Communities of practice (CoPs) have become a hot topic in the past few years. They are an excellent tool for developing skills, sharing tacit knowledge, and shoring up retention of high-performing staff. But they differ from teams and other types of groups in many ways. Understanding what CoPs are and how they work—rather than just looking at how to create and manage them—is critical to supporting their success.

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 the trainer, instructional designer, coordinator, project manager, and business analyst for your organization, all in one? Are you constantly moving from one role to the next while feeling overwhelmed by endless training projects? As a one-person training team, it’s common to feel challenged by constant time management, project intake and prioritization, development, delivery, and analysis you have to do on a regular basis. How do you reclaim control from this chaos?

Good courseware will use multiple elements such as video, audio, interaction, and good old-fashioned reading. You struggle to balance all of it until it’s a finely harmonized symphony of information, waiting for a student to take it all in. But are any of those activities or videos you’ve worked on actually helping anyone learn? How can you show the relationship between the activities and performance?

Many have said that 2016 is the year of virtual reality (VR), as Facebook (Oculus Rift), Sony, Samsung, and HTC, to name a few, are launching consumer products. But how can it be used for learning, especially in a corporate environment? Is VR all hype, or are there sound pedagogical principles behind it?

Learning and performance ecosystems represent a new way of thinking about L&D. Many agree with this approach in concept. But where are the examples? This session showcases a real-life learning and performance ecosystem solution.

Dairy Queen, like many organizations, experiences challenges in knowledge retention following formal training. Dairy Queen needed a strategy that would equip learners with tools and resources to help boost learning retention of role-specific knowledge and skills throughout all learning stages. What Dairy Queen required was a rapid development process to create role-based learning tools to remedy these challenges and address real-time training needs of thousands of Dairy Queen franchisee employees.

Many companies have legacy content that is text-heavy, hard to navigate, impossible to control once out “in the wild,” and ultimately not very effective. Connecting those static documents within a larger training pathway, and keeping that content up to date, can be very difficult. Additionally, getting information about who might be using that content, or how it is being used, is pretty much impossible. Sound familiar?

The corporate eLearning development world may not always seem creative from the outside, but successful eLearning teams use creativity in every project they design and develop. But how, specifically, can this skill contribute to successful eLearning? What kinds of creativity should be part of your eLearning workflow? What benefits does creativity provide to your development process? How can you explain to your stakeholders that increased creativity contributes to business-focused learning objectives?

Gamification is a multibillion-dollar business that has touched a wide variety of fields, but especially learning and development. At the same time, according to research from Gartner, approximately 80 percent of gamification projects fail. So how can you use gamification in a way that’s actually successful? You need to think like game designers and go beyond the buzzwords and definitions.

Designers, developers, trainers, instructors, content experts, and others too often design and build instruction in ways that interfere with how adults learn. The result is less-than-optimal learning that can lead to a chain reaction of disengagement in learning materials and limited, if any, performance improvement.

MOOCs are growing in use in public and private sectors, taking on different forms and providing diverse experiences. The approaches are relatively new, and there is still much to learn. Have you ever wondered whether your organization could benefit from lessons learned designing and facilitating a massive open online course (MOOC)? The answer is: Yes, it can. The data and experiences obtained from a course of thousands can be applied in many different ways.

A large variety of eLearning authoring tools are on the market, and it can be difficult to determine which tools will meet your needs. Two of the most widely used are Adobe Captivate and Articulate Storyline. eLearning designers and managers are challenged with determining which tool will fit their needs today and in the future as the demands for learning content change.

Video is eating the Internet. People are consuming and creating more of it than ever, and 64 percent of consumers identify as binge watchers. But these trends don’t just apply to entertainment content—they’re having a huge impact on learning, and learners’ expectations, too.