Engaging, professional-sounding voice recording is a key to maximizing the potential for eLearning. Voice acting should be professional, sound realistic, and be free of distractions that can disengage participants and limit knowledge retention. While hiring professional voice actors can provide an easy solution, budget constraints may limit or eliminate the option of outsourcing voiceover work. When this occurs, development teams must look to their own in-house talent, many of whom may be new to the idea of lending their voice.

So often, in our day-to-day professional existence, we are bombarded with problems, tasks, and situations that require our attention, all the while neglecting the problem solver—that’s you and me. We seldom recharge our professional batteries and, as such, burn out or become uninspired. We’ve become professional hermits, to an extent, and need an outlet to help us maintain our spark, drive, and creativity.

Due to distance and lack of resources, in-person classroom sessions were not possible for every client who needed to learn Altair Engineering’s software. Its clients did not always want to wait for scheduled classes, so Altair needed to deliver content to them to their desktops in a quick and effective manner at their time of need, not when and where the training schedule dictated. 

In recent years, learning has moved closer to the workplace. Classrooms have moved out of corporate learning centers and into training rooms co-located with offices. Online learning is delivered directly to the desktop more than ever before. The next challenge is to move learning directly into the workflow. To do this, we need to move beyond course delivery and into a broader, more comprehensive, and strategic approach that focuses not just on learning, but on performance and productivity.

Building an eLearning course that works across all devices (desktop, phone, tablet, etc.) and scales and adjusts accordingly is no small undertaking. However with the right tools, templates, and processes in place you can successfully build responsively to develop eLearning that works and looks good on all devices.

Virtual-classroom platforms are not new. In fact, there are probably people in your organization using these platforms right now for training, webinars, and meetings. But are you ready to make an organization-wide move to give up face-to-face classrooms for virtual ones, or is the prospect too daunting?

It’s no secret that most, if not all, of us are facing an ever-increasing need to provide more and more training on complex products, regulatory issues, advanced application processes, and the like. The question is: How do we continue to offer training that keeps our learners engaged in an environment of stagnated training budgets and headcount reductions?

There are several methodologies that can be employed in training development projects, but when time, cost, and quality are not negotiable, an agile development approach may be ideal. Dairy Queen recently introduced a brand-new product line to its 6,500+ franchise organization. In preparation for this momentous rollout, Dairy Queen needed to create an interactive training program to quickly prepare thousands of franchisees and their crew on the sales and operations of an entirely new product platform for worldwide delivery.

As technology changes the way we live our day-to-day lives, it is fascinating to imagine what the future will bring. As a learning and development professional, however, it’s very hard to keep up the pace. What technology will be trending and will change the way we live and learn, and what technology will be nothing but hype? Will augmented reality really disrupt our learning? And how about virtual reality and wearable tech? And, more importantly, will we ever be able to afford those technologies as learning supporting tools?

The number of freelance workers is expected to grow to more than 50 percent of America’s workforce in the next decade. An urgency has arisen to define, create, and articulate credentials that document alternative learning experiences and directly correlate with the skills required in the project-based job market. How can employers determine which soloists have the capabilities and experience that the work demands? And how can soloists showcase their capabilities and achievements so potential employers can reliably identify them?

Medical education in North America is taught in a decentralized manner with in-class coursework delivered in small blocks and students gaining learning experiences in hospitals and other institutions outside of the university. Medical schools need a way to capture and analyze these experiences to get a true picture of a student’s readiness to treat patients. Furthermore, learning requirements are set to change for medical residents from set-year programs to a competency-based model. Current LMSs alone aren’t able to tie outside experiences to competencies.

We use eLearning and other technology platforms because they are cost effective, easily accessible, provide a consistent learner experience, and increase our geographical reach. Unfortunately, it is quite easy to lose the human connection that is so critical to the engagement of employees and learners.

Most designers and developers strive for continuous improvement in the quality and effectiveness of eLearning programs. However, measuring the success and failure of eLearning is often an afterthought. Worse, the metrics used to measure effectiveness send false messages that lead a person to think the eLearning is more effective than it actually is. This is unfortunate because eLearning offers more measurement options than traditional classroom training.

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 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.

Learners are more likely to persist online if engaged in their courses and the educational experience is personalized. Personalized e/mLearning communicates a supportive, nurturing, and respectful learning environment. Branding allows you to tailor the experience and speak to the learners; however, doing so effectively and consistently can be tricky. 

How can creating storyboards online change your writing and review process? What online spreadsheets can help you track open issues? Can you track project time online to help you better estimate projects in the future? What scheduling tools are available? These are just some of the questions we’ll address in this hands-on session. You’ll get to try out a number of online tools (some free, some fee-based) to help you better manage your eLearning development projects. You’ll walk away not only with valuable perspective on what these specific tools can do, but also with an understanding of key features you can look for and use in other tools. 

Training employees and clients is an ongoing challenge. People are busy. Training is expensive, time consuming and usually pretty boring. Athenahealth has a wide range of clients, from physicians and nurses, to front desk staff, and medical billers. Their schedules are chaotic, they have little time to train, and their focus is on doing what they do best, helping patients. The challenge was in moving from an eLearning-heavy approach to a more context-based, hands-on, just-in-time one to meet the needs of learners in this complex environment.

Why do people spend hours learning how to master new levels in their favorite games? The answer to this question, and the ability to harness some of that excitement and magic for workplace learning, is why there is growing interest in games for learning.