Corporate descriptions of integrity, ethical decision-making, and other policy objectives are often written in dry, lofty, formal language that few employees truly read. Complying with a code of conduct can become an annual checkmark and not a mode of behavior. The Canada Revenue Agency used short animated videos to relate workplace ethical dilemmas where employees could indicate their responses and engage in conversations about the right course of action. A series of videos, with one released every two weeks, supported an agency-wide awareness campaign that is still yielding high results in repeat views and is being shared with other federal departments.

Onboarding shouldn’t be an impersonal and disconnected experience. But today’s workforce is diverse and often dispersed globally, making it difficult for new employees to feel connected. At HDR, an engineering firm, new employees felt isolated and unable to make meaningful connections during onboarding. The result was a lack of engagement and motivation to complete required training. HDR needed a way to build connectivity and accountability into learning and onboarding.

You’ve built great content, but your learners don’t seem to care. They’re not engaging with your learning. Why? Companies spend billions of dollars trying to understand consumer behavior, resulting in marketing strategies aimed at getting consumers to buy their products. In those same organizations, there are L&D groups that may not be leveraging the same insights and strategies to reach their learners. Treat your content like a product, and eliminate the friction between your solutions and your learners.

Today’s L&D teams are democratizing learning through social learning platforms: the “un-LMSs.” Yet, you still need to drive formal learning agendas for the organization. The paradox becomes how to both push and pull learning. Capital One’s Tech College team set a goal to drive an organizational learning agenda by tapping into the “maker” energy of Tech College learners. To achieve this, they implemented a social learning platform that gave any learner the ability to contribute content. While they saw learners endorse and create content, the system didn’t offer a way to align creators with Tech College’s learning agenda. To remedy this, the team built an app to connect experts to Tech College content creation, teaching, mentoring, and speaking opportunities.

Bad data creates faulty decision-making. To improve your learning designs, you need good data. Unfortunately, many learning-evaluation methods are seriously flawed.

You may have heard it from your high school math teacher: You can't use a calculator on the test. You think you'll have a calculator in your pocket at your job? If only my cell phone could fly back in time and have a chat about that!

Adobe Captivate is a commonly used tool, but a surprising number of its features are just a bit hidden and not well known. The layers of sophistication these features add can enable you to save a lot of time, deliver more engaging and personalized learning, and tap into resources more easily. It’s just a matter of knowing where these features are and how to use them effectively.

In many companies, all the most important data and technologies sit inside high-security locations that most employees can’t ever access. But the data and equipment represent a direct link to the customer experience, and it’s important for employees to understand what is inside these centers and what it means for their services. How can you give employees a realistic and immersive view inside what is typically unseen?

In telecommunications, the term “last mile” is used to describe the challenge of connecting the final leg in a communications network, typically describing the distance between the last hub and a consumer’s home. The “last mile,” although the shortest leg, is often the hardest to put together. In the world of performance support, the “last meter,” the distance between a learner’s eyes and their computer, is an appropriate comparison. In theory, creating a great resource library should be the bulk of the work, but too often, overcoming the “last meter” ends up being the ultimate nemesis. The challenges are to get the learner to recognize the need for support resources, remember where to access them, and utilize them as necessary.

While onboarding involves different activities and programs depending on your organization,  some aspects are universal. Typically it involves a limited period during which new hires are expected to read company policies and procedures, get settled into their work spaces, and learn about do's, don'ts, and how-to's. If your onboarding isn’t working, you might struggle with retaining employees, accelerating learning, improving performance and team engagement, and making your staff happy and proud to join in. We must turn staff onboarding into a transformational experience.

You know that making your online training more interactive could produce tremendous results. But maybe your company is very conservative, maybe a previous gamified training went horribly wrong, or maybe you’re just not sure how to make existing material more engaging. How can you get the leaders and learners at your organization to trust you to turn training content into meaningful game-like experiences?

Choosing your organization’s first learning management system is a daunting task. What features should you be looking for? What questions should you be asking? How much is too much to spend? And what happens after you make the decision? In many ways, implementing the LMS you’ve chosen can be even more daunting than making the initial selection.

You have a slew of tools to choose from to author eLearning, but regardless of the tools, creating a unique user experience that engages learners is important and often relies on your skills as a storyteller. One way to improve your eLearning storytelling skills is through comic book theory. Using special tricks and tips from comic books and graphic novels, you can create a unique user experience—no matter which authoring tool or platform you use.

It’s not uncommon for many projects to be organized through chains of email after email. But it’s hard to keep track of all the answers to questions, reviewers’ comments, and version control of the documents you need for managing a project. Is there a way to streamline your project management processes to make them easier to manage and follow?

