Economic stress, learning technologies, global competition, and the learning sciences present opportunities and threats to learning and performance professionals. How will you respond as we move to more mobile, performance support, and video?

With the combination of highly engaging content and on-the-go availability through mobile, eLearning is now reaching wider audiences. This reflects the power of mobile learning, but its combination with the xAPI is still evolving and is in its infancy. At the same time, mobile learning capabilities like collaboration, messaging, and offline use have yet to be harnessed by many learning platforms. Moreover, the analytical data collected using the xAPI are also underutilized.

Formal online learning doesn’t work like it used to. Attention spans are decreasing, and mobile access is more critical than ever. So how do you create mobile learning without hiring experts or spending a fortune? And how do you get part-time employees to care about making shakes and smoothies?

The prerequisite to effective training retention is gaining the attention of students once they have left the training environment. This is not a trivial challenge! Employees ignore emails, never visit web portals, and forget about apps installed on their phones. How can you gain access to their attention to reinforce important training?

Your business sponsor wants to cut costs and improve performance. Your end users want lots of high-quality, traditional training. You need solutions that focus on enabling performance through the use of both formal training and effective performance support. How can you effectively evaluate learning and performance needs and implement solutions that leverage both formal training and performance support in the most efficient way possible?

Technology continues to advance rapidly, changing how people live and interact with the world around them. Today’s learning professionals face the challenge of staying ahead of this curve and tracking the technologies that are shaping the future of organizational learning, while at the same time recognizing technologies that may be more of a passing fad.

There are so many authoring tools on the market, and so many promise that they’ll let you create stellar mobile learning solutions. How can any organization make sense of which will serve it best? Is one enough, or do you need two? Are two enough, or do you need eight? You don’t randomly choose which car to buy. You don’t throw a dart at a map to decide where to live. Research is key, and consulting an unbiased expert can save a lot of time and cost. Choosing an authoring tool that you can use to create mobile lessons is no different.

The Experience API is an eLearning software specification that allows learning content and learning systems to communicate with each other. The xAPI is appealing to mLearning developers who seek accessible solutions for learner activity tracking. At the same time, considering how diversified the mLearning and training ecosystem is, solutions such as PhoneGap can enable cross-platform delivery. Combining both tools allows for the delivery of a cross-platform solution with the ability to track learners’ experience.

Video technology is ubiquitous. However, many professionals become so preoccupied with whether they CAN produce a video that they often don’t stop to think about whether they SHOULD. Too often, this results in the development of ineffective content that doesn’t support user needs, wastes viewers’ time, and sets a poor precedent for the use of video within the organization.

Microlearning is a way to solve the problems facing L&D today: dwindling attention spans, shrinking budgets, knowledge workers with less time, and perhaps most challenging, the rapid evolution of technology that outdates skills as soon as they’re learned.

Within the learning and development professional community, we don’t always focus on the tools we need to enable our performance. The phrase “The shoemaker’s children have no shoes” comes to mind here. In this session we will discuss a performance support solution created for instructional designers participating in the 5 Moments of Learning Need™ certificate program. We will preview the solution and discuss how it helps instructional designers both as a tool during learning and, more importantly, as a support tool while they apply 5 Moments of Learning Need™ methods on the job.