Successive approximation, rapid prototyping, agile methods—they all call for iterative development. With each iteration you take a product out to the learners and gather new input into your designs. Does this completely mess with everything we’ve learned about the ADDIE model? How do you know when to stop iterating? How do you convince your project sponsors to go along? Is this just an excuse for releasing shoddy work?

Engaging learners online in an authentic way presents challenges for instructors and designers trying to create effective and pedagogically sound courses. An ideal educational experience happens when students encounter a cognitive presence, a social presence, and a teaching presence. Such an experience can also be grounded within the community of inquiry model and personal learning environment.

Organizational storytelling can be a powerful learning approach, but it suffers from many obstacles. Storytellers often lack skill in developing a cohesive narrative and delivery. Often the relatability of the narrative misses the mark. Content, relevancy, and usefulness should always be paramount and the current quality of many training-related videos is mediocre at best

Some developers pay instructional design (ID) no attention at all. Some have never heard of it, and do not see any reason to get to know it. You can see instructional design being criticized in blogs, Twitter streams, and other areas. It’s too slow. It’s too wordy. It’s not techie enough. It’s not appreciated by customers or clients. What you don’t find are alternatives or even a shared definition. If you ask 100 instructional designers for a definition, you won’t get just one definition, you’ll get many—or shrugged shoulders. Shouldn’t we try to establish a shared, contemporary perspective on it before we consign it to the scrapheap of history?

Using video for eLearning is here to stay. But it’s almost impossible to answer fundamental questions about whether or not your training video is reaching its goals. In many cases, you don’t even know if the viewer is still in the same room after they’ve clicked play.

With the financial advantages of big data gaining global attention, C-level managers and senior business leaders are beginning to demand better reporting and improved accountability across all organizational divisions. While the goal of measuring learning seems unreachable for most in the training division, the reality is that these technological advancements mean that disruption in the training industry is inevitable. These innovations will enable unprecedented reporting of training effectiveness, business impact, and return on training investment.

The process of getting newly hired salespeople trained and actively selling products is a key concern for most businesses. Organizations typically throw new hires into a classroom for a week or two, and then send them on their way with a couple of three-ring binders and with little or no follow-up. Grainger was seeking faster and more innovative ways to make its new hires successful while recognizing that people learn better over time.

There is an increasing demand for accessibility in learning content, yet many instructional designers are unsure if they are doing a good job of meeting the needs of learners with disabilities. There is a need for instructional designers to discover what they can do to accommodate and enhance content for users of all abilities.

How can you make computer application training interesting and effective for your learners? Software simulations can be an effective way to train employees on new applications. However, creating complex simulations is expensive and time consuming. Simplistic simulations are often ineffective, resulting in boring eLearning (often referred to as death by PowerPoint).

Most learners and stakeholders want an efficient learning experience that can increase their competency as quickly as possible. Most training teams want a scalable, flexible, and sustainable solution. Yet too often training programs fail to deliver on these expectations because we try to cram too much information into too short a timeframe using the wrong type of solution.

Too often, when we get rooted in our projects, we become very self-centered in our work. We forget there are people just like us struggling in the exact same way. We begin to convince ourselves that our way is the only way and, creatively, we can shut down very quickly under the weight of our workload. The panic, stress, and insecurity all lead us to not put our best work out there and, what’s more, to not share our work in pursuit of improvement and feedback.

The concept of using games for learning is a very popular topic right now. It is also a controversial topic, as there are people who support games for learning, and others who question their value. Part of this divide is the existing confusion regarding how games support learning, and what research-based approaches are most effective.

Many practitioners think that learning research is pie-in-the-sky information that is of value for academics but of little value for practitioners. But good practitioner research is practical research that points practitioners and their managers towards better practice and helps them make the important decisions.

Articulate Storyline is a very powerful tool for eLearning. It is also extremely easy to use, enabling novice users to quickly learn how to build courses and add interactivity to content. Interactivity is what can make even the most boring content more engaging.

Research shows that only 20 percent of corporate learning happens during formal training, regardless of the delivery modality. However, 70 percent of learning occurs during on-the-job experiences. One way of bringing more job experience into formal training is through online roleplay simulations. The challenge most organizations have is the belief that simulations are too expensive, take too long to build, or require skill sets they cannot support.

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.

The promise of MOOCs is appealing … massive to scale an organization’s limited resources, online on any device, open to people who wouldn’t otherwise have access, but that course part? It gets boring fast. Courses can be too linear, too logical, and too long for digital learners. It’s time to face up to the fact that courses are an artificial way to learn, invented 150 years ago to make farmers into obedient assembly line workers.

