For instructional designers and facilitators, the challenge is to create learning materials that reach and affect audiences positively and do not elicit feelings of exclusion or discrimination. However, you’re human, and every human has hidden or unconscious biases that impact behaviors and thoughts. This can lead to unintentional missteps in design and delivery. As learning becomes more story-driven, you need to be sensitive to how you present characters, including race, gender, gender identity, and organizational roles.

While there are many practices and models grounded in research that people use to create eLearning, there are also a lot of common statements about the field that may or may not be based in fact. Do learners really remember 50 percent of what they hear? Does L&D need to treat generations differently? Do learning styles matter? While these ideas are widespread, are they actually true?

Learners, particularly online learners, often suffer from illusions of competence in learning, procrastinate, and fail at breaking down content into smaller chunks to build solid expertise. Each can lead to higher rates of frustration and, ultimately, reduce success.

What happens when your current eLearning development tool and your LMS are not enough (and they often are not)? With myriad tools and platforms available, being married to one or only a few is not wise, nor does it provide you the flexibility to create dynamic learning opportunities.

PowerPoint is the basis for much of the training material you design and use, and yet it’s text-heavy, dull, and boring. That switches people off, and they don’t learn anything. It’s poorly used for in-person training, dreadful in webinars, and deathly when converted to eLearning. Quite simply, you can’t keep using PowerPoint like this. You can do better.

Communities of practice (CoPs) have become a hot topic in the past few years. They are an excellent tool for developing skills, sharing tacit knowledge, and shoring up retention of high-performing staff. But they differ from teams and other types of groups in many ways. Understanding what CoPs are and how they work—rather than just looking at how to create and manage them—is critical to supporting their success.

Are you the trainer, instructional designer, coordinator, project manager, and business analyst for your organization, all in one? Are you constantly moving from one role to the next while feeling overwhelmed by endless training projects? As a one-person training team, it’s common to feel challenged by constant time management, project intake and prioritization, development, delivery, and analysis you have to do on a regular basis. How do you reclaim control from this chaos?

The corporate eLearning development world may not always seem creative from the outside, but successful eLearning teams use creativity in every project they design and develop. But how, specifically, can this skill contribute to successful eLearning? What kinds of creativity should be part of your eLearning workflow? What benefits does creativity provide to your development process? How can you explain to your stakeholders that increased creativity contributes to business-focused learning objectives?

Designers, developers, trainers, instructors, content experts, and others too often design and build instruction in ways that interfere with how adults learn. The result is less-than-optimal learning that can lead to a chain reaction of disengagement in learning materials and limited, if any, performance improvement.

Creating effective learning experiences is not a job for a novice, although many novices are thrown into the role of instructional designer/developer. If beginners turn to the field’s expansive literature, which ranges from cookbook-style guides and blogs to scientific research, they are easily overwhelmed and typically turn to overly simplistic approaches. But even experienced professionals can come to feel they’re never able to do the job that should be done.

Animation is a powerful tool for creating engaging eLearning experiences. Sadly, many animations are used without purpose as just a design embellishment. When that happens, the animation distracts the learner from the content rather than helping to elevate it.

J.M. Barrie said, “We are all failures; at least, the best of us are.” When attending conferences, you often get the opportunity to see individuals sharing their best work. What isn’t visible is everything that fell apart in the process of achieving something great. These are great opportunities to learn from.

A large amount of research in recent years has explored the value that music has for the brain and learning. Everyone has experienced it in some way, be it from listening to music while studying, learning something from a catchy song, or learning to play an instrument.

“Blended learning” was one of the hottest buzzwords back in the day. In its infancy it was, at best, a design construct that focused on combining the best elements of face-to-face with eLearning. At worst, though, it merely gave the learner the choice of attending class in person or online. This was a cutting-edge approach at one time, but the tools and media for learning have expanded far beyond this. To get the most out of blended learning, you need to shift your thinking and look at how you can use all of today’s tools in the blend.

