Camtasia is an all-in-one tool that you can use for screencasts, video, and even user interaction. It has many powerful features and a few that could greatly improve the engagement level of your eLearning production. Camtasia “power users” can create visually stunning courses with very efficient workflow.

Microlearning videos under one minute in length require rapid storyboarding and predefined video content structures. As the length of the video decreases, so does the optimal format of the video. Leaving out too many details will have a negative effect on your learning strategy. Every second counts for your learner!

Your access to learning-related data has grown dramatically over recent years. But just because you have a large volume of data doesn’t mean it necessarily provides value. While tools like the xAPI make it increasingly easy to acquire data about learners’ activities, this information provides little benefit if you don’t know how to design to acquire meaningful data, interpret that data, or improve your learning design based on what you’ve discovered.

Massive open online courses (MOOCs) continue to be both big news and big business, but one aspect that is less often discussed is the behind-the-scenes perspective. Building a greater understanding of the design considerations, facilitation techniques, and data interpretation from MOOCs can give you valuable inspiration for designing and facilitating any people development activities—regardless of whether or not you’re building MOOCs.

On time. Within budget. What they need (even if that changes!). These are moving targets, and yet you’re expected to deliver all three. The software development industry is embracing agile methods to address these issues, and there is much that the eLearning development world can learn from it. Agile provides a framework for adapting to change as it happens and working with the client to deliver content that learners need most.

For a remote workforce such as flight attendants, who travel all over the country, eLearning is effective, necessary, and widely enjoyed. However, there are no computers on the airplane, which serves as their office. Due to the lifestyle of the work group, many do not have computers at home; this leads to a large percentage’s trying to complete non-mobile courses on their tablets or smartphones, causing a poor user experience.

For instructional designers and facilitators, the challenge is to create learning materials that reach and affect audiences positively and do not elicit feelings of exclusion or discrimination. However, you’re human, and every human has hidden or unconscious biases that impact behaviors and thoughts. This can lead to unintentional missteps in design and delivery. As learning becomes more story-driven, you need to be sensitive to how you present characters, including race, gender, gender identity, and organizational roles.

Learner-driven, adaptive, engaging, future-proof, innovative, and business-aligned—you need to deliver all this and more! Constructing a strategy to match, though, is tough, pushing L&D to redefine its role in the business. However, by applying a performance lens to learning, you can engage everyone from the board to new starters, construct a holistic strategy, and put learning at the heart of the workflow.

How do eLearning developers ensure that trainings are well designed graphically? There are many resources out there for web design standards, such as the Nielsen Norman Group and the World Wide Web Consortium, but what about eLearning design? Sure, there are plenty of resources for free templates and character packs, but that doesn’t really help developers learn how to properly design online training.

Learners are distracted with daily competing priorities and struggle to retain information presented through digital learning. Ebbinghaus’ forgetting curve shows that retention rates are abysmal. Educators and instructional designers are pressed for time and resources to deliver learning that maximizes retention and desired outcomes.

Today, 360-degree video is becoming a part of consumers’ lives on social media and through entertainment. However, to be effective for learning, it needs to be interactive, relevant, and trackable. Achieve these, and you can give learners the ability to explore a space and discover its secrets (or risks). As video shifts, learning professionals need to be ready to make the most of the changes.

While there are many practices and models grounded in research that people use to create eLearning, there are also a lot of common statements about the field that may or may not be based in fact. Do learners really remember 50 percent of what they hear? Does L&D need to treat generations differently? Do learning styles matter? While these ideas are widespread, are they actually true?

Learners, particularly online learners, often suffer from illusions of competence in learning, procrastinate, and fail at breaking down content into smaller chunks to build solid expertise. Each can lead to higher rates of frustration and, ultimately, reduce success.

The challenge with the majority of learning that goes on in organizations is that it is quickly forgotten. Modern neuroscience tells us that in an increasingly complex digital world, with so much competing for our attention, a majority of what we learn in organizational training is forgotten within days. With the amount of time, money, and energy spent on developing these learning experiences, it is critical that organizations find ways to maximize their investment by ensuring learners retain the information they are given.