Whether you’re looking to showcase your work internally, seeking employment, or prospecting for clients, developing and maintaining an up-to-date portfolio will help you articulate what you do well. With a little forethought and planning, your portfolio can become one of your most valuable tools, opening up conversations and possibilities beyond your expectations.

In this session, you’ll explore the reasons why you should create a portfolio and how to effectively evaluate your design requirements for it. You’ll learn how to set realistic, achievable goals for your portfolio, and how to grow it over time without compromising confidentiality. You’ll then look at a variety of tools that can help you design and build this portfolio, and you’ll discuss what kinds of solutions you should consider including in it to best showcase your skills.

In this session, you will learn:

• Why you should create a portfolio, even if you’re not looking for a job
• How to identify the right things to focus on in your portfolio (and what not to include)
• How to plan the design and development of your portfolio
• How you can use your portfolio to get feedback on your work
• How to leverage your portfolio itself as a design example

Audience:
Novice to advanced designers and developers.

Technology discussed in this session:
WordPress and themes, web technologies (and IDEs), eLearning tools, and related technologies.

Traditional eLearning can be dull and demotivating, a reality that runs counter to human nature. People eagerly consume and comprehend new ideas whenever they find the content engaging. They want eLearning that leverages learners’ innate desire for autonomy, mastery, and purpose.

This session will explore the underlying reasons that learning motivates or demotivates learners. You will learn how to integrate motivating strategies into your learning content design. You will see examples of these strategies applied to specific course content, from simple interactions, knowledge checks, and gamification to broader decisions like varied delivery and completion options. You’ll learn methods to leverage the inherent desire to demonstrate mastery by creating social engagement opportunities to promote peer learning and an enhanced culture of learning.

In this session, you will learn:

• About what motivates and demotivates learners
• Principles for motivating through autonomy, mastery, and purpose
• How to encourage a culture of learning
• How to create interactive conversations that encourage autonomy
• How to create gamification that encourages mastery

Audience:
Novice to advanced designers, developers, project managers, managers, and directors.

Technology discussed in this session:
Adobe Captivate and Adobe Captivate Prime.

Sales training can often seem like the toughest nut to crack. You plan, design, learn new tools, hire consultants, and still you haven’t moved the needle. The sales team is the lifeblood of the company, generating revenue every day. The demand is high and the pressure strong. Those who are charged with training them face an equal challenge: improve productivity, accelerate deals, and enable individual and team success. How can you accomplish it, especially if you are a team of one?

In this presentation, you will learn about designing bite-size learning to meet the needs of the individual, driving training into the point of work. You will learn about establishing techniques to strengthen the sales core and capitalizing fingertip knowledge with mobile devices. Most importantly, you’ll learn how to make the most out of what you have (no tools, no budget, no team).

In this session, you will learn:

• How to design a blended learning solution from easily accessible tools
• How to recommend focused training solutions targeting the sales core
• How to create bite-size training modules to meet specific sales training needs
• Ways to customize training programs to respond to the unique needs of salespeople

Audience:
Intermediate to advanced designers, developers, project managers, and senior leaders (VP, CLO, executive, etc.).

Technology discussed in this session:
Social media, mobile devices, virtual instructor-led training, video modules, and animated PowerPoint.

Whether you are creating a new project, developing an app, or launching a new platform, come learn about the latest strategies in brainstorming, prototyping, and designing your experiences. This session will highlight tools, techniques, and workflows to help you kick off any project the right way. Learn how to communicate a concept, beginning with low-fidelity prototypes; gather user feedback; and translate into high-fidelity prototypes before you start development. Get pumped and ready to get ideas out of your head and make them reality!

The term “bench strength” is frequently used in relation to leadership, so it isn’t surprising that many organizations are keen to create development programs for their future leaders. However, many of these programs fail to adequately prepare employees for the demands of assuming a leadership role.

