Poor leadership is a significant drain on organizations, with some estimates claiming it costs the US economy billion of dollars a year. That’s why leadership development remains a top priority for many companies. But while organizations want to invest in this training, in many cases the training they offer doesn’t fully meet the needs of the leaders taking it. So where should you look for inspiration on how to make your leadership development more effective? Games!

Video production and delivery have evolved quickly over the past few years. Unfortunately, pre-2010-era video knowledge often dominates how people consider using video for learning, including their understanding of video files and codecs, streaming specifications and file sizes, video production techniques and styles, and even the role of video in training media. Moreover, these misconceptions actually keep teams from launching the video production processes they’d love to be working on.

In a world of fragmented content consumption and constant distraction, how do you not only grab your audience’s attention but also get them to care about your content? One way is to create an emotional connection by putting them in the driver’s seat of the experience. Giving your audience choice both attracts their attention and creates emotional investment, allowing the message you share to go deeper and actually change behavior.

You know that taking online courses isn’t the only way to learn. You want to invent new learning formats and experiences that better meet your audience’s needs. However, in many cases you need to include tracking, and the types of learning trackable by traditional learning management systems are limited. The Experience API (xAPI) specification is flexible enough to track a wide range of learning experiences, but it’s a new technology, and barriers to adoption still exist. How do you bridge this gap?

How do you develop a generation of learners who may have spent more time with video games than in school? How do you leverage the explosion of screens and devices to change behavior among all learners? How do you use the recent growth in affordable virtual reality devices to bring immersion, engagement, and presence to new levels? This is the reality in which you design training. So how do you use these media experiences as inspiration for where L&D should go in the future?

When a new director of diversity and inclusion reviewed the courses offered at Johns Hopkins Medicine International, the eLearning development team was surprised to find out just how much work its content needed in order to be current and inclusive. Staff had thought they were practicing diversity and inclusion at a high level, but this review showed that they were way off the mark. Both this review and feedback from newer members of the team helped the eLearning development team realize the nuances to incorporating diversity and challenged them to do better.

Admit it: You have a love/hate relationship with stock photography websites. Sure, you love how using stock images can inspire your creativity, but you also hate how hard it is to find ones that look genuine and aren’t exaggerated. eLearning developers rely heavily on stock-image-based designs for building workplace eLearning. And it’s not just a problem of finding stock images full of people with the right poses or expressions. The bigger challenge is that the images you find often just don’t feel authentic.

Implementing an effective mobile user experience is challenging. How do you deliver useful information at the time of need without being disruptive to the employee’s workflow? How do you integrate the content effectively within the context of the user’s task at hand? How do you leverage the available technology to reach the target audience? How can you create a mobile app that is “sticky”?

Using workplace stories to engage learners and enhance your content is a hot topic in learning and development. But when you’re getting started with storytelling as an instructional design technique, you’ll likely have a lot of questions about where to find effective stories for this purpose and how to make sure they not only entertain but also foster learning at the same time. You’ll also want to know how best to integrate storytelling techniques in the tools you already use.

You’re excited about the promise of an xAPI-enabled world, but you currently have a learning management system and a host of SCORM-based courses that you can’t just get rid of. Early on, it can be difficult to see how you can stay flexible and manage this transition over time. But what if you could get the most out of both an LMS and an LRS (learning record store) at the same time that you move to your next-generation learning and performance infrastructure?

When you’re developing strategies to engage your learners, you need to keep your audience and their anticipated learning environment top of mind. But with more and more people shifting when and how they want to access training content, it’s more important than ever to make sure your design strategies reflect this. Your success in reaching the modern learner will depend on understanding how these shifts should influence your technology selection, implementation strategy, and design approach.

Accessibility is about more than just doing the bare minimum for compliance. It’s about the difference you can make when you ensure everyone has equal access to what you’ve designed. While this intent is good, in the real world, actually making all your content accessible can seem like a daunting task. But it doesn’t have to be.

Selecting authoring tools wisely is important! Choosing the right tools will set you up for success, and choosing the wrong tools can lead to disastrous results. Knowing your project’s requirements and the capabilities of the tools help ensure you select the best tools to get the job done. 

Critical thinking is an incredibly valuable skill in today’s workplace. In fact, the US Department of Labor proclaimed that it’s the raw material of workplace success. But while organizations value this skill, they don’t always systematically seek out and support it. Many employers actually say their employees struggle with critical thinking skills, and most want to provide more development opportunities in this area. How can the L&D field address this gap and help amp up people’s ability to think critically?