Learning professionals have a number of difficult goals to achieve relative to the creation and management of online learning. We need to ensure consistent quality, visual identity, and education outcomes of effective learning objects that are reusable between programs and delivery methods. As many challenges as we face, sometimes the solution itself presents its own new set of issues. In the case of the Johns Hopkins School of Nursing, massive open online courses (MOOCs) were both a challenge and a solution.

As learning and development professionals, we often spend a significant amount of our time trying to put together the pieces of a giant organizational puzzle so we can do our jobs. We are, in many ways, the middlemen between those who know and those who need to learn. L&D must reposition itself away from its current role as an information conveyor and leverage its unique skills to help people find and use information to improve their performance.

Learning professionals are increasingly losing a battle against short attention spans and increased competition for learners’ attention. We need to adapt our approaches to accommodate the changing needs and desires of our audiences that want training in highly visually formats, and in short doses.

Your course looks fantastic, but how does it sound? Learning is most effective when it takes advantage of both audio and visual pathways into the brain. Adding quality voiceovers to your eLearning program can greatly enhance knowledge transfer. But hiring professional voiceover talent can be expensive, and subject-matter experts may not always be available. That leaves just one person: you!

Narrating our work—also known in some circles as “working out loud”—is getting a lot of attention lately as it offers great potential for connecting talent pools and capturing tacit knowledge, reducing rework and duplication of effort and maybe even meetings. While there is a lot of discussion around the value showing your work provides in the context of learning, there’s less clarity around how showing your work provides value to a business or organization.

Everyone’s talking about Big Data, but learning systems already generate piles of data and it’s a mess. How can we move on to a more in-depth analysis of learner behavior if we can’t even straighten out the basics? Our technicians roll their eyes and complain about poor data quality in the upstream feeds. The report designers complain that the stakeholders keep changing their requirements, and our teams are burning precious hours managing unwieldy Excel spreadsheets. We don’t need a new technology. We need a new approach.

Learning has been and always will be social. However, in a world of increasing use of eLearning and mobile-learning courses, we run the risk of coming full circle back to stale, unengaging “click-here”-based learning. People naturally collect in communities of practice outside of work (Facebook, Google+, reddit, Tumblr, etc.) to share and collaborate. How do we create an ecosystem of learning that engages learners both within and outside our eLearning content?

Organizations often need to communicate critical knowledge and motivate learners of varying proficiency to achieve specific performance levels. This commonly requires delivering a range of content across disciplines. It can be challenging to design impactful learning that goes beyond transmitting information that results in consistent performance.  

Many organizations have significant investments in SharePoint. If you are already using SharePoint as a corporate intranet portal, it makes sense to consider an LMS with strong integration points with SharePoint. CorVel has a well-developed intranet portal in SharePoint and had previously implemented a home-grown LMS. However, after a few years, some additional requirements led the company to evaluate the LMS market for SharePoint.

Salespeople make up 70 to 80 percent of Hilti’s 21,000 team members worldwide. Those employees only make money if they are closing sales. Training is an important support tool for salespeople, but it is often looked at as an interruption of the sales process by both the salespeople and organizational management. Trainers needed to find a way to motivate salespeople to complete training.

Technology is constantly evolving and changing the ways we live, work, and learn. The ways we approach learning are very different than they were even a decade ago. In order to keep our practices current, we must stay ahead of this technological evolution—and that starts with getting the most out of today’s technology.

When learners are geographically dispersed, and the training is completed, it is difficult to know if the skills were transferred back on the job. In addition, it is difficult to observe the learner performing a new task, and to provide feedback for improvement and/or reinforcement of what was done well. We need to find ways to use technology to enable us to effectively evaluate learners’ ability to apply what they learn in training.

The Experience API is still an emerging technology. While the specification has matured over the last few years, most organizations approach xAPI conversation with more questions than answers.

Complex online learning platforms usually mean complex visual styles. Maybe your platform has different skins for different groups of learners. Or maybe the styles change depending on the learning context, e.g., in a practice exercise versus a learning evaluation. All that visual complexity transfers to complex, often messy, stylesheet code.

Scenario-based eLearning is a proven effective method for learning using complex real-life situations. All too often, designers and developers shy away from this effective method because it seems too complex, expensive, and time-consuming. Because of improvements to authoring tools this is no longer the case.