In this session, you will learn about Spectrum Health University’s experience in redesigning its leadership readiness program, Futures. You will learn about the difficult conversations and internal debates around how to develop immersive and engaging content, as well as how to select the right program participants. You will also learn how to utilize various skill sets across all team members throughout the design and development process. The session will explore various program ideas ranging from rotational experiences to immersive simulations and individual personalization via assessments, debriefs, and competency-based development plans.

In this session, you will learn:

• How to utilize all members of your team (not just instructional designers) in program development
• Why selecting the right participants leads to better learning experiences
• How to create “rotational” experiences in highly condensed time frames
• How to create "formal informality" to strengthen participant relationships

Audience:
Novice to advanced designers, developers, managers, and directors.

Technology discussed in this session:
Social collaborative platforms, online survey tools, and online assessments.

Very often, training is created in isolation. Stakeholders may believe that “one and done” constitutes a solution; however, in reality, training needs to be reinforced and scaffolded. The eLearning you create is one piece of the puzzle, but it needs a bit more to really stick.

In this session, you will look at the ways you can design learning for stickiness, then involve managers in the application of the learning afterward. The session will use experiential, discovery learning, and problem-solving techniques to help you ponder where you are today and consider how you can bring stickiness into your own systems.

In this session, you will learn:

• What makes learning sticky
• How to recognize problems with existing learning
• How to gain stakeholder buy-in for a more comprehensive solution
• How to articulate the tenets of the forgetting curve and describe ways to reduce its impact
• How to describe what learning transfer is and develop methods to ensure it occurs with any developed learning

Audience:
Novice to advanced designers, project managers, managers, and directors.

Technology discussed in this session:
Learning management systems, microlearning, text reminders, and gamification.

Too many eLearning courses are just data dumps full of facts, details, and nonessential content. These kinds of courses also often lack the necessary context to explain how all this information applies to the real world, making them both boring and ineffective. eLearning should be redesigned to better reach the audience and share content with them in a way that’s engaging and practical. And one simple but effective way to do that is through interactive stories.

Interactive stories instantly add meaning to your content. In this session, you’ll explore how you can use them to redesign your eLearning lessons so they engage learners and help them actually use what they’ve learned. You’ll find out how to craft experiences that will make your audience better appreciate the content in your eLearning and have an easier time recalling and applying it in their day-to-day work. Furthermore, you’ll get to see real examples of interactive stories in use for compliance, sales, orientation, manufacturing, and other common training situations.

In this session, you will learn:

• How to find interactive stories that match the facts of your content
• How to construct emotionally driven content
• Why short and emotional interactive stories can be more effective than long, narrative storytelling
• How to identify and edit out unnecessary content so your stories can focus on the absolute musts
• How to cut your costs and develop interactive stories rapidly

Audience:
Novice to intermediate designers and managers.

Technology discussed in this session:
Demos will use Articulate Storyline, Adobe Captivate, and/or HTML5.

During design and development, SMEs and stakeholders sometimes suggest ideas or practices that are antithetical to good instructional design. For example, a designer might have a stakeholder who believes it’s best to simply film a daylong stand-up training session and deliver it as one video. In this case, like so many others, it’s helpful for the designer to identify research findings to help them understand why learning should be designed differently.

In this session, you will learn the most current research regarding multimedia, visual design/usability, and assessment in eLearning. Framed as a story, this session will use scenarios in which research is used to make design decisions, and attendees will receive a list of places to look for current research to inform eLearning practices. You will receive a list of current research findings and assessments, learn how to identify how and where research is best cited for an SME, and learn how to apply findings to your design and development process.

In this session, you will learn:

• To cite research in three areas—multimedia, visual design/usability, and assessment
• To successfully use research to make data-driven decisions for design and development
• To find sources of eLearning research
• To conduct a research-based discussion with SMEs

Audience:
Novice and intermediate developers and managers.

Technology discussed in this session:
N/A

Science fiction has always challenged people to see their world in new ways, from a glimpse at an imagined “long, long time ago in a galaxy far, far away” in Star Wars to envisioning a potential future centuries from now in Star Trek. Movies like The Matrix, Inception, Minority Report, Blade Runner, and so many others have proposed mind-blowing ideas like alternate realities, parallel universes, transporter beams, and time travel. One of the many reasons this genre is so popular is that it poses a wide range of “what-if” questions and allows its audience to play with possible answers. But these ideas can do more then just entertain you—they can also inspire your work in L&D.

