About Guild Articles
Find practical, solution-oriented information—on design, development, management, technology, and executive matters—that you can use to make well-informed business decisions to ensure your organization’s success with learning.
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Marc My Words: Selling Performance Support
Selling performance support comes with unique challenges. Whether you are just getting started or have some performance-support experience under your belt, here are ten approaches to employ when planning to sell a performance-support project.
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Challenging the Infinite Monkey Theorem: Mobile Performance Support
We’ve been facing a problem with mobile. We’ve been concentrating on delivery of training rather than support of performance. Here’s a suggestion to stop this cycle by introducing strategies that focus on using performance tools with mobile devices rather than delivering training through mobile devices.
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Book Review: Leaving ADDIE for SAM Field Guide, by Richard Sites and Angel Green
Written as a follow-up to Michael Allen’s 2012 bestseller Leaving ADDIE for SAM, the recently released Leaving ADDIE for SAM Field Guide, by Richard Sites and Angel Green, is chock-full of checklists, worksheets, templates, and tools. The Field Guide is sure to become a go-to reference as you make the most of the Successive Approximation Model (SAM) in your organization.
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Nuts and Bolts: Reflective Practice
Professional development—our own, personal, professional development—is one of the most important things we can invest in. This isn’t a matter of paying money, necessarily, but of paying time and attention on a regular, even daily, basis to consciously becoming better at what you do. How? Reflective practice. Reading this column could be the best thing you do for yourself today.
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Best Practices: Get Learners and Stakeholders to Adopt New eLearning Technology
New eLearning implementations and their supporting technologies, from learning management systems and learning record stores to mobile devices, social media, and performance support, introduce change in organizational life. End user and stakeholder resistance to change can defeat even the “perfect” system. Here are five key practices to gain the support needed for success.
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Toolkit: ApprenNet—the Missing Link
The near-universal availability of mobile devices capable of recording and sharing video is creating some excellent opportunities to reach learners no matter where they are, to engage them with the instructor and each other, and to create libraries of crowd-sourced problem solutions. Here is a review of a social eLearning platform that is among the first to leverage these possibilities.
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Report Card: Gamification in Learning (What Works?)
Gamification applied to learning is getting a lot of attention from designers, but are there any proven best practices? Here are seven “lessons learned” from millions of discrete interactions within gamified learning interactions. The big lesson: Gamification more completely engages learners. But you also need to pay attention to detail.
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Book Review: Seven Attributes of Highly Effective Development Vendors, by William West
In his book Seven Attributes of Highly Effective Development Vendors, William West draws on more than two decades of experience working with many of the world’s most admired companies from the perspectives of both employee and external-development partner. West’s attributes can help guide those responsible for hiring vendors … and vendors themselves!
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Mobile, Tablet, and Laptop: Serving Your Content with Web-service Architecture
Mobile devices often have much less on-board storage than laptop and notebook computers, and mobile apps often need to interact with real-time data from online sources. These facts often apply to eLearning as well as business apps. Here’s how to take advantage of real-time data to improve your eLearning designs!
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Better eLearning: Agile, LLAMA, and Lean
Agile project management and lean manufacturing influence many activities today. LLAMA (lot like agile methods approach) applies those two processes and instructional-design best practices to deliver effective eLearning. At the Learning Solutions 2014 Conference, we crowd-sourced ways to reduce waste in instructional design, and we present the results of that work here.