Learning professionals often create and deliver learning without huge budgets for tools, but it is impossible to be effective instructional designers, training managers, or learning developers without knowing the tools of those trades. Fortunately, many of the best tools for creating and delivering online learning are free or very inexpensive!

The way we learn is changing. In his Predictions for 2015 report, Josh Bersin states we are in an era where corporate learning is going through as much change as we witnessed when eLearning hit the scene. Corporate learning strategies have always treated learning as an event. That’s not how we learn best. We learn continuously, on the job. We learn by making mistakes and solving problems. Your learners are asking you to shift away from formal training to more focused, ad hoc learning. How do you evolve your learning strategy to adapt to this shift?

Many eLearning developers neglect to use a soundtrack in eLearning programs. Music is used in film and television to set the mood, convey emotions, and provide transition cues yet many avoid using music in eLearning because of a perceived cost, lack of musical skills, possible copyright issues, or simply no recording space. Fortunately there are many tools and sources available for us to quickly build music tracks that can connect emotionally and enhance the learning.

Social learning allows organizations to realize the benefits that eLearning promised 20 years ago. Social is flexible, cost efficient, and allows experts in an organization to directly connect with learners. Employees are already using social tools already with zero training required. How can training professionals leverage tools their employees already know how to use?

The world of technology and information is changing rapidly. As emerging delivery and engagement technologies, including MOOCs, immersions, games, and badges, are disrupting expectations of relevant meaningful learning and development, new waves of learning technology innovation—wearable technologies and the Internet of Things – are promising to shake things up even more. Will you be ready to step up? In this session we’ll examine the current and emerging learning technology markets to anticipate the skills and capabilities required for success as eLearning professionals.

Training focuses on learning and performance improvement, but we typically only access the knowledge aspect of performance. What about emotion? To truly improve performance, training in context is essential and that includes training employees to leverage their knowledge and control their emotions.

Embedded performance support (EPS), while it has been described as a discipline, also serves a critical role as a component part of a holistic learning and performance solution. All too often however, performance support is viewed as a training add-on targeted to post-training applications. When this happens, we don’t fully realize the significant benefits of agile development, nor are sustainable performance results achieved by our end-users.

Design is not only about aesthetics. It’s about intersections, and especially those intersections that connect to human emotions. Mobile learning-game designers must consider both the learning and gaming contexts as they develop solutions. Striking the right balance is a blend of art and science. So how do successful learning games get this right? Understanding the fundamentals of game design and learning design can help you lay the foundation, but it doesn’t get you to mastery. You have to look at the patterns.

If you visit a Fortune 500 website today, what you see is not created by handcrafting a webpage. Amazon and Netflix recommendations, too, are not completed by someone watching your particular behavior and cobbling together those for you; instead, it’s a set of rules and tagged content. It’s quite likely that when you visit a site, it may be different than when others visit the same site. This isn’t magic, but it’s also not just your everyday content creation process—it’s a content strategy fueled by content systems. And these changes in traditional marketing have big implications for eLearning.

The Experience API (xAPI) has been in production for more than a year now, and it is becoming more important for training and development teams to learn the ABCs of this important new set of technologies and approaches to tracking and reporting.

Gamification and games-based learning is a viable, effective strategy for learning and yet there is resistance when it comes to executive buy-in. We hear, “Gamification is too expensive!” “It’s too flashy!” “We don’t want our employees playing games on the job!” Turning the tide of perception takes a combination of highlighting programs in which gamification has been incredibly effective, understanding the science behind why gamification works so well for learners, and targeting those specific projects for which gamification is a perfect fit.

“Don’t limit yourself” is terrible advice, yet getting into a creative rhythm is not always easy. When the pressure is mounting, often we can find ourselves blocked in our effort to present a new and fresh idea for the project we’re working on. How can you stay in the flow and find the next great idea for your work?

Nearly 48 percent of employees believe they are ready right now for a career change according to a survey by global talent-mobility consulting firm Lee Hecht Harrison. The hiring market is getting tighter as the economy improves. To attract and keep the technical talent required for your organization is a strategic project, and it will not be successful if you treat it like a “hope and a prayer.” Your competitors are trying right now to steal your top technical staff. To retain and grow your valuable technical talent requires three key accountabilities: hire the right person, onboard and grow the person, and manage him or her through career and succession plans.

In early 2014 Jane Bozarth’s husband was diagnosed with a large tumor perched atop his brain stem like a golf ball on a tee. The story of his surgery and recovery became the most popular piece she’s ever published, “Performance Matters,” which appeared in The eLearning Guild’s Learning Solutions Magazine. Join Jane and Jeannette Campos as they explore the story, its associated observations, and issues learned throughout that are relevant to L&D.

While Articulate Storyline is a wonderful development tool, many times developers end up with only content that resembles a (very pretty) slideshow, rather than enriched content with meaningful experiences that result in impactful learning.

Trends suggest that learners want to drive their own learning and have access to a variety of bite-sized materials in various media to learn what they want, when they want it. It’s not just the Millennials, and it is not because people have no attention span. It is because everything moves so quickly and we have become accustomed to making our own path ... quickly. Yet, corporate learning organizations are having trouble shifting fast enough.

