There’s a growing demand from organizations to create courses that work on both mobile and desktop platforms. The currently available tools have a hard time doing this, and many times you must create multiple courses for each type of screen. In addition, content only resizes to fit these various screens; it doesn’t truly change based on each device.

The availability of (and demand for) data around learning has grown dramatically. Tools like the Experience API (xAPI) make it increasingly easy to acquire data about learner’s activities, but this will provide little benefit to instructional designers or learners if we do not design to acquire meaningful data, know how to interpret that data, or know how to improve our learning design based on that data.

Games and gamification are the latest fads, but getting learners to play games only exposes them to learning content and develops first-level reflexes. This risks confining learning to superficial understanding of the subject matter. We need games to solidify what the trainee has learned, but to do that we must redefine the responsibilities and the role of trainers.

With the successful rollout of the Experience API (xAPI) the foundation for a new SCORM standard has been laid. By itself, xAPI is not a replacement for SCORM. Instead, xAPI defines communication between a learning experience and the learning record store, or LRS. While most of us agree that the majority of learning occurs outside the LMS, there is still some formal eLearning that will be maintained in the LMS.

Have you ever reached a slide in an eLearning course where you were unsure what to do, or where to click? If so, you were the victim of bad navigation design—a common eLearning problem. One of the most challenging aspects of eLearning development can be designing clear and cohesive navigation that is easy for learners to follow, and that doesn’t lead to dead-ends.

Preconceptions of eLearning, lack of instructional design insight within organizations, disjointed learning ecosystems, and the perceived size of the task in front of them mean organizations have lacked the confidence to take their more complex programs into the online domain. However, online learning is opening the doors to more flexible, sustained, and comprehensive support for learners than ever before.

In their clinical training, physicians and other clinicians are not learning the skills they need to lead their organizations through the rapid changes happening in health care. It has become more and more difficult to pull clinicians away from patient care to teach them core leadership skills. As a result, health care organizations are struggling to provide these critical skills with shrinking time and resources.

There’s a great deal of buzz in our industry about HTML5. Chances are that the development tool you’re using to create eLearning can output to HTML5, but most instructional designers are not sure why that feature is important. HTML5 is also a subject that, for many, is clouded in confusion, with learning professionals often unable to translate the technical discussion into understanding of what the technology makes possible.

Remembering is a major challenge for all of us. Estimates range from zero to 90 percent on the amount of forgetting that occurs within days after training occurs. At times, this matters little because the focus is on compliance rather than actual performance. However, do learning professionals need to take a different approach in those instances when remembering really matters?

“I need the content to work on a phone and a tablet as well as on a desktop.” This is a request we’re hearing more and more each day. In the new era of multi-device delivery, instruction designers struggle to find the one design to rule them all. How can you ensure solid instructional design across all those devices if your aim is to only build one course?

Like many organizations in today’s increasingly global marketplace, the Asia Pacific Region of World Bank Group has a workforce in 20 countries. The regional team has the daunting task of training global staff in an efficient manner. Since World Bank knowledge workers are also mobile and tech savvy, moving training to a virtual classroom that can be accessed on a laptop or mobile device was a logical solution.

Training for sales professionals at global pharmaceutical firm is robust, thorough, and frequent. However, the training curriculum of its marketing staff, who were being asked to be its commercial leaders, creating and delivering on business objectives and strategies as well as leading salespeople, was almost non-existent. Fixing this multi-layered challenge wouldn’t be as simple as implementing new training for marketers. Because so little training had existed previously, the company needed to change its culture to take its marketers’ attitudes from “why training?” to “I want more training!”

I’ve often heard managers tell me that they have a course they like that meets their requirements, but it isn’t what they wanted or envisioned. I find myself asking “If it is what you asked for, but not what you wanted, why didn’t you ask for what you wanted?” This problem exists in many forms. The results can range from a disappointed client to the world losing the next great idea, all because we don’t always know how to ask for what we really want in our products.

We have all experienced huge courses, documents, and texts that are barely manageable by the instructional designer. In fact, much of how we design courses and even our documents makes it impossible for an employee to find the one piece of information they need at the time they need it. Since content is so dense, it makes finding meaningful information difficult, and it makes tracking anything useful in it even more difficult.

Rapid instructional development tools provide us with the ability to add narration and text-to-speech to eLearning courses, but many instructional designers aren’t using the audio medium to its full potential. Bringing quality audio design together with engaging stories can transform a click-and-read presentation into an immersive experience.

In today’s training departments, a learning management system is a usually a necessary technology for organizations that utilize eLearning. However, these systems can be expensive, especially for organizations with minimal budgets. Finding low cost learning management system options that still provide the needed features for organizational learning can be a challenge.