We’ve all been there: the dreaded project meeting where stakeholders tell you exactly what to create and how long it should be. You work very hard over several weeks crafting the product they expect. The result is a training solution that is late, bloated, over budget, and failing to change employee behaviors. With scenarios like this one, it’s no wonder that, according to Harvard Business School, only 10 percent of corporate training is effective. This problem led one team to hunt for a solution that would revolutionize the process of designing learning experiences.

Conventional wisdom says that people can self-provision their learning and professional development through internet-enabled access to resources and social networks. But studies indicate that employees are not necessarily skilled at managing their own professional development and leveraging digital tools for learning. With an abundance of resources available, people may become paralyzed by too much information and too many choices. And they may not have the time or savvy to find what they need and use it to develop their knowledge bases and skill sets. Nonetheless, you don’t want to resort to structured training programs as the only path for learning.

As teams compete for scarce resources, investing your current resources in activities that have a high rate of return is critical to not only surviving but using learning to solve your business’s biggest, baddest problems.

It's not every day L&D professionals get to spend time in the trenches conducting a true needs analysis, learning firsthand about the needs of leaders and the barriers that impact their performance.  We did and survived to share what we learned, translating this analysis into customized yet scalable performance-based solutions. The strength of leadership at the mid-level is critical to employee engagement and organizational success.

A recent survey by Donald H. Taylor, chairman of the Learning and Performance Institute, revealed that L&D is falling out of love with enterprise collaboration and Forrester Research has shown that roughly 80 percent of enterprise social platform implementations fail. In recent years, social technology has fractured into social intranets, enterprise social networks, and chat platforms. What are we to make of this? Has social lost its way? Have expectations been over-inflated? Should L&D let go … or do more?

Artificial intelligence technologies are transforming homes and workplaces. The World Economic Forum has started to talk about what is happening as the fourth industrial revolution. When you start to think about AI and L&D, it raises many questions: What do AI technologies mean for L&D? What is the impact on the capabilities that organizations need to be developing in people now and into the near future? How can you use AI technologies to enhance and automate L&D work? What is the reality of what you can do now? What is really happening with AI in workplaces now? AI can be a confusing area with jargon like decision trees, k-clusters, and regressions. Even most technically focused L&D people are not math and data experts.

The majority of what people learn comes from practical experience on the job. However, they don’t learn everything they need just by doing their jobs. You have to be ready for exceptions when they arise. Learners need reinforcement of important topics to help avoid bad habits. They look for opportunities to expand their knowledge and skills beyond their current roles to further their careers. Unfortunately, with limited time and competing priorities, employees often are unable to make continuous, targeted learning part of their work.

People are constantly bombarded with requests for their attention, many of which unfortunately go ignored. It’s frustrating to consider that when you share educational content, most people will forget 90 percent of it after just two days. Why go through all the trouble of painstakingly developing content, if most of it won’t be retained for the long term? With the brain more likely to forget something than remember it, it’s critical to understand how the brain processes information and tends to remember it, and then to apply that knowledge when designing instructional content.

Disasters happen when teaching in a virtual classroom: connections fail, audio echoes, and files crash. In order to get the problem(s) solved and get the session back on time and on track, you’ll need more than a good idea. You’ll need a plan.

Infographics are great tools to convey complex information in an elegant way. They can be the basis of engaging classroom training, interactive eLearning, or intuitive resources. And you can repurpose them for sales, marketing, HR, and conferences. But, creating a good infographic can be hard. You don't want it to just be nicely designed bullet points. To be effective, it must tell a story.

Though there’s been great interest in learning personalization in recent years, the truth is that we have been trying to use systems to adapt teaching to individual learners for decades. The key to successful implementation of learning personalization is not through the use of the best learning management system or latest technological trend. 

Working with different subject matter experts (SMEs)—each with their own working style, personality, and expertise—can be a challenge. And that challenge can be amplified further when you need to work with multiple SMEs at the same time. How do you, as an instructional designer, know how to get the content you need from your SMEs to create effective and engaging learning experiences?

As adoption of xAPI begins to take hold, it allows for more robust and interesting tracking of the learning process. As actual performance and results data are integrated with learning metrics, L&D professionals will have the data they need to tailor the learning process to individual needs at the same time that they can draw more useful conclusions about the learning as a whole across a wider population.