The promise of open digital badges extends beyond their potential to recognize informal learning and professional development. Open badges also provide data that can be mined and analyzed to benefit learners, educators, and learning organizations, both locally and globally across the ecosystem. What does the current universe of badges look like? What practical data can be conveyed through badges? How can usable data be extracted from digital badges that can be used by learners and institutions of learning?

The world of work and the workplace is changing rapidly, and your internal business strategy needs to include motivational elements such as gamification, badging, and incentives to support workplace engagement and interest.

The training industry is going through a shift from eLearning to mLearning to take advantage of the capabilities of mobile technology. Many organizations are in need of transforming their training content and materials for learning on different devices such as smartphones, tablets, and laptop computers. The challenge is doing this cost effectively, rapidly, and with flexible solutions.

Simulations are an important component of training in many healthcare verticals. Mannequins, simulation labs, and computer-based simulations are well-established parts of many healthcare professionals’ education. They are however also expensive and difficult to deliver online. What’s needed is a solution that combines the low-cost, distributed model of eLearning with the power of simulation.

Learner engagement can be elusive. It is difficult to grab and hold a learner’s attention with so many smartphone distractions at their desk or at their fingertips. But engagement is possible through specific techniques that command attention and engage the learner.

Can the challenge of conducting annual onboarding for 700 volunteer leaders be met in a cost effective and engaging way? Leaders are located across time zones, supported by different technology platforms, and do not have common availability for a centrally-located training meeting. However, networking and sharing ideas are key learning requirements of the group. In addition, budgetary constraints mean that only half the population can be trained per year, leaving the other half with very little support from national headquarters. This uneven approach has led to inconsistent results in terms of membership retention, chapter programming, and volunteer engagement.

Authoring tools natively lack sophistication of handling variables. Rapid authorware developers feel limited, and many fear tackling more advanced functionality such as JavaScript.

Adding performance support to the learning ecosystem of an organization provides the opportunity to enhance the performance of workers in a powerful way. To take the best advantage of this new paradigm, the instructional design process and the content of online learning need to change.

Given the choice, many learners will choose mobile abstracts over books, YouTube DIY over lecture, single-point lessons over ILT, and JIT mobile reinforcement over day-long training. This is a very real challenge most T&D departments are facing. While they all have legacy training courses that are traditionally a day longer or more, learners today do not enjoy or benefit by these long-form training methodologies.

Accelerated change, moving technologies, globally diverse audiences, increasing demand. We’ve been talking about these and other pressures that senior L&D leaders face for decades. The trouble is that the pressures are not going away. Today’s L&D leaders must align learning to needs, move quickly to improve performance, and add value. They are increasingly looking to technology to help.

Free tools like Google Analytics can reveal important characteristics about online learner behavior, and help instructors and course developers make confident design and technology decisions. With a thoughtful analytics implementation derived from course learning goals, instructors can better understand what aspects of their course were successful and communicate this story to their businesses and institutions.

Instructional designers and eLearning developers are not typically trained in how to design a visual experience for their learners, yet a cluttered presentation of information interferes with learner cognition and retention. Often, the effort to transform unappealing, text-heavy content can seem overwhelming, but there are simple approaches that you can master to create a visually appealing experience.

As trainers, we work hard to create great training. As a result, we are disappointed when our employees fail to learn or don’t transfer learning back to their workplace. We may be tempted to blame our students, but the truth is that we often fail because we don’t understand the mind of the learner. As a result, we build training modules that are not consistent with the brain’s natural means of acquisition. Teaching should be more effective, and it can be more effective once we understand how the learner’s mind operates.

Writing is an underdiscussed aspect of instructional design. In fact, many people get into the field without realizing that writing is a significant part of a learning designer’s job. It is difficult to do it well. Learning designers may be required to write in at least ten different forms that involve unique styles. Yet there is no single source of instruction for writing in all of these styles.

While universities continue to explore the new possibilities of massive open online courses (MOOCs) in establishing global brand, learning research, and innovation, corporate training has begun a deeper look into using MOOCs for their own purposes. How would a landscape of higher ed–produced MOOCs being used by corporate training benefit both types of organizations?

Back by popular demand, Hyperdrive returns to DevLearn this fall. This year’s Hyperdrive competition focuses on innovation, showcasing projects that are using technology and solutions to create new and exciting opportunities for learning and performance support.

Are you a Storyline 2 user? Maybe you were self-taught or used Storyline 1 and are now using Storyline 2? Storyline 2 offers expanded capabilities that are often underutilized, which if applied can create more engaging learning experiences. 

The power of games for learning is well documented, yet the thought of undertaking the design and development building of a game seems overwhelming due to the perceived cost and hours to learn how to do it. The time and the energy just seem too large of a barrier.

Learning professionals commonly build online content, using both off-the-shelf and custom tools. These tools may create web content, be destination sites, or be content repositories of some sort, like an LMS or CMS. What do you know about the security vulnerabilities of these tools? One of the core principles of security is that you can never be 100 percent guaranteed safe from attackers. However, if you know and understand the potential vulnerabilities of your toolset, you can work proactively to reduce the risk that your work becomes the vector for a breach.