If you talk to game developers most will agree that building a functional artificial intelligence (AI) for a game engine is usually the most time-consuming part of development. Are there tools that we can use to rapidly develop the look and feel of AI without the resource drain of full AI development? Despite the fact that our development tools have greatly enhanced our abilities to create compelling, engaging content, adding AI elements to our courses can seem like a “bridge too far” for many developers.

You’ve created a video, and visually it looks great. At the same time, something about it feels flat to you. You’ve shared the video with others and it seems sort of flat to them as well. The problem is often not with the visuals; it’s with the audio. Video often needs more than just voices to be engaging.

Management often views training efforts as a line expense for a specific period. Rarely is any type of training activity considered an investment apart from specific tangible elements. eLearning and mLearning initiatives are considered investments since they require tangible financial requirements, including technology and supporting infrastructure viewed as capital expenditures.

It is increasingly challenging for designers and developers to create content that works well across an ever-increasing number of devices. Screen sizes and aspect ratios vary tremendously, and instructional designers and developers do not have the resources to create multiple versions of each project for each type of potential device.  Responsive design has allowed learning content to be flexibly displayed across the diversity of devices while maintaining a single content source.

Many training professionals find it challenging to know if training was effective on the job or if part of the organizational system is not supporting the training delivered. While many training departments collect data under Kirkpatrick’s levels one or two, few are able to track data beyond that. Training departments need a methodology for finding out training needs without on the job observation or having trainees return for a test.

As training professionals we know that practice and repetition builds skills, reinforces knowledge, and aids information retention and recall. However our traditional learning solutions and tools often struggle to provide practice opportunities that allow learners to apply knowledge and build skills in realistic, risk free environments. Even when we have practice opportunities in our curriculum, they may often lack the engagement that motivates learners to repeat and build proficiency and/or mastery over time, and they are difficult to scale to larger audiences.

As valuable as courses are, there will always be times when performance support is more appropriate. But in order to have really effective just-in-time learning support, people need to be able find and use it quickly and effortlessly. Performance support needs to be available wherever you are and whenever you need it. More importantly, the performance-support tools of the future are hands free.

Changing technologies, changing learner behaviors and characteristics, and the way that content is delivered today all impact how learning should be architected. As learning professionals, what are we to make of the explosion of new technologies and their promise to transform how we learn?

Technology has completely changed the way we live, work, and learn. Technology has brought us the Internet, smartphones, tablets, and many more tools that have changed our lives forever. Of course, these same technologies have also brought us memes like Socially Awkward Penguin, Success Kid, and yes, Grumpy Cat.

On the job performance support is often a key area of professional development that may not always be adequately addressed or sustainable, particularly in instances where workers are part of a mobile/virtual workforce. Traditional forms of training are often leveraged to bridge performance gaps and provide ongoing development opportunities. However, the methods often fail to deliver on the performance support needs of today’s mobile worker.

eLearning is often viewed as a brain dump of knowledge and there is far too little examination of how to motivate the learner. Engaging design elements and interactivity can inspire the learner to complete the module, but it doesn’t necessarily inspire the learner to keep learning and growing. There is a huge opportunity to incorporate motivational strategies from educational psychology in a practical way in eLearning.

Learning professionals have long battled what is allowable from an organization’s IT group. Understanding why IT has these issues is the best method of lowering these barriers. In today’s world, data theft has become big business. The IT group sees allowing personal laptops and mobile devices onto organizational networks as a surefire method to data disaster. As such, IT groups often shut all the doors to minimize risks. Opening those doors can yield huge benefits and can be relatively easy—if you know how.

The tools and technologies that exist today in large learning and development organizations are complex, and they don’t always play nice with each other. This makes it very difficult to build useful reports from the results of learning experiences in multiple systems. One of the new tools that is available that can address this problem is the Experience API (xAPI).

Lectora is a popular development tool that is more powerful than most instructional designers realize. Lectora is extremely malleable, making it possible to do almost anything you can design. However, some users are unaware of how to get the most out of the authoring tool.

As eLearning developers we often get caught up in designing only what we know from experience. The same holds true with eLearning developers using Articulate Storyline. The more you know, the more options and ideas become evident to solving instructional design challenges. The more you know about variable programming in Storyline, the more the world opens up to unlimited design possibilities.