The eLearning development requests keep rolling in, and everyone wants their projects completed as of yesterday. Working on a busy team can get tough when you’re managing various SMEs, reviewers, demos, feedback, and LMS configurations. This is especially true when you have multiple projects and you play many roles—or every role—on each of them. How do you keep your creative flame burning from project to project without being bogged down by all the project management work that goes along with each one?

Do you ever worry about hiring independent contractors to support your learning projects? Are you realizing that the typical interview process needs to change a bit to ensure you make great selections quickly? Are you considering how you can market yourself as an independent contractor and increase your chances of being hired? Learn some insider tips on how to identify great learning support contractors or become one yourself.

Demonstrating the value of training and eLearning is a common challenge for instructional designers and eLearning developers. ROIs and cost-benefit analyses are almost never done, and KPIs often aren’t used to measure performance changes. However, using data to understand the results of your projects and approaches and then share them with others can do a lot to help others see what benefits come from your team’s work.

Every day you interact with various websites and mobile apps. Each is designed to deliver a certain experience, set the stage for what’s to come, engage you as a user, and keep you returning. They’re also created to surprise you with their flashy colors, interaction, and ease of use. If you want to go beyond simple next/back buttons in your course designs, finding inspiration within these cleverly created user interface (UI) and user experience (UX) interactions is a great place to start.

There is a lot of subjectivity when it comes to interpreting 508 compliance for eLearning. Although the law, originally amended to the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, was enacted in 1998, the interpretation and implementation varies widely across organizations. This can cause much confusion and distress among developers and project managers as they zigzag across what can be an accessibility landmine hoping to come out whole on the other side.  

The conversation around 70:20:10 has been growing in popularity in recent years—with good reason. People are learning and getting support in a host of different ways, and 70:20:10 helps us see our work through a lens much broader than just traditional training methods. But in order to really be impactful, 70:20:10 needs to be more than just an idea. How do organizations put the concept of 70:20:10 into action?

Do you experience skepticism from stakeholders about the validity of the L&D function? Do you miss out on opportunities to demonstrate your value as a business advisor because you’re left out of the conversation from the start? And does this cynicism in the field lead to self-doubt and impact your career mobility? Many people can relate to this uphill climb and even experience impostor syndrome: the self-belief that you are not as skilled as people think you are and that you’ll be called out as a fraud. Because L&D is so often ill-defined and misunderstood, it provides fertile ground for impostor syndrome. So how does an L&D professional demonstrate value despite constant roadblocks or when impostor syndrome hits?

Adult learning principles state that adults learn best when content is relevant. So why do most virtual classroom lessons rely on lectures and slides? One of the most effective ways to ensure learning sticks is by getting learners involved, and scenario-based learning design does just that. Join this session to discover ideas for producing appropriate scenarios that resonate with your learners in the virtual classroom.

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

A company’s learning management system contract was coming to an end. After thoroughly reviewing its effectiveness, the L&D organization concluded it was no longer meeting their needs and decided to replace it in order to improve the end-user and administrative experiences, offer better mobile capabilities, enhance reporting and data visualization, and better integrate with internal systems. Ultimately, they also wanted to accomplish this without increasing spending.

The most expensive instruction is that which doesn’t work. This discussion will look at the actions and behaviors that have been scientifically proven to affect learning. You will explore the ways in which instructional design requires more than content delivery and common sense. You will look at robust, evidence-based principles of learning to discover new ways to build the kind of training that is genuinely effective at creating performance change and helping organizations achieve their objectives.

Alexa is one of the most widely used smart devices in the US today. It’s a disruptive game­changer in the learning and development space, but its integration into the learning ecosystem is drastically low. The number-one barrier today for learning professionals in using Alexa for learning and performance support is fear of the technology. The second barrier, and the one that’s easier to solve, is understanding how to even start developing learning content in this new platform. You cannot leverage what you do not understand, but it may be easier than you assume to learn to create experiences for Alexa.

How often do you read text on an electronic device? (You’re doing it right now!) Research shows that people read digital text differently than printed text. But does your eLearning strategy consider these differences?

Good courseware engages the user with multiple elements. From video to audio to the venerable drag-and-drop, you need to make sure your content is doing the job. But is your audience actually learning anything? More importantly, are they learning the lessons you need them to? And if they are, do you have the tools to prove that to your leadership?

A number of myths persist about people’s allegedly ever-shortening attention spans—but what does the science say? Neuroscience, behavioral economics, and consumer psychology all offer insights into how we manage and allocate attention. Additionally, our ability to manage attention and focus seems to be related to our abilities to allocate willpower and influence how we make decisions.