High-impact organizations invest in people. While some skills are prerequisites to employment, others can be acquired on the job, preparing people for more complex tasks, even future leadership roles. That is the promise and possibility of building a progressive credentialing system using competency-based digital badges as “curricular building blocks.”

In 2013, SunTrust Bank began a multi-year journey to consolidate its key mortgage underwriting business applications that would enable strategic growth and improved customer service. This new way of doing business required a pioneering approach to capability building and systems training for end-user adoption of their business application.

If you’re in the world of eLearning, it goes without saying that you’ve probably heard the term gamification thrown around quite a bit. But what does it mean for your eLearning projects? Is it as simple as leaderboards and badges? Fundamentally, gamification is about applying game elements and gaming techniques to otherwise static content, with the intention of making that content a little more fun, engaging, and impactful. These days, designing game elements and applying gaming techniques to eLearning content doesn’t have to require a lengthy design and development timeline, nor the use of complex programming tools.

It’s critical that learners come away with new knowledge and information from eLearning lessons, but frequently they don’t. Learners sometimes find the material or presentation so foreign that even high-quality information just doesn’t stay with them. Integrating mutually shared pop culture and historical experiences into eLearning is one approach to making lessons both entertaining and lasting while creating engaging eLearning courses.

There’s been a large amount of research in recent years exploring the value music has on the brain and learning. We’ve all experienced it in some way in our lives, be it from listening to music while learning or studying, learning something from a catchy song, or by learning to play an instrument.

Chances are you didn’t dream of becoming of an eLearning designer when you grew up, did you? Most of the instructional designers in the eLearning business arrived here by accident. So now that you’re here and doing this work, how can you become a more intentional practitioner?

Three significant challenges L&D practitioners experience are in the ability to add context to their mobile learning and performance support, time and resources to experience the possibilities of new technologies, and having the ability to see real-world applications. 

We all know we may have some bad habits: biting nails, tapping our feet, regularly eating junk food. But did you know you can also work to create productive habits—habits that can improve your performance and build your knowledge? Those who have built diverse social networks are not only building more powerful relationships, they’re opening doors to new opportunities and staying ahead of the curve in their practice, and they seem to do it almost unconsciously … like a habit.

Most eLearning projects get off the ground with great intentions. Somewhere along the development path deadlines may be missed, SME demands increase, and the resulting project gets rushed and lacks consistent design. Having a style guide to refer to not only aids in the development cycle, but also assists in ensuring nothing is forgotten or missed. While documenting all of details of a project may seem tedious and nonsensical, having the ability to revisit a project months later and know everything is documented is priceless.

Rapid development tools, readily available templates, mobile delivery, social media. These advancements have opened up the eLearning industry to more than just learning professionals with deep skills in both instructional design and programming. An instructor with PowerPoint skills can now quickly and cheaply develop eLearning. Although technology has improved, has instructional design followed suit, or has it been undermined by conformity and complacency?

Learning and development professionals are under pressure to produce real results. Many times the traditional methods of instructional design and content development are not getting the job done. We have to think differently on how to design, develop, and leverage technology to create learning experiences that actually impact performance and get the results that matter.

Games are a hot topic in the learning industry right now. At the same time, few people truly understand the differences between games and gamification or their applications to learning. Learning professionals interested in gaming need to understand how games work and how technology can be used to bring games to life.

Micro-learning has gotten huge over the last several years. Micro-learning, particularly video, offers huge benefits, including that it fits into available time slots in busy schedules and that it’s inherently mobile. From the organizational perspective, it can also be much faster to market, more focused, easier to maintain, and more scalable than its macro counterparts. The challenge, however, is for organizations to take advantage of this format. How can it be produced quickly and affordably, and how can it scale to engage the whole organization?

Micro-learning video is the creation of video-based content under one minute in length that is primarily consumed on mobile devices. The rise of user-generated micro-content has required the use of rapid storyboarding and predefined video content structures. As the length of the video decreases so does the optimal format of the video.

Why is it so hard to engage participants in your virtual sessions? Are you not sure of the best tools or techniques to use? Engagement isn’t easy, as delivering in a virtual environment is different than in a live classroom setting. It takes practice and know-how. So what is the key to stop learners from multitasking and really get involved in the session? If you can’t answer this question, there’s a chance you aren’t effectively engaging your learners.

Building a native HTML5 mobile game could take very complex code to build, especially if you want to add elements like flex and responsive layouts, natural motion that interacts with user actions and the device’s accelerometer, accept user input, and more.

Developing an online course can be an overwhelming process. Oftentimes it can be difficult to know where to start and what resources are available. In addition to timelines, tools, and scope, you need to be able to manage the flow of information and the critical relationships with other designers, developers, and subject matter experts (SMEs).

The world of digital online credentials is changing, and IBM is a leading voice in the IT industry. In this session, using real program data and results and the IBM Open Badge Program as a case study, you will learn how to design a nano-credential program that quickly generates significant results. See how IBM merges credentials and recognition with social media, such as LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. The session explores Mozilla Open Badges, which are quickly emerging as an industry standard to recognize achievements and nurture and progress talent.