Data privacy is an issue that is rising in importance around the globe. As more examples of privacy violations are becoming public, the need for learning professionals to focus on data privacy increases. However, most learning professionals have never really put much thought into data privacy or how privacy factors into our design and development.

In the world of Big Data, organizations are increasingly using data and technology to better understand the value of their investments and efforts. As training professionals, it is imperative that we also use data to communicate the impact of our work. Many learning professionals avoid data and measurement because it seems like a daunting task, but it doesn’t have to be.

Organizations often recognize that the best way to improve performance is through practice, but they have struggled to shift their learning design from knowledge acquisition to performance improvement. Immersive learning is a new way of thinking about training design, and companies are looking for examples to help them see how immersive design can help them with their unique needs.

One of the most challenging aspects of developing learning programs is managing the sheer volume of content generated on a daily basis. There are eLearning modules, demos, simulations, videos, job aides, quick-start guides, webinars, ILT decks, graphs, flowcharts, assessments, animations, podcasts, and the source and media files to go along with each. The most frustrating aspect of all this is the number of times developers are forced to reinvent the wheel because, while the perfect content may already exist in one format it is incompatible with content in another format.

Experience is the most meaningful type of learning learners can engage in. Experience implies using skills in context and applying critical thinking to any situation. We have to provide as realistic an experience as possible to learners without putting people at risk. Multiple-branching and multiple-outcome simulations help learners develop critical judgment to address what to do in real scenarios, creating true experiences that will translate easily to real-life situations.  

Choosing an authoring tool can be very challenging, especially as the number of authoring tool options continues to grow. In 2014 there are almost 190 different authoring tool options available to organizations. Understanding which authoring tools work best in different contexts is critical in order to make the best purchasing decision.

When well-conceived and executed, games can greatly enhance learner engagement, but randomly adding game principles to learning can result in colossal failure and many hours of wasted time. One way to assure a positive impact on learning is to approach designs from the game perspective first, rather than trying to gamify existing or planned learning.

Today’s employees need to use different types of tools and they must learn how to assimilate and perform their job with limited training time and support. By using a social-networking site for a virtual-learning environment (VLE) learners can interact with experienced employees, learn how to properly use the company’s internal social network, and properly navigate through systems and repositories.

A conversation begins, most often, with a question. IT blogger Selena Deckelmann suggests that when those in control “ask women directly to speak up, we open the door for participation,” and diversity and inclusion can begin. “If we insist on equal participation, the structure of our organizations will change. The first time I spoke up in a user group was terrifying, but I did so because a peer politely, but repeatedly, asked me to speak.”

Most instructional designers can recognize a strongly designed and developed eLearning program. However, there is a noticeable gap between the accepted standards of what makes quality eLearning, and the reality of what the industry produces. We understand what quality eLearning looks like, but too often we fail to deliver on that standard. Many instructional designers struggle with maintaining eLearning quality standards when confronted with the realities of organizational project constraints.

The Internet of Things (IoT) is expected to touch and transform every facet of our lives. From industry automation and automobile connectivity to wearable devices and smart-home appliances, it will make our way of living more enriching. Learning will also undergo many changes as a part of this evolution, though it will likely be a bumpy road getting there.

Chances are that your organization already has one or more learning management system in place. Chances are that you also have a learning content management system, enterprise resource planning, a human resource management system, knowledge management, and/or customer relationship management systems in place. Now you are looking at adding performance support to the mix. Technology can be an enabler and driver of efficiency, but it can also be complex, cumbersome, and confusing. But all systems have one primary intent: To increase the performance of employees.

Most organizations focus on the quality of the eLearning they develop, but have you ever considered the quality of the workflows used to create that eLearning? We always face the challenge of doing more faster but with fewer resources. As such it is critical that an organization’s eLearning-development workflows are organized and efficient. Many organizations resist the need for more organization under the reasoning that the process is time-consuming; the opposite is actually true.

Interest in the Experience API has grown steadily in the last few years, but most of the conversations exploring the topic were either conceptual or technical in nature. There have few case studies showing the xAPI in practice, and those that did exist focused more on the technical application of the specification rather than on business value.

When you limit your design to the default question slides in Captivate, the result can often be a boring assessment. Being aware of the basics of these slide designs and of the quizzing system variables allows developers to extend the functionality of the default slides. By tweaking these default slides you can create simple games that can turn a basic quiz into a challenging experience.

Video will become increasingly important as a method of imparting knowledge as our populace transitions from a linear written-word culture to a global and visual culture. Many instructional designers and developers would like to implement “how-to” videos in their programs but do not know how to go about it. Practitioners are unable to leverage the power of video instruction into their presentations and eLearning projects.