As websites and apps get increasingly more sophisticated and personalized, people are coming to expect a similar experience from learning as well. Adaptive learning is one such technology that promises this experience, but many of the platforms that exist are expensive and currently geared primarily toward K-12 and higher education. How can L&D professionals in the corporate space find ways to provide their audience with this more tailored learning experience?

Admit it: You have a love/hate relationship with stock photography websites. Sure, you love how using stock images can inspire your creativity, but you also hate how hard it is to find ones that look genuine and aren’t exaggerated. eLearning developers rely heavily on stock-image-based designs for building workplace eLearning. And it’s not just a problem of finding stock images full of people with the right poses or expressions. The bigger challenge is that the images you find often just don’t feel authentic.

Using workplace stories to engage learners and enhance your content is a hot topic in learning and development. But when you’re getting started with storytelling as an instructional design technique, you’ll likely have a lot of questions about where to find effective stories for this purpose and how to make sure they not only entertain but also foster learning at the same time. You’ll also want to know how best to integrate storytelling techniques in the tools you already use.

When you’re developing strategies to engage your learners, you need to keep your audience and their anticipated learning environment top of mind. But with more and more people shifting when and how they want to access training content, it’s more important than ever to make sure your design strategies reflect this. Your success in reaching the modern learner will depend on understanding how these shifts should influence your technology selection, implementation strategy, and design approach.

Accessibility is about more than just doing the bare minimum for compliance. It’s about the difference you can make when you ensure everyone has equal access to what you’ve designed. While this intent is good, in the real world, actually making all your content accessible can seem like a daunting task. But it doesn’t have to be.

Critical thinking is an incredibly valuable skill in today’s workplace. In fact, the US Department of Labor proclaimed that it’s the raw material of workplace success. But while organizations value this skill, they don’t always systematically seek out and support it. Many employers actually say their employees struggle with critical thinking skills, and most want to provide more development opportunities in this area. How can the L&D field address this gap and help amp up people’s ability to think critically?

Frequently, learning design is about showing people how to do the right things, but actually getting them to change their behavior can be another story. It’s particularly challenging to get people to change those intractable habits and behaviors that everyone struggles to avoid, despite the wealth of available information about better choices.

Employees at a global technology giant were enrolling in a popular performance improvement workshop at a rapid clip. The learning activities and exercises were interactive, hands-on, and practical. But wait lists were long, mostly because capacity was limited by the delivery format: two days of face-to-face instructor-led training. The challenge: to scale enrollments while reducing costs, without sacrificing learner engagement. The solution: a brain-friendly virtual learning environment and experience.

With the advent of so many new technologies, ensuring the learner has the best access to the right-size, right-format content, delivered at the right time, is challenging. Coupled with rapid development cycles, this means designers have less time to do thorough or extremely detailed needs analysis.

Have you ever watched a really engaging web-based conference session and wondered, “How’d they do that?” When slides or polls appear or videos pop up and play automatically, it’s not magic! There’s a person behind every action who must click, type, or drag to make things happen. And learning how to use these features when you run your own webinars is surprisingly easy.

eLearning has fallen behind other sectors in developing engaging, immersive experiences. While the world of advertising is continually exploring new ways to affect people’s habits and decisions, eLearning developers often focus purely on knowledge acquisition. This session will explore how the psychology of marketing can affect the efficacy of eLearning.

Some of the best training out there looks like it was developed by a single designer, regardless of how many people worked on it. But often when more than one learning professional is in the mix and there aren’t established design standards, even with the best of intentions the final product suffers from inconsistency and results in training that looks hodgepodge. The bigger the team, the worse that inconsistency can become. Consistency is key—and the solution resides in detailed style guides, design documents, and templates to make your work look polished and professional.

Simulations can provide learners with safe environments in which to learn how to use new skills through practice and failure. When done well, they give people the opportunity to get things wrong and learn from that experience in a way that has little to no risk involved. They can also be deeply immersive, replicating the actual experience of doing something in a realistic and engaging way. Because of this, they can be incredibly effective tools for learning. But how do you create simulations on your own, particularly if you’re on a tight budget?