Engaging, professional-sounding voice recording is a key to maximizing the potential for eLearning. Voice acting should be professional, sound realistic, and be free of distractions that can disengage participants and limit knowledge retention. While hiring professional voice actors can provide an easy solution, budget constraints may limit or eliminate the option of outsourcing voiceover work. When this occurs, development teams must look to their own in-house talent, many of whom may be new to the idea of lending their voice.

So often, in our day-to-day professional existence, we are bombarded with problems, tasks, and situations that require our attention, all the while neglecting the problem solver—that’s you and me. We seldom recharge our professional batteries and, as such, burn out or become uninspired. We’ve become professional hermits, to an extent, and need an outlet to help us maintain our spark, drive, and creativity.

Due to distance and lack of resources, in-person classroom sessions were not possible for every client who needed to learn Altair Engineering’s software. Its clients did not always want to wait for scheduled classes, so Altair needed to deliver content to them to their desktops in a quick and effective manner at their time of need, not when and where the training schedule dictated. 

In recent years, learning has moved closer to the workplace. Classrooms have moved out of corporate learning centers and into training rooms co-located with offices. Online learning is delivered directly to the desktop more than ever before. The next challenge is to move learning directly into the workflow. To do this, we need to move beyond course delivery and into a broader, more comprehensive, and strategic approach that focuses not just on learning, but on performance and productivity.

Building an eLearning course that works across all devices (desktop, phone, tablet, etc.) and scales and adjusts accordingly is no small undertaking. However with the right tools, templates, and processes in place you can successfully build responsively to develop eLearning that works and looks good on all devices.

Virtual-classroom platforms are not new. In fact, there are probably people in your organization using these platforms right now for training, webinars, and meetings. But are you ready to make an organization-wide move to give up face-to-face classrooms for virtual ones, or is the prospect too daunting?

It’s no secret that most, if not all, of us are facing an ever-increasing need to provide more and more training on complex products, regulatory issues, advanced application processes, and the like. The question is: How do we continue to offer training that keeps our learners engaged in an environment of stagnated training budgets and headcount reductions?

There are several methodologies that can be employed in training development projects, but when time, cost, and quality are not negotiable, an agile development approach may be ideal. Dairy Queen recently introduced a brand-new product line to its 6,500+ franchise organization. In preparation for this momentous rollout, Dairy Queen needed to create an interactive training program to quickly prepare thousands of franchisees and their crew on the sales and operations of an entirely new product platform for worldwide delivery.

As technology changes the way we live our day-to-day lives, it is fascinating to imagine what the future will bring. As a learning and development professional, however, it’s very hard to keep up the pace. What technology will be trending and will change the way we live and learn, and what technology will be nothing but hype? Will augmented reality really disrupt our learning? And how about virtual reality and wearable tech? And, more importantly, will we ever be able to afford those technologies as learning supporting tools?

The number of freelance workers is expected to grow to more than 50 percent of America’s workforce in the next decade. An urgency has arisen to define, create, and articulate credentials that document alternative learning experiences and directly correlate with the skills required in the project-based job market. How can employers determine which soloists have the capabilities and experience that the work demands? And how can soloists showcase their capabilities and achievements so potential employers can reliably identify them?

Medical education in North America is taught in a decentralized manner with in-class coursework delivered in small blocks and students gaining learning experiences in hospitals and other institutions outside of the university. Medical schools need a way to capture and analyze these experiences to get a true picture of a student’s readiness to treat patients. Furthermore, learning requirements are set to change for medical residents from set-year programs to a competency-based model. Current LMSs alone aren’t able to tie outside experiences to competencies.

We use eLearning and other technology platforms because they are cost effective, easily accessible, provide a consistent learner experience, and increase our geographical reach. Unfortunately, it is quite easy to lose the human connection that is so critical to the engagement of employees and learners.

Most designers and developers strive for continuous improvement in the quality and effectiveness of eLearning programs. However, measuring the success and failure of eLearning is often an afterthought. Worse, the metrics used to measure effectiveness send false messages that lead a person to think the eLearning is more effective than it actually is. This is unfortunate because eLearning offers more measurement options than traditional classroom training.

We have all experienced huge courses, documents, and texts that are barely manageable by the instructional designer. In fact, much of how we design courses and documents makes it impossible for an employee to find the one piece of information they need at the time they need it. Since content is so dense, it makes finding meaningful information difficult, and it makes tracking anything useful in it even more difficult.

Learners are more likely to persist online if engaged in their courses and the educational experience is personalized. Personalized e/mLearning communicates a supportive, nurturing, and respectful learning environment. Branding allows you to tailor the experience and speak to the learners; however, doing so effectively and consistently can be tricky. 

How can creating storyboards online change your writing and review process? What online spreadsheets can help you track open issues? Can you track project time online to help you better estimate projects in the future? What scheduling tools are available? These are just some of the questions we’ll address in this hands-on session. You’ll get to try out a number of online tools (some free, some fee-based) to help you better manage your eLearning development projects. You’ll walk away not only with valuable perspective on what these specific tools can do, but also with an understanding of key features you can look for and use in other tools. 

