Migration to virtual training delivery is a “must consider” strategy for most geographically dispersed organizations. The Army & Air Force Exchange Service (AAFES) is an $8 billon organization that supports soldiers, airmen, and their families with over 2,400 retail facilities. Training the staff that supports those operations is a worldwide task. AAFES needed a better and more effective training strategy.

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.

From CIOs to instructional designers, to faculty, trainers, and students, organizations and universities are considering adding video-making or “visual literacy” as a core skill to the three Rs—reading, writing, and ’rithmetic—in order to prepare learners for a highly visual communication landscape that requires critical thinking to offset consumerism. Evidence shows there is a need for multi-modal learning and cognitive skills. Researching, creating, and sharing video playlists is one of the important additions to creating personalized learning pathways and engendering continuous post-diploma learning.

You can read the statistics yourself: Bersin reports that nearly 60 percent of CLOs will enjoy an 8 percent budget increase in 2015. But so what? About what are they thrilled? What keeps them up at night?

A Fortune 500 company was seeking a way to get a safety message to customers via their sales force without the training impacting face time. But, how do you train 3,000 plus salespeople to enhance their selling approach and deliver this new message to thousands of customers in a consistent fashion, in a compressed time frame, and with limited time away from selling?

L&D professionals are consistently being asked to do more with less while providing scalable training solutions that align to business needs. At the same time, employees are becoming increasingly accustomed to driving their own learning at home using popular technologies. By leveraging a mix of technology, instructional strategy, and organizational knowledge, L&D professionals can put employees at the center of the learning and performance ecosystem and, by supporting this shift in accountability through a focus on providing right-time, right-fit learning opportunities, truly do more with less.

Many applications of gaming in learning simply encourage competitive or game behaviors—they lack a focus on true learning or underlying game dynamics. The game dynamics are what power the experience and include aspects of generosity, collaboration, sharing, trading, perspective, and power.

Every year, we spend millions of dollars on training and development. One of the ways we can determine the value achieved is by using analytics to assess who is using the content, where, when, and how. But with all this data available, which data points matter? Deciphering the ways to analyze a program’s effectiveness can be confusing. And just because we have a lot of data, does that really make any of it valuable? 

There are things that prevent us from making the great video learning content that we are capable of. Sometimes these things are technical, sometimes they are budgetary, but mostly they are due to our misconceptions about what is involved. While some blaze into situations making bigger promises than they can ever deliver, others scare themselves out of ever getting started in the first place. Most of us fall in between, perpetuating common video myths without even knowing it.

Learning professionals today are under a great deal of pressure. It becomes easy to get formulaic and forget two important things: our learners’ needs and our own joy, growth, and fulfillment. How can we break out of the mold, stay connected with our audiences, and remain excited about our profession? And what are some techniques we can use to contribute to a learning culture, even if the rest of the organization isn’t quite there yet?

Implementing a great user experience is critical for designing the optimal learning experience and requires the content developer to think from the perspective of the learner. There is much research on user experience (UX) available and bad practices still in circulation. Identifying what works and what doesn’t is a task worth undertaking.

The holy grail of all learning is retention (and subsequent behavior change). Relevance drives retention. And we have no faster path to relevance than through effective stories. Stories engage us and trigger our imagination to take us places. We’ve all read about the importance of storytelling, we’ve listened to webcasts, maybe we’ve even bought a book or two about effective storytelling. Storytelling is a major buzzword today, but how can we effectively use storytelling in learning solutions?

A state healthcare agency made a significant investment in new technology with the purchase of Microsoft Office 365 (SharePoint, Outlook, Excel, etc.), but there was a known gap in the digital skills of agency employees. Due to budget constraints, it had been several years since the last technology upgrade and as a results the employees had no experience with Office 365 and limited experience with productivity tools in general. However, the employees were not without relevant learning content. They had a catalog of eLearning courses on Microsoft Office and a learning management system (LMS) to make them available. Yet this skills gap remained an issue...

As the world becomes more and more mobile, so too has the technology we’ve grown accustomed to using on desktops moved to mobile devices and in so doing has expanded the possibilities. AR is one of the emerging technologies that enable smartphones and tablets to interact with the world around them.

Scenario-based learning is a proven effective method for learning using complex real-life situations. However the effort and technology to develop scenarios has often appeared to be too complex, expensive, and time-consuming. Today though, authoring tools have advanced to make designing and developing robust scenarios to be easier and more efficient than ever before.

Many organizations are still using paper-based guides, manuals, and job aids for day-to-day operations. Planning for additional printing costs throughout the year to accommodate frequent content changes is often the norm. Reliability can also be questionable, as older documents may not all be thrown out when replaced with an updated version. Some organizations have gone almost completely paperless, yet the electronic versions of the documents are still basic text, which doesn’t make use of the full potential of a virtual format.

