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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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!

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.

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. 

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.