In this session, you’ll explore the ways sci-fi can help you rethink how you create your content, and you’ll find out where L&D and sci-fi have some fascinating points of crossover. Come learn how to create truly engaging eLearning by applying the best ideas of sci-fi to your eLearning designs, and have fun while doing it.

In this session, you will learn:

• New approaches to find the best “what-if” ideas and determine whether they can help you reach your learners
• How to engage learners with storylines that you can borrow from the best sci-fi
• Practical ways to apply concepts from science fiction to your eLearning designs

Audience:
Novice and intermediate designers and developers.

Technology discussed in this session:
The concepts in this session are tool agnostic.

Most learning programs have the goal of supporting behavior change, even a change as simple as getting people to do their jobs better. Organizational learning traditionally measures desired outcomes in terms of “learning objectives,” which are fairly straightforward to identify. In contrast, identifying the root cause of behavior change problems is considerably more complex.

This session will examine the differences between analyzing learning objectives and diagnosing behavior change problems. You will explore behavior change from multiple angles, including why people do what they do today, why they may resist changing their behavior tomorrow, and more. You will leave this session with strategies you can use to diagnose behavior change problems in the organizations you support.

In this session, you will learn:

• Ways to identify the specific issues underlying difficult behavior change problems
• How to use research-based models to diagnose behavior change problems
• Specific strategies to address barriers to behavior change

Audience:
Novice to advanced designers, developers, and managers.

eLearning professionals are expected to take on a wide variety of very different roles. Sometimes you’re the eLearning developer, graphics designer, narrator, or videographer. Other times you may act as the project manager, researcher, or even the department’s tech guru. It’s no surprise that this can be a daunting and sometimes scary prospect for those new to the industry, leaving them feeling insecure, overwhelmed, and unsure of where to begin.

In this session, you’ll learn 10 fundamental tips and strategies that can help any new eLearning professional survive their first year in the L&D field. These practical tips will range from visual design to content development, project management, and more. You’ll spend time learning about each tip in detail and then see specific examples of how they’ve been successfully applied in real life.

In this session, you will learn:

• Ten tips to help you become a more confident and successful eLearning professional
• About the importance of setting high expectations for your work
• Important things no one else will tell you when you start your first eLearning job
• How to cultivate continued success and confidence beyond your first year in eLearning

Audience:
Novice designers, developers, and project managers.

In the customer training world, L&D professionals often have difficulty convincing their customers to complete coursework. This audience consists of busy professionals who increasingly want training they can take at their own pace, on their own time. While in theory this approach has benefits for both companies and customers, in practice there can be real challenges in trying to convince customers to prioritize this non-mandatory training over their other pressing work tasks and deadlines.

In this session, you’ll learn techniques to overcome the barriers associated with non-mandatory training and motivate your customers to make taking your courses a priority. You’ll explore the strategies and tactics behind using incentives to encourage people to complete training and understand the different stakeholders who need to get involved in order to make them happen. You’ll also learn how to use data to assess the effectiveness of your incentives so you can adjust your approach when necessary.

In this session, you will learn:

• About specific incentives that can encourage completion of non-mandatory training
• Techniques for implementing incentives across different organizations
• How to use data to evaluate incentives
• About the pros and cons of using gamification as an incentive for completing coursework

Audience:
Novice to intermediate designers, managers, and directors.

Technology discussed in this session:
Learning management system (LMS) and gamification software.

With so much of your design work focused on smooth navigation, creating engaging content, and crafting complex interactions, you may overlook a basic issue: Can people actually be successful with the course? Design flaws such as overload, ineffective use of multimedia (especially narration), and poor assessment items are just some of the ways an “engaging” course can still cause people to stumble.