Training employees and clients is an ongoing challenge. People are busy. Training is expensive, time consuming and usually pretty boring. Athenahealth has a wide range of clients, from physicians and nurses, to front desk staff, and medical billers. Their schedules are chaotic, they have little time to train, and their focus is on doing what they do best, helping patients. The challenge was in moving from an eLearning-heavy approach to a more context-based, hands-on, just-in-time one to meet the needs of learners in this complex environment.

Why do people spend hours learning how to master new levels in their favorite games? The answer to this question, and the ability to harness some of that excitement and magic for workplace learning, is why there is growing interest in games for learning.

eLearning designers are often faced with complex training topics that are difficult to deliver concisely. The results are lengthy courses that are counter to the needs of today’s learners, who need to be extremely efficient with their time. To deliver learning to this audience means being very concise in both content and course design, while still having impact and not sacrificing instructional integrity.

One of the major challenges facing organizations is getting the balance between formal and informal right. Capitalizing on the benefits of social learning requires the right environment to facilitate it. The most successful communities have clarity of purpose, support from wider stakeholders, an engaged hub of participants, and a skilled facilitator to nurture it. For anyone interested in creating a sustainable and effective social learning strategy for their organization, understanding the benefits of a community approach and the right balance between structure and exploration is key.

As learning practitioners, we strive to understand the real life environment of experts as much as possible. But getting access to really see how they do their jobs when they are in a more technical or hands-on role (i.e., construction, refinery, factory) is difficult. Many times we can’t get access to use video or real-life images because of safety or clearance constraints. This poses a challenge as we try to create impactful learning materials.

Questions about mobile and social learning can often take the conversation in the wrong direction, ones about issues of screen real estate, for example, rather than the more important questions about learner experience or if mobile is even the appropriate approach. Mobile, coupled with social media, provides a rich resource for informal learning outside of the classroom, as well as supplemental learning within the classroom. 

You’re all excited about the promise of an Experience API-enabled world, but you’ve still got a learning management system (LMS) and a whole host of SCORM-based courses. Now what? In most cases, you’ll need to manage the transition—read: republish your library for the Experience API (xAPI)—over the months and years to come. But what if you could get the most out of both an LMS and a learning record store (LRS) at the same time as you move to your next-generation learning-and-performance infrastructure?

If you work in L&D, chances are you use design assets (like photos, drawings, icons, and fonts) all the time. And if you don’t have a graphic design background, chances are you’re paying someone else to make these design assets for you. Professional designers and stock photos are fantastic resources, and ones I’d never want to get rid of, but sometimes what you need is a DIY solution that’s fast, free, or even better: both.

Although the world of web design has evolved and rapidly leveraged open-source technologies to build new experiences, many eLearning instructional designers and developers have limited themselves to rapid eLearning tools such as Captivate and Storyline. But what is possible when we go beyond our usual toolsets?

Infographics powerfully convey content in a visual and readily understandable manner. However, as appealing as they often are, learners often spend only a brief time viewing them before moving on. Are there ways to increase an infographic’s “stickiness,” or its effectiveness to make the content better understood and retained by the learner?

The importance of social factors in learning are well established. But knowing how to best influence and impact these factors remains something of a mystery to most organizations. A number of thought-leaders have suggested you can’t do much of anything to impact social learning in the workplace. They are wrong. You can design social learning opportunities and measure their impact. Drawing on research, and from our experiences of working with some of the leading organizations in the world, we’ve developed our own social-learning playbook. Now we invite you to develop your own, based on the framework we provide.

It’s hard enough to get learners to engage with the content of your eLearning course. The issue is compounded even further when learners can’t figure out how to use the course in the first place. All too often, new eLearning designers put their focus solely into designing the learning content, while at the same time ignoring the interface it’s encapsulated in. This leads to confusion on the part of the learner and disrupts the learning process.

Often the idea of using instructional games is met with stiff resistance by project stakeholders and the organization’s leadership: “We don’t want our employees playing games! We are a serious organization with serious work to do!” So how do you design instructionally effective games for the workplace and gain buy-in from stakeholders and leadership in your organization?

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.

Intellectual property law affects every stage of the development process. Yet, it is daunting and complex. Trying to gain a working knowledge can be overwhelming. As a result, decision making is rooted in ignorance, fear, or frustration, none of which contributes to project goals. The continuing struggle to quickly develop content may lead you to infringe on someone else’s work, expose your work to an unpleasant legal action, or miss out on using free media to enhance your projects.

From the first desktop PCs to today’s cutting-edge smartphones, technology has a history of fundamentally changing the expectations of learning and development programs. We are now on the cusp of another technological advance, one that will once again change some of our definitions and how we address performance issues: wearable technology. This technology will come in various forms, but the one that many expect to serve as a quantum leap forward is Apple Watch.

eLearning developers are often challenged with making learning more interesting or interactive. Games provide an opportunity to meet both needs. You’ve read the research on their impact and you know that games have been useful learning tools through all the stages of life, but building games in eLearning has been a challenge for those who do not know how to program.