Learning is an intrinsically human activity that happens in many places and in many ways. It doesn’t matter how great or feature-rich any one learning system is; learning will never happen in just one place. The modern learning ecosystem not only recognizes this reality but also embraces it to support learners wherever and however they learn best.

Developing great mobile content from an existing course is a lot more than shrinking font sizes and stacking everything into a portrait layout. Unlike traditional learning platforms, effective mobile content provides bite-sized, relevant information at the right time. So, how do you design customized mobile content that makes your users actually want to learn? What skills do you need to develop mobile content? How should the design workflow differ from traditional eLearning? What do mobile learning design documents actually look like, and how do you use them in development?

Audio can be one of the most powerful tools in your toolbox when it comes to creating effective and impactful eLearning. Bad audio, however, can be one of the most destructive tools, distracting the learner and making your course feel unprofessional or unfinished. Don't let your courses fall prey to bad audio. There are easy steps you can take to create high-quality audio without big-budget voice talent.

Many learning professionals are approaching video without formal training. While creating video has gotten simpler, it’s easy to make a bad video. This session will look at 7 “gotchas” video creators should know about. 

Experiential learning provides rising leaders in your organization the critical practice in real world environments they need to be successful. As organizations shift to a blended approach to learning, simulations can bridge the gap between virtual and classroom experiences. It is crucial that the integration of simulation-based learning takes into account the objections of the program and leverages the unique environment that this kind of practice provides.

Most organizations have required training that becomes a chore for individuals to complete. Many learning and development functions are ultimately defined by these required trainings. In addition, managers and leaders must resort to fear or discipline to get individuals to complete the requirements on time. This session will provide a unique approach to “flip the script” and actually motivate individuals to complete their requirements while reducing the time spent. This allows learning departments to focus on more elective programs, and reduces the negative impression associated with training.

Don’t be daunted by the white screen when you’re getting started making your own video content. While it can be hard knowing how to get started, creating video content quickly is easier than it might seem.

Do the executives who fund learning and development care how many courses you have? Or how many students? Or the number of class hours you’ve delivered? Actually, they may react negatively to those numbers. Most of the time, when people are in training their productivity is zero. The key question is how to get to Level 4 and measure actual impact.

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.

To hire a vendor to assist with an eLearning project, your organization may require you to issue an RFP (request for proposals) and obtain multiple quotes. When you get the quotes back, they may vary significantly. How do you know which one to choose? But the better question starts at the beginning of the process: How do you obtain accurate, apples-to-apples quotes from quality eLearning vendors? To receive good quotes, you need to issue an RFP that provides appropriate and clear information for the vendor to accurately price and schedule your project. Once you have accurate quotes, then you can decide which vendor is best for the project using a criteria-based, methodical approach.

It can be challenging  for an instructional designer to manage scope creep and have difficult conversations throughout the course of the project, however you can minimize the likelihood of those things happening with the right tools in your toolbox, and a friendly, approachable attitude.

With so many tools at their disposal, how do L&D professionals create effective learning ecosystems that meet the diverse needs of their learners? The key is focusing on relevancy, choice, and motivation. By listening closely to your learners about what, when, and how they want to learn, grow, and develop, you can deliver personalized experiences that help them fit professional development into their busy day. Learner-driven experiences offer the ideal mix of microlearning and macrolearning, from short how-to videos to in-depth learning paths. Done right, they will inspire your learners to build new skills and knowledge, put what they’ve learned into practice, and reflect on what went well and what could have gone better.

Many people in the eLearning field are trying to use gamification and serious games to spark employee engagement and drive learning retention. Everyone is working to make the best serious game that will enhance the learning objectives and retain learning. The biggest setbacks for some of these serious games and gamified learning experiences have been little to no planning, tough-to-pinpoint metrics, little to no implementation strategy, and insufficient or nonexistent post-deployment support.

As more learning and training is delivered online, instructors and trainers no longer have the opportunity to get to know all their learners by meeting them face-to-face. This disconnect often leads to missing or ineffective assessments as eLearning developers increasingly hope their learners understand the content, but lack the tools to adequately measure the level of understanding. How do you know if your eLearning assessments are effective? Are you testing learners’ content knowledge, or do your assessments measure their deduction skills? In this session, you will explore common test-writing pitfalls and discover how smart test-takers excel without learning the content.

Interactive video often has a wow factor that’s hard to deny. What’s critical for L&D, though, is thinking beyond the wow factor to ensure interactive video truly supports learning and performance improvement. Interactive video offers a range of design models, each with different strengths. Understanding how to align those strengths to different learning needs simplifies your design process, reduces development costs, and produces the best results for your organization.