Join this session to take a closer look at the most common, but also easily fixable, issues that can trip up learners. You’ll find out how context failures, interaction failures, attitude failures, or even reality failures can make an otherwise well-designed course ineffective. You’ll then discuss a wide range of ways that designers can avoid or correct these problems, helping to ensure that your audience can get the most out of your course.

In this session, you will learn:

• How to identify which tools are best suited to your audience, organization, and instructional goals
• How to better understand tools at their root so you can leverage them in more useful ways
• Ideas for partnering with your audience to create more user-generated content
• Ideas for overcoming resistance and common objections
• Hands-on tips for using these tools to create a solution for your workplace challenges

Audience:
Novice to intermediate designers and developers.

When your organization is located all across North America, it’s no surprise that it can be a challenge to deliver in-person sales training events. Sylvan Learning needed to find a different approach, and the best option was a blended one. But while blended learning made strategic sense, the team still needed to find a way to use this approach to engage learners while still providing the same level of interactivity as an instructor-led event.

In this case study session, you’ll take a deeper look at how a blended learning, cohort approach to sales training can engage business owners and employees alike. Through the Sylvan Learning team’s experiences, you’ll find out how you can use individual coaching support, instructor-led webinar sessions, and ongoing learning opportunities to engage your audience even when you can’t be in the same room with them.

In this session, you will learn:

• How to provide sales training using a distance learning model
• How to support participants through a learning community after the initial training event
• How to use a cohort approach to training
• How to engage business owners in employee training by reporting results

Audience:
Novice to intermediate designers, managers, and directors.

Technology discussed in this session:
LMS (Cornerstone) and webinar technology (WebEx).

Instructional design focuses on only a small portion of the learning process—instruction. Much learning also happens through experience, supported by social feedback, content, and some formal instruction (70:20:10 sums it up). This broader approach that looks at the entire learning process goes by a different name: learning experience design (LXD). And while instructional design isn’t dead as a concept, it is finding itself being subsumed by LXD, allowing for a deeper perspective on how designers can provide the experiences that people need to develop job skills.

In this session, you’ll find out more about the guideposts on the path to becoming a learning experience designer. You’ll visit the key disciplines that inform LXD, including design thinking, user experience design, and cognitive science. You’ll also explore how to use technology, especially mobile and xAPI, to support and track learning experiences. Finally, you’ll walk through a simple process for designing learning experiences that produce measurable results. 

In this session, you will learn:

• About the key steps in becoming a learning experience designer
• How to apply design thinking, user experience design, and cognitive science principles to the design of learning experiences
• A six-step process for learning experience design

Audience:
Novice to advanced designers, managers, directors, and senior leaders (VP, CLO, executive, etc.).

Technology discussed in this session:
General application of xAPI and mobile devices.

By creating a learner profile, you will be better able to avoid building training that is ineffective, undesirable, and lacking relevance for your learners. By doing research up front about all aspects of your learners, you will be able to leverage those details to create impactful training that will capture their attention.

This session will explore a proven approach to getting to know your learners in depth, answering questions like: Who are they? Where do they live? What do they do? What do they eat for breakfast? You will learn why this is important to all roles on a project (ISD, PM, GD, etc.). In addition, participants will build a learner profile on the spot using an audience member to create an actual learner avatar. Additionally, you will explore the potential downfalls of NOT performing a thorough learner analysis.

In this session, you will learn:

• About a proven approach to creating a learner profile
• How to create a learner profile
• About the benefits (to all team members) of a comprehensive learner profile
• What can happen when an adequate learner profile isn’t created prior to the start of a project

Audience:
Novice to intermediate designers, developers, and project managers.

Organizations implement new software all the time, especially with the constantly changing technology landscape. A healthcare organization was tasked with training thousands of non-clinical associates, nurses, and physicians when it implemented a new electronic health record. The burning question was: How do you teach people new software in a way that sticks? How do you provide learners with authentic context to practice what they’ll actually do on the job?