The use of learning videos has been widely employed for many years and for good reason. Video-based learning can be more engaging and has been proven to increase learner retention. It is fast becoming an essential learning tool. Advancements in technology have triggered an explosion of innovation in the usage of video for learning. As always, with change comes challenges.

Instructional designers are seeking more than just knowledge retention from learners; we are seeking positive, quantifiable, and repeatable changes in behavior—the gold standard of eLearning results in the business world. However, these behavior changes are challenging to facilitate, and even more challenging to track.

Maybe you’ve heard some of the following in your workplace learning discussions about mobile: Mobile learning just means HTML5, right? Mobile really isn’t that important to me because I’m an instructional designer. I let the developers worry about that part. I have XYZ rapid development tool and it works with mobile devices, so I feel pretty good about mobile. If any of these comments sound familiar, then this session is for you.

At the request of the Quebec Ministry, innovative technology was developed to support a first-of-its-kind distance learning program launched in Quebec to encourage potential immigrants to perfect their knowledge of the French language prior to arriving in Quebec. This was an important goal to help accelerate immigrants’ access to the job market as well as facilitate their integration into their new home.

There was a time, not that long ago, where the lowly training team, in tough times, was the first to go. Training was the expendable critter scurrying through the business wilderness picking up resource scraps and being kicked around by larger apex predators. Over time we evolved into learning and development moving up the corporate food chain. Have we now reached an evolutionary dead end? Do we need to become a different species to move up any further?

Social learning has been the “next big thing” for years now, yet discussions often still focus on introducing the tools and simple uses for them. It’s time for learning professionals to go beyond the basics and focus on advanced techniques for using social tools and networks for learning.

Let’s face it: A lot of eLearning programs are just plain ugly. From the email invitations marketing, graphics and tweets, to the blog posts, presentations, handouts, and more, most learning experiences are built without focusing enough attention on the value visuals play in creating quality digital learning experiences.

The Internet is full of compelling images, video, and sound, but most learning designers and developers struggle with understanding what content they are allowed to use, and which content is limited based on copyrights. There is a continuing struggle to quickly develop content while balancing speed with protecting our own work, respecting the work of others, and using copyrighted works fairly.

The heart of many eLearning solutions is a video presentation. A recorded lecture, voiceover PowerPoint, or training video transfers information in a scalable, anytime, anywhere manner. They are also often passive, isolating, and dull. Ruth’s Chris Steakhouses have over 500 hosts working in almost a hundred restaurants around the world. How do you teach such a disbursed group the meaning of hospitality that makes the Ruth’s Chris experience unique? Training videos were not working.

eLearning has had a good run. It will always have a home in our organizations, but change is in the air. New learners, new social technologies, declining resources, the rise of informal learning, and innovations in learning design are all converging to change how we must think about using technology for learning.

MOOCs have become a popular buzz word in the industry over the past couple of years. While interest in MOOCs continues to increase, our understanding of what MOOCs are and where they can best be applied to help organizations and individuals learn has not kept pace.

If you find running online sessions difficult, and you and your learners waste time setting up activities and solving technical problems, you’re not alone. Even the most experienced online presenters can struggle to manage the software and deliver a clear message at the same time. An online session producer can provide the structure and support that allow presenters to stay focused on content and keep learners engaged.

A sea change in how children in K-12 learn is underway. Using a variety of strategies and technology, teachers are engaging students to a degree not seen in years, including flipped classrooms, genius hour, differentiated instruction, and project-based learning. While these methods may have academic origins, they have a place in corporate learning, too.

The Experience API (xAPI) has become a very popular topic in our industry. It seems everywhere you look someone is talking about it and how it will change the way we look at learning. And it may well do that. But is the xAPI right for you and your organization? Is now the right time for the xAPI?

Learning how to do full HTML5 and JavaScript programming can be a daunting task unless you’re able to spend hours learning how to do all the programming by hand. Adobe Edge Animate is like Flash for HTML5. Edge Animate allows you to quickly build custom learning interactions with more control than any standard eLearning tool, but can still be imported into most eLearning authoring tools or wrapped inside of a PhoneGap mobile project.

Visual design is one of the most important elements of effective eLearning. Unfortunately, it is also often the first element to get pushed aside when project deadlines loom and budgets evaporate. Instructional designers need to apply a wide array of resources and techniques in order to maintain visual-design quality in their eLearning programs.