DemoFest is a huge science fair-like event; a collective showcase of eLearning examples from conference participants. As you move from table to table, exploring a wide range of learning solutions, you can discuss the tools, tech, and processes with those who built them. Although it’s an exciting evening of discovery, diving deep into each of the projects can be challenging.

Everyone likes stories. Using storytelling techniques to spice up otherwise dull training modules is a great idea. Situating learners in a realistic context encourages them to apply skills and retain knowledge longer. But it’s not easy to write engaging narratives. Scenarios written by educators tend to be prescriptive, predictable, and preachy. Even worse, they feel contrived and artificial. Learners know when they are being manipulated to think or feel. Outwardly, they may click the right answer, but inwardly they resent it. Recent studies have shown that this sort of training may actually produce a reverse effect, compelling learners to feel more opposed to the training lesson than before they participated. So, how do you write a real-world learning scenario that isn’t contrived?

You’re tasked to begin multiple new eLearning projects simultaneously and are responsible for successful and timely completion. You initiate the work and quickly find that other stakeholders with differing expectations are now involved. The pressure is on to keep the project on track and on budget with limited resources. What do you do? There are many factors that can derail projects. Breaking ground on new development and keeping track of multiple assets can be daunting for new or seasoned designers and managers. Reproducing quality work that meets your expectations can be tricky on a tight budget or schedule. Additionally, frustrations run high when work is submitted that misses the mark and must be redone, or is grudgingly accepted.

A neurology medical affairs team at a large pharmaceutical company was facing the perfect storm. A low-priority product with an anticipated launch in over two years had become one of the global company’s most important assets overnight, with a new launch timeline of months. Training was in the process of being converted from self-led to automated. A single trainer was tasked with developing a comprehensive curriculum in a new area (typically 15 to 20 hours) to deploy via LMS. The existing team required training and completion of a new certification process. The team also underwent expansion during this time, which required that the new hires completed onboarding and therapeutic training simultaneously. Management wanted the team to begin the training on the product in three weeks!

If you hire the wrong instructional designer, you risk wasting time and money and losing credibility in the eyes of your stakeholders. It’s important to first understand your needs and then look for an instructional designer with the right design experience, level of creativity, and communication skills to make your projects successful. Join this session to discover a recruitment process that can help you identify the skills you need and source the candidates who possess them.

Most L&D teams are keenly interested in exploring ways to combine their macrolearning needs—traditional ILT classes and VILT sessions, tracked online learning, and structured compliance programs—with microlearning initiatives leveraging mobile, game mechanics, and social interactions. While most legacy LMS platforms have yet to include compelling microlearning features, there are ways to design and integrate legacy macrolearning platforms with modern microlearning solutions to achieve tech-enhanced learning success.

xAPI has been around for a few years. You’ve been hearing about what it is and how it’s used in a conceptual sense. But what about the real world? This session will discuss a company that has made a long-term investment of time and money in existing learning technologies. They were interested in leveraging xAPI but had questions: What could they track with xAPI? Would they need to scrap everything and redesign from scratch? Could they use their current rapid development tools, or did they need to learn a new technology? What benefits could they realize from xAPI?

The standard advice you hear about eLearning narration has taken you down the wrong path. You’ve been told to “billboard important phrases,” “speak at a comfortable and steady pace,” and “e-nun-ci-ate your words.” All this advice has done is turned you into a predictable and boring script reader. “Billboarding” causes you to sound unsure of what you’re saying. That “comfortable pace” is slow, repetitive, and disengaging. And “enunciating” makes you sound like a robot. Since the beginning of civilization, people have passed along information through speech. Narration engages your learners by connecting with them at a primitive and emotional level—a human level. It’s time to throw out the old advice and start talking to your learners like a human.

Over the past 10 years, access to mobile devices and the incredible user experiences designed by companies like Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, and Google have dramatically altered the expectations of learners, resulting in disappointment when they come into contact with many learning solutions. Strictly using typical learning design tools and methods isn’t leading you to the leap in learner experience you need to position yourself for the future as a value-add platform for employee acquisition and retention. In a recent LinkedIn Learning research report, nearly two-thirds of learning professionals wouldn’t even recommend their own learning solutions to their learners. It’s a travesty that so many are working so hard to create products they don’t love and don’t recommend.

Apple announced its new ARKit in 2017, enabling iOS devices to view and interact with augmented reality. In 2018 they took it a step further by coming out with ARKit 2, enabling 3-D object recognition, persistent experiences, and even shared experiences between two devices. So how do you get started with Apple ARKit, and what application does it have to learning and performance support?

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.