During this session, you’ll learn innovative ways to move beyond the traditional “watch me do it” approach to software training. You’ll explore methods for engaging with SMEs to get the content you need and then turning that content into “sticky” interactions that teach software in the real context of how learners will use it on the job. You’ll walk away with artifacts, templates, and concrete ideas for creating performance-based software simulations and just-in-time performance support. And finally, you’ll be prepared to transfer these takeaways to your own pressing training needs.

In this session, you will learn:

• Concrete tips for building performance-based software simulations
• How to blend “watch it” and “try it” methods into meaningful software training
• How to design job aids that are clear, concise, and helpful
• How to gather end-user and SME input in focus groups and usability testing
• How to create a workflow across multiple instructional designers to ensure a consistent end product

Audience:
Novice to intermediate designers, developers, and managers.

Technology discussed in this session:
Articulate Storyline 2 and Screencast-O-Matic.

Have you always wanted to play Family Feud but are a bit camera shy? Now is your opportunity! Join this session during the expo reception, where we’ll be looking for audience participation to field two “family” teams. Topics may include best practices, emerging trends and technologies, and common pain points. A game of Family Feud wouldn’t be complete without each member of the winning “family” going home with a prize! Each member of the winning team will walk away with a Bose Wireless Speaker. Let’s play the Feud!

eLearning and instructional professionals constantly crave new approaches to design, and they regularly grapple with how best to incorporate design thinking into their workflows. Many experienced designers find themselves struggling to enhance usability, influence perception, and make better design decisions. For the instructional designer, the ability to add techniques that “teach through design” can validate creative prowess and yield enhanced interactive and visual solutions in learning materials.

In this session, you will learn advanced design methods that can elevate your approach to design thinking and expand your design vision for better learning and education products. You will explore and discuss how advanced-level design approaches and contextual design process abilities are part of the critical skill set instructional designers command. By attending, you will build your advanced conceptual utility and discover new ways to enhance learning experiences.

In this session, you will learn:

• About advanced design-thinking approaches embedded across design disciplines
• About contextual design methods to influence perception and usability
• Strategies for teaching through design
• How to think and teach through design by adding 10 new advanced techniques

Audience:
Novice to advanced designers, developers, project managers, managers, and directors.

How do you take a traditional learning experience like new hire training and radically reimagine it for today’s learner? More importantly, why should you want to change your approach? There’s a growing consensus in the L&D industry that new employees learn more on the job than they do through formal learning events. Nonetheless, L&D is in a unique position to shape the experience of new employees from day one, which presents a prime opportunity to create a lasting impact as they begin their new roles.

In this session, you’ll learn how to plan and execute a transformation of your new hire experience. You’ll find out how to leverage the best in ed-tech to design a new-hire program that reflects how people learn not only at work, but in their daily lives as well. You’ll look at how this approach should change your design, such as how techniques like interactive video can connect new employees to both company culture and to experienced employees, and also go beyond tactical learning design techniques to better understand how to package and sell your new-hire vision to key business stakeholders.

In this session, you will learn:

• How video-based narratives can drive adoption of company culture
• Strategies for planning and executing a large-scale new-hire transformation
• Authentic ways to facilitate co-creation of knowledge among new employees
• Techniques for connecting new employees through social communities
• Tips for selling your vision to key business stakeholders

Audience:
Intermediate designers, managers, directors, and senior leaders (VP, CLO, executive, etc.).

Technology discussed in this session:
Interactive video.

This session is a regulatory training case study focusing on a competency course that works on any device, tablet, or PC and provides xAPI analytics and competency data. This approach allows for third-party hosted training to be distributed through content providers by integrating to LMSs using SCORM, AICC, or APIs provided by the LMS or other systems. Along with diagrams of the same approach with multiple Riptide Elements clients, the session will focus on the case study as an innovative solution for food safety team members who manufacture and supply FDA-regulated products around the world.

The ability to plan and execute successful events, promotions, and incentives is a key skill for any sales professional. But, what if your salespeople are dispersed? How can they get the support they need when they need it? How do they know if they’re making the right decisions? And, most importantly, how can an organization ensure that these sales events are worth the investment in the first place?

