eLearning designers are often faced with complex training topics that are difficult to deliver concisely. The results are lengthy courses that are counter to the needs of today’s learners, who need to be extremely efficient with their time. To deliver learning to this audience means being very concise in both content and course design, while still having impact and not sacrificing instructional integrity.

One of the major challenges facing organizations is getting the balance between formal and informal right. Capitalizing on the benefits of social learning requires the right environment to facilitate it. The most successful communities have clarity of purpose, support from wider stakeholders, an engaged hub of participants, and a skilled facilitator to nurture it. For anyone interested in creating a sustainable and effective social learning strategy for their organization, understanding the benefits of a community approach and the right balance between structure and exploration is key.

As learning practitioners, we strive to understand the real life environment of experts as much as possible. But getting access to really see how they do their jobs when they are in a more technical or hands-on role (i.e., construction, refinery, factory) is difficult. Many times we can’t get access to use video or real-life images because of safety or clearance constraints. This poses a challenge as we try to create impactful learning materials.

Questions about mobile and social learning can often take the conversation in the wrong direction, ones about issues of screen real estate, for example, rather than the more important questions about learner experience or if mobile is even the appropriate approach. Mobile, coupled with social media, provides a rich resource for informal learning outside of the classroom, as well as supplemental learning within the classroom. 

You’re all excited about the promise of an Experience API-enabled world, but you’ve still got a learning management system (LMS) and a whole host of SCORM-based courses. Now what? In most cases, you’ll need to manage the transition—read: republish your library for the Experience API (xAPI)—over the months and years to come. But what if you could get the most out of both an LMS and a learning record store (LRS) at the same time as you move to your next-generation learning-and-performance infrastructure?

If you work in L&D, chances are you use design assets (like photos, drawings, icons, and fonts) all the time. And if you don’t have a graphic design background, chances are you’re paying someone else to make these design assets for you. Professional designers and stock photos are fantastic resources, and ones I’d never want to get rid of, but sometimes what you need is a DIY solution that’s fast, free, or even better: both.

Although the world of web design has evolved and rapidly leveraged open-source technologies to build new experiences, many eLearning instructional designers and developers have limited themselves to rapid eLearning tools such as Captivate and Storyline. But what is possible when we go beyond our usual toolsets?

Infographics powerfully convey content in a visual and readily understandable manner. However, as appealing as they often are, learners often spend only a brief time viewing them before moving on. Are there ways to increase an infographic’s “stickiness,” or its effectiveness to make the content better understood and retained by the learner?

The importance of social factors in learning are well established. But knowing how to best influence and impact these factors remains something of a mystery to most organizations. A number of thought-leaders have suggested you can’t do much of anything to impact social learning in the workplace. They are wrong. You can design social learning opportunities and measure their impact. Drawing on research, and from our experiences of working with some of the leading organizations in the world, we’ve developed our own social-learning playbook. Now we invite you to develop your own, based on the framework we provide.

It’s hard enough to get learners to engage with the content of your eLearning course. The 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.

Often the idea of using instructional games is met with stiff resistance by project stakeholders and the organization’s leadership: “We don’t want our employees playing games! We are a serious organization with serious work to do!” So how do you design instructionally effective games for the workplace and gain buy-in from stakeholders and leadership in your organization?

A number of myths persist about people’s allegedly ever-shortening attention spans—but what does the science say? Neuroscience, behavioral economics, and consumer psychology all offer insights into how we manage and allocate attention. Additionally, our ability to manage attention and focus seems to be related to our abilities to allocate willpower and influence how we make decisions.

Intellectual property law affects every stage of the development process. Yet, it is daunting and complex. Trying to gain a working knowledge can be overwhelming. As a result, decision making is rooted in ignorance, fear, or frustration, none of which contributes to project goals. The continuing struggle to quickly develop content may lead you to infringe on someone else’s work, expose your work to an unpleasant legal action, or miss out on using free media to enhance your projects.

From the first desktop PCs to today’s cutting-edge smartphones, technology has a history of fundamentally changing the expectations of learning and development programs. We are now on the cusp of another technological advance, one that will once again change some of our definitions and how we address performance issues: wearable technology. This technology will come in various forms, but the one that many expect to serve as a quantum leap forward is Apple Watch.

eLearning developers are often challenged with making learning more interesting or interactive. Games provide an opportunity to meet both needs. You’ve read the research on their impact and you know that games have been useful learning tools through all the stages of life, but building games in eLearning has been a challenge for those who do not know how to program.

Adobe Presenter works perfectly in some situations and not others. Knowing when to use a particular tool is half the battle. Adobe Presenter features many new possibilities for you to use it if the situation calls for it.

An intensive two-year study of 29 projects that were awarded funds to build digital badge systems in the 2012 Badges for Lifelong Learning competition revealed surprising results.

There’s been a large amount of research in recent years exploring the value music has on the brain and learning. We’ve all experienced it in some way in our lives, be it from listening to music while learning or studying, learning something from a catchy song, or by learning to play an instrument.