Anyone still struggling with learning projects or courses that exceed schedule, budget, or that do not meet audience objectives needs to understand project-scope management. This project management key knowledge area is often overlooked. However the planning, monitoring, and controlling processes involved are critical to ensuring your projects deliver the required results, on time, and on budget.

Your organization has a mature learning program facilitated through the use of a learning management system (LMS). But now the technology powering the current system constrains your organization’s evolving strategic needs for business growth. Your team may have begun looking for technology solutions or started drafting a wish list, but what are your next steps?

Live virtual learning, while not new, has only recently gained momentum due to a down economy and increased travel restrictions. Learning organizations know that they must increasingly provide live virtual solutions, but they don’t fully understand how to transition their traditional content to a virtual platform. Intel initially struggled with a lack of standards and development skills which led to mediocre learning experiences.

More than four years have passed since the inception of the Open Badges experiment, and in that time the concept of digital badges has moved steadily into the general consciousness. As this novel idea continues to evolve, so do its many opportunities and challenges.   

The coming year will see the launch of inexpensive virtual reality (VR) devices. But this change is not about gadgets; it’s about a massive consumer technology that will be accessible and powerful with huge potential. VR is a medium, not a gadget. How appropriate is it for education and training?

Do you spend more of your time copying and pasting from one content format to another than you do creating new instructional materials? Do you have to deliver the same information for more than one learning deliverable? If you answered yes to either of those questions, then it’s time to reclaim your time and use a single source for your content.

During design and development, SMEs and other stakeholders sometimes suggest ideas or practices that are antithetical to good instructional design. For example, a stakeholder believes it’s best to film a daylong stand-up training session and deliver it as one video. An SME might write learning material on a complex topic without breaking concepts down for beginners. In these cases, it is helpful for the designer to be able to present research findings to help the stakeholders understand why you should design learning solutions differently.

Learning professionals are always looking for the best and most efficient way to distribute training, education, and performance support. Sometimes that is face-to-face (F2F), other times online, and there are times where a blended approached is best. You can easily and cost-effectively create an online or blended approach by using readily available online tools and resources. No expensive LMS is needed!

Tracking learning and performance activities to be able to analyze them and interpret their value has always been a desire of learning professionals. Having this information naturally leads to the opportunity to refine the effectiveness of the learning experiences. Until now, this has been time and cost prohibitive.

There is a huge difference between the traditional levels of interactivity for asynchronous eLearning and interactions. Levels of interactivity delineate the mechanical complexity used during the request for proposal (RFP) and proposal stages of business development, sales, and contracting to determine scope and pricing for an eLearning project. Interactions, on the other hand, have to do with the actual design of the eLearning project to bring about the desired performance change. We have interactivity (mechanical) and interactions (instructional). How do we work with both to achieve what we want for our learners?

We’ve spent years aiming our focus at being good business partners. We build our road maps around urgent and emergent business needs. We have begun to dispel the notion of learning styles. These are all good steps. But are we getting too far away from our understanding of the learner’s experience? Understanding the needs of our business partners is useless if we don’t understand how our work will land with our learners. How can we seek to understand how the learner’s experience plays out in our learning ecosystem?

You have limited resources and need to create from scratch, and you’re under time constraints to deliver targeted learning programs. What do you do? You have to leave the glitter aside and create what you can with what you have. When you are in the trenches of a startup, you have to constantly iterate on learning and training solutions. There is rarely a final learning product, more like an MVP, most viable product. MVP is the quickest way possible to start the learning process. 

Yes, the interest in learning games has exploded, along with the interest in gamification. Many practitioners want to create digital game play experiences as opposed to “Click NEXT to continue” eLearning. But when you get started in digital, how do you do it? How “game-y” does something need to be to produce solid learner engagement while maintaining the integrity of the learning experience? What best practices should you follow, and what pitfalls should you avoid? How is the design process the same? How is it different?

People live in a visual world and are, therefore, conditioned to perceive quality based largely on its visual design. Your digital badge is your visible representation displayed in digital backpacks and ePortfolios. You have been tasked with creating the badge artwork. But you are not a designer and your budget does not support hiring one—so what do you do?

eLearning and instructional designers are often asked to turn long blocks of content into a product that is effective and engaging. On top of that, everyone wants a product that is mobile-ready and adaptive. How can designers with limited skills in programs like After Effects or Blender and limited coding skills create products that fit the content-focused needs of our clients?

As the eLearning industry continues to shift towards a more software-like and code-intensive development model, it’s important for learning developers to understand the process of software development. An understanding of the vocabulary, process, and difficulties of writing code is important to better communicate with software developers and others who are involved in the process of writing complex eLearning.

Many companies are interested in seeing how mobile learning can enhance and supplement current learning practices.