Adobe Presenter works perfectly in some situations and not others. Knowing when to use a particular tool is half the battle. Adobe Presenter features many new possibilities for you to use it if the situation calls for it.

An intensive two-year study of 29 projects that were awarded funds to build digital badge systems in the 2012 Badges for Lifelong Learning competition revealed surprising results.

There’s been a large amount of research in recent years exploring the value music has on the brain and learning. We’ve all experienced it in some way in our lives, be it from listening to music while learning or studying, learning something from a catchy song, or by learning to play an instrument.

Studies show that using audio narration in eLearning lessons is significantly more effective than using on-screen text. However, adding a human voice to lessons increases production time and makes updating lessons difficult. These obstacles might make you consider using text-to-speech or even cause you to forego the use of audio altogether.

Competency-based education within the University of Wisconsin System’s Flexible Option program allows students to demonstrate mastery of a subject area and earn a degree without adhering to a rigid course schedule. This shift in higher education is part of a larger move away from learning measured by seat time or credit hours to an evaluation of learning outcomes.

Authoring, particularly cloud-based, is a growing segment for L&D. With numerous platforms and approaches to consider, having a strong framework with which to source, assess, and evaluate a tool is critical. Selecting the wrong technology for authoring your learning assets can prove costly to the organization and its learners if critical criteria or processes are overlooked or misunderstood.

Video can be a highly effective form of media for learning. However, adding video to an eLearning course has historically been expensive and something that required a large amount of time and skill to create. That’s not the case today, with the tools for creating and editing video becoming both easier to use and less expensive.

Most often an eLearning program will suffer from poor graphics and design, regardless of how well written it is. Poor design reflects negatively on your company, your products, and your professionalism. Design can impact how content is received and how information is trusted. And many times an organization does not have a professionally trained designer on hand to tackle these issues.

Every organization relies on the Internet these days for many things: a public web presence, sales, marketing, customer service, document sharing, research, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and much more. Every time a member of the organization uses the Internet, there is potential for a security breach. As an employer, an employee, and a private individual, nothing that you do on the internet is truly private, and all of your activities can be linked together by observers.

Regardless of your industry or job focus, learning management systems remain the central focus for corporate learning and the foundation upon which most types of traditional, informal, social, and mobile learning is built, deployed, and tracked. With numerous industry analysts announcing the death of the LMS, you can't afford to miss this critical update for today’s learning leaders, business decision makers, LMS administrators, and learners of all types.

Video is an increasingly used and powerful tool for performance support. Incorporating video into a responsive performance support project, however, can be daunting. How to use it, which tools are best, and when to use video are just some of the decisions to be made.

Subject matter experts (SMEs) are the lifeline of our work as instructional designers, trainers, and facilitators of learning. They bring the content to life and provide both relevance and context. Our goal should be to ensure the working relationship is the best that it can be. However, we are often speaking different languages to each other, causing the instructional design process—and, more importantly, communication—to break down. 

The traditional lecture-based classroom format of corporate training can be time consuming, inefficient, and costly. A number of companies have switched to an eLearning model, which is much more cost effective but can be a difficult platform to teach concepts that require the higher forms of cognitive learning.

Technical training solutions often lack the rigor that leaders want to see when they are trying to answer the question, “Is our technical field ready?” Even when training activities and resources do require learners to go deep technically and to be challenged, the measure of learners’ readiness is too often based on attendance at an event or consumption of training assets.

Have you ever wondered whether there are special tactics for enhancing memory recall that psychologists are keeping locked away in their ivory towers? Well, such tactics exist! Not only do they exist, but many best practices and techniques can be extrapolated from research, and are entirely accessible to eLearning developers to generate high levels of memory retention.

There’s no doubt that employees of the 21^st century are different. The way they engage in workplace tasks is different. The way they consume content is different. Their brains themselves are different. How do you create a more effective learning solution for people whose brains have been rewired by our quick-change, bite-sized content world? Easy. You simply rewire the whole learning experience.

Technology has completely changed the way we live, work, and learn. Technology has brought us the Internet, smartphones, tablets, and many more tools that have changed our lives forever. Of course, these same technologies have also brought us memes like Socially Awkward Penguin, Success Kid, and yes, Grumpy Cat.

The ability to customize content for learners is the best tool in the hands of eLearning authors. Learning is better when you can customize the experience based on learner choices, responses, specialization, and scores achieved in a quiz. It would be even better if you have the ability to serve content to learners based on their location. 

You spend an incredible amount of time designing, developing, and delivering virtual instructor-led training (VILT) or webinar sessions. It can be a challenge to find the time to promote the topics and follow up with participants in a way that keeps the content fresh in participants’ minds without a lot of additional work. Oftentimes, the content and delivery can be reused in a variety of ways along the learning continuum, from generating interest to post-training performance support, without a lot of resources or effort.

When planning to adopt virtual-classroom platforms for learning sessions, successful organizations need a clear idea of what management, design, delivery, and technical issues to consider.