In this session, you’ll dive into details of a learning solution created for just this type of audience—Xfinity indirect account executives who primarily supported external retail partners. You’ll learn how the L&D team worked to solve this issue with thoughtful training and performance support. You’ll look at how they began assessing the situation with a targeted survey, walk through their design process, and see their final output: content that included engaging live-action video, an interactive training guide with embedded support tools, and an online game that measured whether the audience was ready to begin planning and executing their own events. Through exploring the process used to design this content, you’ll gain ideas and approaches for creating your own blended learning solutions.

In this session, you will learn:

• How to position a survey and ask the right questions for maximum results and input
• How to approach designing a self-paced learning solution to support a dispersed audience
• Options for using interactive PDFs to serve as both the foundation for training and on-the-job performance support
• Tips for planning and executing learning media, such as live-action video with actual employees and online “choose your own adventure” games with customized video feedback
• How this learning solution drove sales results, increased leader buy-in, and fostered audience engagement

Audience:
Novice to intermediate designers, managers, directors, and senior leaders (VP, CLO, executive, etc.).

Technology discussed in this session:
SurveyMonkey, Adobe AfterEffects, Adobe InDesign, and Articulate Storyline 2.

With tight timelines and rapid development tools, people on your team often find themselves on the hamster wheel of endless production. Out of context, this production machine seems very much alive and in sync with corporate needs. But is it? A six-word story experiment asked people to share their experience with corporate training—and not a single one of these stories offered a happy ending. Even with only six words, stories can weave an intricate web of emotions and events. What if you could capitalize on the power of story to redirect the efforts of your team and bring out everything human about your organization?

In this session, you’ll find out what an instructional story is and learn the three most powerful aspects of story that can transform your organization. Using instructional story design and a variety of technical options, you’ll address corporate learning needs with a wholistic approach, integrating technology, people, and information. Your organization will never be the same.

In this session, you will learn:

• About the difference between vignettes and instructional stories
• About the fundamental concepts for instructional story design
• About the three most powerful aspects of story for transforming organizations
• How to experiment with various technical and non-technical approaches of story distribution
• How to develop an action plan for building relationships that add to the corporate story

Audience:
Intermediate to advanced designers, managers, directors, and senior leaders (VP, CLO, executive, etc.).

Technology discussed in this session:
PowToon, Aurasma, Poll Everywhere, survey tools, internal/external social sharing platforms, social brainstorming, email, xAPI, and a whole host of simple, complex, free, and expensive tools that can be used in new ways for instructional story design.

Storyboarding an eLearning project is a process. There is no right or wrong way to document the design of eLearning, and there is no rule that a project even needs to use the storyboarding process in some circumstances. Because of this, the choices for storyboarding techniques and procedures can be overwhelming if you’re new to the process, and it’s no surprise that some people decide to skip it entirely. But storyboarding can, in the long run, help your project development run smoother, encourage buy-in from your stakeholders or clients, and allow you to create projects you’re more satisfied with—it’s just a matter of determining a storyboarding process that works for you.

In this session, you’ll look at the essentials of eLearning storyboards and find out how to get started yourself. You’ll explore how storyboards are not just three-column documents or a deck of slides—they are a collection of documents that define every aspect of your project. This session will show you many of the storyboarding documents and procedures you can consider using in your own work, from a main storyboard that documents the instructional design to style guides, visual modeling, and more.

In this session, you will learn:

• About the essential documentation that goes into a storyboard
• About various storyboard documents that address different aspects of an eLearning project
• How style guides are an essential supporting storyboard document
• Why assessment storyboards are independent of the main storyboard

Audience:
Novice designers and developers.

Neuroscience is one of the hottest topics in training and education, so it’s no surprise if you’re drawn to this research as a source of wisdom for your learning designs. Yet despite its promise, neuroscience is a fairly young field. Questions remain. Are neuroscience findings valid? Are they relevant to learning design? Are they useful?

