Today’s eLearning developers have amazing desktop and cloud-based solutions to choose from. However, deciding which tool will best suit an organization’s learning and development needs, both today and in the future, can be an overwhelming challenge. There are a number of factors that you need to explore and understand before you can make a proper authoring-tool purchase decision.

Getting self-directed learners to jump into their LMS and click through the curriculum can be as simple as individual requirements and goals. But people are more effective learners when they are engaged and eager to interact with the content. While we have struggled with this in the training world, the marketing world has had great success in this area.

To meet the real needs of an organization’s learning and performance strategy, learning programs have to be designed appropriately. On principle, this means acquiring performance objectives, mapping to meaningful practice, presenting models that guide application, supporting with reasonable examples, and making the experience engaging. In practice, you have subject matter experts who don’t have access to what they do, tools that are aligned with knowledge presentation, pre-existing processes and practices that are hard to change, stakeholders who mistake sizzle for steak, and limits on schedule and budget.

Gamification is one of the hottest buzzwords in the learning world, yet its true benefits are not yet proven or fully understood. We need stories about what works and what doesn’t to enable us to grasp and harness the power and possibilities of this shiny new toy. Instructional designers, trainers, consultants, and others need to know how gaming can work alongside or integrated with both better-known and emerging tools.

It’s hard enough to get learners to engage with the content of your eLearning course. This issue is compounded even further when learners can’t figure out how to use the course in the first place. All too often, new eLearning designers put their focus solely into designing the learning content, while at the same time ignoring the interface it’s encapsulated in. This leads to confusion on the part of the learner and disrupts the learning process.

Learners are increasingly taking control of their learning. As a result, the role of the learning department is changing from steering to facilitating. The trends affecting this change are already visible, however many learning professionals do not know how what they mean or how to respond to them. Even if they recognize the environment changing around them, they do not know what to do or how to adapt. These changes could ultimately signal the end of the learning department staple—the LMS.

Designing for face-to-face delivery is hard enough. How do you transfer those skills to the virtual- and blended-delivery environments? The shift can be daunting because instructional designers don’t have as much experience in virtual deliveries as participants do. Couple that with the fact that when a design falls apart, the participants usually know about it before the facilitator does so spending time on a tight design is critical up front. Plus, designing in the wrong way can be expensive when it comes to programming and technology adoption costs.

Mobile design and development is a new discipline for many in the learning industry. A user-centric design-thinking approach is necessary for positive results. However, this type of approach is counter to how most of us have approached instructional design and we must understand it if we are to truly address the mobile learner’s needs.

Developing content that is meaningful and accessible in a world of multiple devices and varied platforms is a huge challenge for today’s instructional designer. Content developers have to first consider the context in which the training is being consumed, and then try to navigate the devices that might access that training today and in the future. Responsive training design is being heralded as a panacea for this training delivery dilemma, but is it enough?

The volume of content in most organizations is getting to a point where manually curating content for various audiences is becoming overwhelming. Sifting through thousands of eLearning packages for relevance to a certain topic, role, or location can be a very time consuming task. The delivery may change, the style of content may change, the packaging and location of content may change, but the volume will continually expand making finding relevant content increasingly difficult for our audiences.

Building eLearning isn’t just about design and development. Each eLearning course or module you develop is essentially a project. Project management can be a daunting task, from goal definition to the post-mortem review. However, proper management of eLearning projects can have more of an impact on success than even design and development.

Our current training paradigm does an admirable job of transferring knowledge, but no matter how well we accomplish this transfer, knowledge retention works against us when what we really need is flawless performance at the point of work. In short, our training paradigm was never intended to support performers at the point of work. It never was, and it never will be. It’s time for a little disruption!

Training demands are greater that any one central training department can meet. Departments are always making their own training despite lacking the skills or tools to make it truly effective. Even if subject-matter experts want to partner with a full instructional-design project team, they rarely have the time to do so. And yet despite these challenges, end users still require and deserve a high level of quality in their training programs.

There are a number of misunderstandings and misconceptions about the Experience API (xAPI). Many learning departments and organizations aren’t quite sure what the benefits are of xAPI and how to integrate it into their learning solutions. In a time when mobile technologies and informal workplace environments are on the rise, designing comprehensive learning programs to take advantage of these devices and environments can be daunting without the right technology to tie it all together, one that will help improve learning overall.

It’s all too easy to create boring eLearning with any authoring tool, including Adobe Captivate. What we need to engage learners is to make them interact with the content, not just watch and listen. Interaction does not mean just hitting next, back, and menu, nor does it mean just pressing a glossary button or a mute button. It means pulling the learner into the content and having interactivity involve them at the level of doing, not just seeing.

Courses that meet the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) accessibility requirements are in high demand. However, many instructional designers lack the understanding of what 508 compliance really means, and the competency to effectively develop compliant courses.