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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The Business of Instructional Design: Career Tips for Thinking Beyond the Storyboard
What’s the difference between an instructional designer (ID) and a lead or senior instructional designer? It’s more than simply having more knowledge of design principles and learning theory! The critical factors are all about business. Here are some tips on developing these business skills, specifically as they pertain to instructional design.
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Nuts and Bolts: Building Community
The rise of social media and the accompanying interest in social learning is generating a lot of talk about community building. Many people voice similar concerns in these conversations, and at the same time there are many things that never come up as topics for discussion. Here are some suggestions for keeping the never-heard items from killing a community.
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The Elusive ROI for Learning Through Technology
Few would dispute the convenience, low cost, and high efficiency of eLearning. However, dozens of ROI studies show the results, in terms of transfer to the job and impact on business results, are usually less than facilitator-led versions. It does not have to be this way. Here is an analysis of the reasons, and some recommendations that will make a difference in your real-world results.
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Gamification, Game-based Learning, Serious Games: Any Difference?
Sooner or later, every learning and development or training department will come to a decision point about gamification. There will inevitably be discussions and disagreements about the details! This article provides some best practices in a helpful framework that may be very useful as you begin.
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eLearning Guild Research: Karl Kapp on Using Stories
Research shows that stories are extremely powerful tools for learning. That’s because our brain has a natural ability to remember facts told in a story. The implications of using stories to support learning are described in the Guild’s new Big Answers report, Using Stories for Learning: Answers to Five Key Questions, by Karl Kapp. This article explains why you need to read the report.
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Corporate Executives and the New Secret Weapon: Learning Data
Identifying the effect of transfer of knowledge to the job and on operational and financial results has long been a challenge for training managers who wish to demonstrate to executives the value of training, even though this has always been possible. Here is a look at how retrieval practice, which is grounded in research, supports the needed link.
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Getting the Most Out of Your Capital Investments
With a multitude of tools, technologies, platforms, and systems on the market, learning executives face a dizzying array of options to support formal and informal learning and performance. Building a cohesive strategy that spans multiple technologies is a serious undertaking, fraught with challenges. What’s a leader to do? Discover a learning ecosystem mindset that integrates them all.
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Marc My Words: Training Hubris
Training activity that doesn’t produce business value is primarily wasted. Here is the story of a training organization that believed it was creating value, but saw it in terms of its own desires, rather than servicing and supporting the key needs of the business, as defined by the business. Scary stuff. Don’t try this at home.
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Avant-garde! Is Your eLearning Video Ahead of the Crowd?
Can we really have avant-garde video in eLearning? If by avant-garde you mean innovative, you bet we can … and with good reason—to challenge and to engage learners. Here’s a quick look at making video that is outside the box, yet achieves the goal of supporting learning.
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Five Ways to Avoid Script Development Pitfalls
A video script is more than narration; it also sets the style and direction for the entire presentation and orchestrates the other elements of the production. Here are five ways to avoid potential pitfalls that could otherwise prove hazardous to your production!