In this session, you’ll take a closer look at the research on neuroscience and what it actually shows (or doesn’t show) about how people learn. You’ll debunk myths, pinpoint misconceptions, and get practical advice for how to approach neuroscience recommendations. The session will utilize challenge questions, research briefs, guided discussions, and opportunities for practical reflection to enable a deep and informed review of the latest neuroscience research revelations.

In this session, you will learn:

• What the research says about neuroscience and learning
• What the research says about neuroscience beliefs
• How to approach neuroscience findings from a practical perspective
• What other sources of learning research are of critical importance

Audience:
Novice to intermediate designers, developers, managers, directors, and senior leaders (VP, CLO, executive, etc.).

Outsourcing of T&D is becoming more frequent, providing a large gap for freelancers to fill. But deciding to move to freelancing means you’ll need to find answers to a wide range of business concerns that you likely never had to worry about as an employee. What kind of business should you establish? How can you thrive in a competitive landscape? What do you need to put in place to protect both your new business and yourself?

In this session, you’ll learn the core concepts that every freelancer should know as they begin their new business. You’ll find out the basics of selecting the type of business to form and the business insurance you should consider when you get started. You’ll explore the kinds of work you can take on by looking at the pros and cons of direct and subcontract-type work. You’ll also discover why a webpage and a portfolio are vital to your ability to market your services.

In this session, you will learn:

• About the two types of freelance work and the pros and cons of each type
• About the three types of insurance you should consider having as a freelancer and what each type covers
• Why you should register as a business, and about the different types of businesses you may register as
• About the benefits of creating your business webpage and portfolio

Audience:
Novice to intermediate designers and developers.

It has been a bit of an uphill battle for clients and learning professionals to make the shift from content creation to curation. You should always be looking to see what exists before you get into creating or customizing new instruction.

In this session, you will learn how to navigate the shift from mostly creation to mostly curation from an instructional design, stakeholder, and learner perspective. The session will provide solutions to questions such as: How do people learn from simply viewing a video or reading an article? What if you need a customized approach for learners’ specific needs? Is curated content a fit for everyone? And if most of the content provided is curated, what will be customized?

In this session, you will learn:

• How to shift to a curation mindset
• How to start a design with curation in mind
• How to integrate curation with creation effectively
• How to address common misunderstandings and myths about curation
• How to address concerns of IDs, stakeholders, and learners when it comes to curating vs. creating

Audience:
Novice to advanced designers, managers, directors, and senior leaders (VP, CLO, executive, etc.).

Technology discussed in this session:
Degreed, River, Learner Community, and possibly Mobile Coach.

The benefits of collaboration are well known, and today the tools available to extend collaborative efforts across time and space (geography) are plentiful. However, merely having collaborative platforms doesn’t necessarily mean collaboration will happen.

This session will discuss successful, rapid learning design collaboration in a virtual remote work world. It will focus on roles, tools, and communication to leverage design capabilities to rapidly develop virtual learning aids and performance support. Examples of projects at various stages of development may be shared during this session (from storyboard to launch) to illustrate the process while discussing best practices. This session will explore collaborative instructional design in a virtual environment—specifically, how instructional design teams can work collaboratively while members are in geographically separate locations.

In this session, you will learn:

• About various communication tools that are advantageous to remote teams
• About best practices for remote collaboration
• About pitfalls to be avoided during remote collaboration
• Why clear delineation of tasks and roles is critical to project success
• About the benefits of remote collaboration

Audience:
Novice to advanced designers, developers, project managers, and managers.

It’s estimated that 50 to 90 percent of training is “scrap learning”—content that is delivered but never actually applied back on the job. Scrap learning serves no practical purpose and is essentially a waste of everyone’s time. L&D professionals can’t help but be uncomfortable with those figures, but nothing in their traditional training bag of tricks has proven capable of eliminating that waste. It’s time to alter the training paradigm.