Have you decided to implement a badge program at your organization but are unsure what to do next? Perhaps you are wondering: How do I create the badges? How do I award them? How are the badges displayed? What kind of communications do I send out to those who are awarded badges? How can I promote badges beyond my department? How do I help participants understand the value of badges? Find out how a badge expert used badges to gamify an award-winning developmental math massive open online course at Cuyahoga Community College, and developed a successful badge system for professional development workshops at Kent State University.

Migration to virtual training delivery is a “must consider” strategy for most geographically dispersed organizations. The Army & Air Force Exchange Service (AAFES) is an $8 billon organization that supports soldiers, airmen, and their families with over 2,400 retail facilities. Training the staff that supports those operations is a worldwide task. AAFES needed a better and more effective training strategy.

Technology is constantly evolving and changing the ways we live, work, and learn. The ways we approach learning are very different than they were even a decade ago. In order to keep our practices current, we must stay ahead of this technological evolution, and that starts with getting the most out of today’s technology.

From CIOs to instructional designers, to faculty, trainers, and students, organizations and universities are considering adding video-making or “visual literacy” as a core skill to the three Rs—reading, writing, and ’rithmetic—in order to prepare learners for a highly visual communication landscape that requires critical thinking to offset consumerism. Evidence shows there is a need for multi-modal learning and cognitive skills. Researching, creating, and sharing video playlists is one of the important additions to creating personalized learning pathways and engendering continuous post-diploma learning.

You can read the statistics yourself: Bersin reports that nearly 60 percent of CLOs will enjoy an 8 percent budget increase in 2015. But so what? About what are they thrilled? What keeps them up at night?

A Fortune 500 company was seeking a way to get a safety message to customers via their sales force without the training impacting face time. But, how do you train 3,000 plus salespeople to enhance their selling approach and deliver this new message to thousands of customers in a consistent fashion, in a compressed time frame, and with limited time away from selling?

L&D professionals are consistently being asked to do more with less while providing scalable training solutions that align to business needs. At the same time, employees are becoming increasingly accustomed to driving their own learning at home using popular technologies. By leveraging a mix of technology, instructional strategy, and organizational knowledge, L&D professionals can put employees at the center of the learning and performance ecosystem and, by supporting this shift in accountability through a focus on providing right-time, right-fit learning opportunities, truly do more with less.

Many applications of gaming in learning simply encourage competitive or game behaviors—they lack a focus on true learning or underlying game dynamics. The game dynamics are what power the experience and include aspects of generosity, collaboration, sharing, trading, perspective, and power.

Every year, we spend millions of dollars on training and development. One of the ways we can determine the value achieved is by using analytics to assess who is using the content, where, when, and how. But with all this data available, which data points matter? Deciphering the ways to analyze a program’s effectiveness can be confusing. And just because we have a lot of data, does that really make any of it valuable? 

There are things that prevent us from making the great video learning content that we are capable of. Sometimes these things are technical, sometimes they are budgetary, but mostly they are due to our misconceptions about what is involved. While some blaze into situations making bigger promises than they can ever deliver, others scare themselves out of ever getting started in the first place. Most of us fall in between, perpetuating common video myths without even knowing it.

Learning professionals today are under a great deal of pressure. It becomes easy to get formulaic and forget two important things: our learners’ needs and our own joy, growth, and fulfillment. How can we break out of the mold, stay connected with our audiences, and remain excited about our profession? And what are some techniques we can use to contribute to a learning culture, even if the rest of the organization isn’t quite there yet?

Implementing a great user experience is critical for designing the optimal learning experience and requires the content developer to think from the perspective of the learner. There is much research on user experience (UX) available and bad practices still in circulation. Identifying what works and what doesn’t is a task worth undertaking.

The holy grail of all learning is retention (and subsequent behavior change). Relevance drives retention. And we have no faster path to relevance than through effective stories. Stories engage us and trigger our imagination to take us places. We’ve all read about the importance of storytelling, we’ve listened to webcasts, maybe we’ve even bought a book or two about effective storytelling. Storytelling is a major buzzword today, but how can we effectively use storytelling in learning solutions?

A state healthcare agency made a significant investment in new technology with the purchase of Microsoft Office 365 (SharePoint, Outlook, Excel, etc.), but there was a known gap in the digital skills of agency employees. Due to budget constraints, it had been several years since the last technology upgrade and as a results the employees had no experience with Office 365 and limited experience with productivity tools in general. However, the employees were not without relevant learning content. They had a catalog of eLearning courses on Microsoft Office and a learning management system (LMS) to make them available. Yet this skills gap remained an issue...

As the world becomes more and more mobile, so too has the technology we’ve grown accustomed to using on desktops moved to mobile devices and in so doing has expanded the possibilities. AR is one of the emerging technologies that enable smartphones and tablets to interact with the world around them.

Scenario-based learning is a proven effective method for learning using complex real-life situations. However the effort and technology to develop scenarios has often appeared to be too complex, expensive, and time-consuming. Today though, authoring tools have advanced to make designing and developing robust scenarios to be easier and more efficient than ever before.