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.

Gamification is the integration of game mechanics, or game dynamics, into a learning experience. Game-based training can be defined as a game designed for the purpose of solving a problem. However, these words are being used in parallel by the industry and it can be quite confusing.

The two goals of any eLearning program are to teach learners new information and then to enable them to transfer their new knowledge into their work. Learning transfer is a complex process, and most eLearning designers do not understand the simple steps that they can take to ensure that knowledge does transfer from the computer where the learners learn it to the work place where they need it.

Flat design seems to be everywhere now. It’s the new look of our computer operating systems, our apps, websites, posters, book covers, and so many other places. Is this just a new fad or is this a fabulous new design trend that we in the eLearning industry need to pay more attention to in order to understand the fine points of flat design?

Instructional designers and eLearning professionals are often faced with the daunting task of designing learning interventions to meet the needs of multiple stakeholders quickly and effectively. Many eLearning solutions are perceived as boring, ineffective, or incapable of meeting learning goals effectively, leaving designers with an uphill battle to sell new ideas and concepts to colleagues. Even strong concepts and well-designed projects face barriers and challenges.

Technological advances disrupt the status quo. We’ve seen this happen a number of times in the way we address learning and performance interventions. In the last few decades, the emergence of home computers brought us eLearning, and the proliferation of mobile and smartphones have brought us mLearning. Both of these technological advances have fundamentally changed how we look at learning and performance programs. Another technological advance is coming—one that will once again change some of our definitions and how we address performance issues: wearable technology.

eLearning has a broken feedback loop, and it’s holding us back as a field. Because we usually can’t see our products being used, we lack the most basic information necessary to improve what we do. Traditional evaluation at best is costly and difficult to measure, and at worst either ignored all together or implemented in such a superficial way that it’s meaningless. Even good evaluation measures are not granular enough to inform future design decisions.

Learning to leverage the specific tools and capabilities in mobile devices can be challenging for eLearning developers. Effective mLearning goes beyond converting traditional eLearning for use on mobile and actually applies techniques of responsive design and maximizes technologies like geolocation and gestural inputs to become authentic mobile learning.  

Your course users demand more quality and sophistication in the eLearning content they interact with. A growing expectation is for attractive eLearning content that is close to virtual reality with 3-D animated and interactive content. Interactive 3-D content can help teach more effectively, and make the courses more attractive and competitive. But is it worth the effort and the costs?

There’s an increasing awareness of the value of social learning in the workplace. Knowing that it exists is one thing; creating the scaffolding and support that allows people to capture, categorize, retrieve, and share what they learn is something else entirely.

Modern eLearning courses are technology solutions developed and implemented using many of the same techniques and tools that software developers use. Both share similar challenges: subject matter experts to navigate, aggressive deadlines to manage, assorted files and assets to organize, and an integrated approach to delivery, accounting for various hosting and browsing systems plus ongoing user support.

Currently, a lot of eLearning can be defined as a high-level PowerPoint presentation that includes animated text, images, and narration. The problem is that this type of eLearning doesn’t grab and hold the learner’s attention. Many times the learner can’t relate to what is being presented to them, or understand how they can apply it to future situations.

There is no definitive process for instructional design. Regardless of how much research we conduct, we can modify every theory and every process to meet our individual project needs. Modifying these needs and/or techniques becomes much easier when facilitating live, instructor-led training where learners provide both verbal and visual feedback. When it comes to eLearning, there is no facilitator available to modify the experience based on feedback. Therefore, instructional design plays a key role in determining the success of any training experience.

As you start to explore the Experience API (xAPI), it is easy to feel intimidated. If you lack the necessary coding skills to build a solution from the ground up, taking advantage of xAPI might not be possible without outside help since being able to prototype a solution is critical to the success of your project. Successful prototypes can help show what data is important and what changes you could make before creating a final product for release.

We’ve all been there—as a participant in a one-way, presentation-only style webinar. Presenters may know how to click through a series of slides, but that type of session isn’t very engaging to the learner. Also, although Adobe Connect is one of the most popular platforms for live online learning, it’s also one of the more complicated to learn to use its full feature set.

Instructional designers tend to define what is possible by the limitations of our chosen authoring tools. We remove ideas like responsive courses from consideration because our authoring tool does support the capability. Sometimes common modern web practices don’t always transfer over to eLearning authoring tools until it is too late. Why not take control over what you can do in your eLearning authoring by building it yourself?

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.