In this session, you’ll examine the heart of the scrap learning problem and experience its most effective antidote. Instead of trying to get workers to internalize all of the relevant knowledge before they need it (an impossible task), L&D professionals should instead capture the knowledge and tools the workers need and disperse that guidance into the workplace, where they can quickly assess and apply it directly to the work they are doing. This session will demonstrate how to assemble such mini-performance support to help you significantly “cut the scrap” in the training you deliver.

In this session, you will learn:

• Why so much of training becomes scrap learning
• How just-in-time guidance ensures effective application of the training on the job
• What models you can use for assembling effective mini-performance support to provide guidance at the point of performance
• How integrating performance support into your training can make the course itself more effective, more efficient, and considerably more engaging

Audience:
Novice to intermediate designers, managers, directors, and senior leaders (VP, CLO, executive, etc.).

Technology discussed in this session:
The session will demonstrate several web-based models (viewable on all standard devices) that attendees can follow to augment and expand their training into the workplace.

Training professionals typically fall along a continuum with varying levels of access to their target audience. That amount of access often influences, consciously or not, the techniques they use to analyze their audience. Without adequate awareness of this continuum and where they fall on it, designers risk depending on their own assumptions about their target audience and may end up overlooking more effective analysis strategies that can improve training.

In this session, you’ll discover where you fall along this continuum, identifying your own level of access to your target audience, and find out how unexamined assumptions about your audience may be impacting your training design. Based on that information, you’ll explore tips, tricks, and techniques drawn from case studies for how you can reach your audience more effectively. In this knowledge-sharing session, you’ll also uncover how techniques used by other L&D professionals can have a bearing on your design decisions, allowing you to better serve your audience.

In this session, you will learn:

• Where you fall along a continuum, identifying your level of access to your target audience
• How unexamined assumptions about your audience may be impacting your training design
• Tips, tricks, and techniques for how you can reach your audience more effectively
• How techniques used by other L&D professionals can uncover previously missed opportunities to better serve your learners

Audience:
Novice to intermediate designers and developers.

Agile design processes are beginning to change the ways that people create training content. While agile design appeared in the L&D space only in the last few years, they took hold in the software industry much earlier, starting in the mid-1990s. Clearly there is overlap between L&D and the software industry, and if agile design works in both worlds, what other practices used by software development teams could help L&D create better training and work more effectively?

In this session, you’ll take a closer look at software development best practices and identify the opportunities for L&D professionals to learn from that industry. In particular, you’ll discuss pain points that training teams encounter and find out how software development practices have been built to address similar pain points. Finally, you’ll take specific software practices (such as version control, code libraries, and “commenting your code”) and adapt them to training development with examples from Adobe Captivate and Articulate Storyline projects.

In this session, you will learn:

• About the similarities between your existing processes and software development best practices
• About areas where your processes could be improved using techniques from the software development field
• How to improve consistency and quality when multiple developers work on separate, but related, content
• How to avoid common issues when multiple developers need to work on the same files

Audience:
Intermediate to advanced designers, developers, project managers, and managers

Technology discussed in this session:
Microsoft SharePoint, Basecamp, open-source or free tools, Adobe Captivate, and Articulate Storyline.

You’re faced with volumes of complicated content that you must translate into effective training. Your SMEs are pushing for delivering it through hours and hours of web-based training, which you know your audience will dread. You’ve heard of the benefits of using a micro format, but how can you possibly use it to cover all of that content?

In this session, you’ll learn how to slim down your content and use formats such as email campaigns, modular mini-courses, and microlearning videos to help your learners understand and use challenging content. You’ll discover how to break down the issues related to simplifying difficult content and translate these issues into key goals. You’ll then dive into examples of real micro solutions to find out more about the content analysis techniques and instructional design approaches that made these projects a success. By the end of this session, you’ll be able to use microlearning to create solutions that respect your audience’s time while also ensuring your SMEs feel you’ve covered the material thoroughly.

In this session, you will learn:

• Tips and tricks for crafting microlearning content
• How to employ content analysis techniques for simplified learning in micro formats
• How to design simplified instruction for micro formats
• How to apply the tips and tricks in the session to change how you deliver content in your own workplace

Audience:
Novice to intermediate designers and managers.