Many organizations are still using paper-based guides, manuals, and job aids for day-to-day operations. Planning for additional printing costs throughout the year to accommodate frequent content changes is often the norm. Reliability can also be questionable, as older documents may not all be thrown out when replaced with an updated version. Some organizations have gone almost completely paperless, yet the electronic versions of the documents are still basic text, which doesn’t make use of the full potential of a virtual format.

Anyone still struggling with learning projects or courses that exceed schedule, budget, or that do not meet audience objectives needs to understand project-scope management. This project management key knowledge area is often overlooked. However the planning, monitoring, and controlling processes involved are critical to ensuring your projects deliver the required results, on time, and on budget.

Your organization has a mature learning program facilitated through the use of a learning management system (LMS). But now the technology powering the current system constrains your organization’s evolving strategic needs for business growth. Your team may have begun looking for technology solutions or started drafting a wish list, but what are your next steps?

Live virtual learning, while not new, has only recently gained momentum due to a down economy and increased travel restrictions. Learning organizations know that they must increasingly provide live virtual solutions, but they don’t fully understand how to transition their traditional content to a virtual platform. Intel initially struggled with a lack of standards and development skills which led to mediocre learning experiences.

More than four years have passed since the inception of the Open Badges experiment, and in that time the concept of digital badges has moved steadily into the general consciousness. As this novel idea continues to evolve, so do its many opportunities and challenges.   

The coming year will see the launch of inexpensive virtual reality (VR) devices. But this change is not about gadgets; it’s about a massive consumer technology that will be accessible and powerful with huge potential. VR is a medium, not a gadget. How appropriate is it for education and training?

Do you spend more of your time copying and pasting from one content format to another than you do creating new instructional materials? Do you have to deliver the same information for more than one learning deliverable? If you answered yes to either of those questions, then it’s time to reclaim your time and use a single source for your content.

During design and development, SMEs and other stakeholders sometimes suggest ideas or practices that are antithetical to good instructional design. For example, a stakeholder believes it’s best to film a daylong stand-up training session and deliver it as one video. An SME might write learning material on a complex topic without breaking concepts down for beginners. In these cases, it is helpful for the designer to be able to present research findings to help the stakeholders understand why you should design learning solutions differently.

Learning professionals are always looking for the best and most efficient way to distribute training, education, and performance support. Sometimes that is face-to-face (F2F), other times online, and there are times where a blended approached is best. You can easily and cost-effectively create an online or blended approach by using readily available online tools and resources. No expensive LMS is needed!

Tracking learning and performance activities to be able to analyze them and interpret their value has always been a desire of learning professionals. Having this information naturally leads to the opportunity to refine the effectiveness of the learning experiences. Until now, this has been time and cost prohibitive.

There is a huge difference between the traditional levels of interactivity for asynchronous eLearning and interactions. Levels of interactivity delineate the mechanical complexity used during the request for proposal (RFP) and proposal stages of business development, sales, and contracting to determine scope and pricing for an eLearning project. Interactions, on the other hand, have to do with the actual design of the eLearning project to bring about the desired performance change. We have interactivity (mechanical) and interactions (instructional). How do we work with both to achieve what we want for our learners?

We’ve spent years aiming our focus at being good business partners. We build our road maps around urgent and emergent business needs. We have begun to dispel the notion of learning styles. These are all good steps. But are we getting too far away from our understanding of the learner’s experience? Understanding the needs of our business partners is useless if we don’t understand how our work will land with our learners. How can we seek to understand how the learner’s experience plays out in our learning ecosystem?

You have limited resources and need to create from scratch, and you’re under time constraints to deliver targeted learning programs. What do you do? You have to leave the glitter aside and create what you can with what you have. When you are in the trenches of a startup, you have to constantly iterate on learning and training solutions. There is rarely a final learning product, more like an MVP, most viable product. MVP is the quickest way possible to start the learning process. 

Yes, the interest in learning games has exploded, along with the interest in gamification. Many practitioners want to create digital game play experiences as opposed to “Click NEXT to continue” eLearning. But when you get started in digital, how do you do it? How “game-y” does something need to be to produce solid learner engagement while maintaining the integrity of the learning experience? What best practices should you follow, and what pitfalls should you avoid? How is the design process the same? How is it different?

People live in a visual world and are, therefore, conditioned to perceive quality based largely on its visual design. Your digital badge is your visible representation displayed in digital backpacks and ePortfolios. You have been tasked with creating the badge artwork. But you are not a designer and your budget does not support hiring one—so what do you do?

eLearning and instructional designers are often asked to turn long blocks of content into a product that is effective and engaging. On top of that, everyone wants a product that is mobile-ready and adaptive. How can designers with limited skills in programs like After Effects or Blender and limited coding skills create products that fit the content-focused needs of our clients?

As the eLearning industry continues to shift towards a more software-like and code-intensive development model, it’s important for learning developers to understand the process of software development. An understanding of the vocabulary, process, and difficulties of writing code is important to better communicate with software developers and others who are involved in the process of writing complex eLearning.

Many companies are interested in seeing how mobile learning can enhance and supplement current learning practices.