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.