize and integrate them. This is possible thanks, in part, to APIs (application programming interfaces). Many learning professionals hear about APIs in their daily workflows but don’t know much about them, which prevents them from being able to comprehend the true potential of these important features.

MOOCs, cMOOCs, SPOCs... To the L&D community, these are incredible tools to have in the toolbox, but there are challenges. Clients usually don’t understand what they really are or the partnerships required to create them. The approach and process is quite different from what is required for most other learning solutions, and as a result, most mainstream L&D practitioners lack the skills needed to create an effective cMOOC experience.