Years of momentum have resulted in a collection of use cases for teams seeking to leverage the xAPI to better track, measure, and manage their learning efforts. The time is now; the xAPI can improve the ways you create and deliver content and classes, track interactions, communicate, and measure performance. Armed with knowledge and the proverbial “Swiss Army knife” of xAPI functions, you can begin to “slice, saw, tweeze, and pick” your way through training obstacles.

Well-rounded eLearning courses leverage multiple elements to enhance learning.  These may include video, audio, activities, text, and images. How do you ultimately know whether these elements, in particular the complex activities and videos you crafted, are in fact enhancing understanding? How can you better determine whether there is a relationship between the activities and end-user performance?

Screencasts can be a powerful tool for eLearning developers. Well-produced screencasts can be great for software simulation, process demonstration, or providing background and context within an eLearning course. Screencasts are relatively easy and cheap to produce. However, poorly produced screencasts can be, at best, boring—and, at worst, injurious to your learning goals. While many take the idea of screencasts for granted, there are a number of techniques that can improve screencast quality and engage learners more deeply and for longer periods of time.

Video is eating the Internet. We’re consuming and creating more of it than ever, and 64 percent of consumers identify as binge watchers. But these trends don’t just apply to entertainment content—they’re having a huge impact on learning, and learners’ expectations, too.

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

If your organization is going through change, you’re probably doing a lot to make sure your people are prepared—videos, emails, tools, learning, meetings, etc. The problem is motivating people to care enough before go-live (before the moment of apply) to engage in those helpful experiences. Here’s an example of how you can elevate your change initiative above the noise and get your people to want to get ready.

Implementing effective performance support is challenging. How do you deliver useful information at the time of need without being disruptive to the employee’s workflow? How do you integrate the content effectively within the context of the user’s task at hand? How do you leverage the available technology (devices, web access, security) to reach the target audience and provide a strong user experience?

Performance support is very different from training. In a world where many people are conditioned to think that learning should look like school, with teachers, students, and formal instruction, it can be difficult to get an organization and its workers to adjust to a performance support approach.

With more companies taking advantage of satellite offices and field employees, recognizing the differences in their needs from on-site teams is crucial. Their physical distance from training and marketing teams means they can’t easily access key information, and when they can, it’s often out-of-date. The result? A potentially negative impact on your relationships with top channel partners.

As a follow-up to 2015’s Performance Support Symposium presentation, we present the results and lessons learned!

Binders. One-sheets. Printouts. For salespeople and those who work on the road, the backseat is full of them. They are used not only for collateral but also for training customers on products and services. But are these the right tools? What if the customer has only five minutes? How can an individual quickly and efficiently discuss a topic in an engaging way and avoid the paper clutter?

The current state of mobility and the demand it has created for shorter content lengths, collaborative environments, and personalized experiences are the primary drivers of a renaissance that sees learning seeding itself in practically every environment encountered by today’s worker. Learning has propagated beyond the LMS, beyond the classroom, beyond performance support tools. Organizations must come up with new eLearning strategies and archetypes to work within this evolving learning ecosystem.

Desktop platforms are giving way to mobile in many contexts. Opportunities abound. But eLearning designers and developers are used to a different set of paradigms undergirded by different competencies than those they need to design and develop mobile solutions.

It has always been tricky to track experiences and results when learning happens outside the LMS. Using the xAPI, you can track a huge amount of activity with a robust and flexible specification. The next challenge is to identify learners and capture what they do in the real world in digital format, then put that data to use for learners, their leadership, and the learning and development organization.

Electronic performance support systems, workflow learning, just-in-time training, help on steroids. Even though performance support (PS) has existed as a concept for more than 25 years, its many names are a testament to how difficult it can be to explain, let alone sell, PS to customers, senior leaders, or sometimes even your own team.

With the proliferation of mobile deployment to training audiences and rapidly emerging technology, training and development professionals often struggle with keeping their mobile knowledge and skills current. Sprint University confronted this problem head-on by implementing a mobile learning program.

The Nature Conservancy recently implemented a new constituent relationship management (CRM) application used by more than 1,000 staff members across the organization. The new CRM application not only changed how staff tracks and manages constituent relationships in an application, but also significantly changed the business processes surrounding CRM. An instructor-led training program was developed; however, staff needed ongoing support to address knowledge gaps and ongoing changes to the business processes.

Getting started is often the hardest challenge when implementing a performance support solution. You have recognized the need for performance support and want to implement it in your organization, but where to begin? What factors should you take into consideration? What resources are required? Where should you first deploy the solution? Across which business processes? These questions and more will be addressed in this session.

Performance support can be a powerful addition to an organization’s learning and performance ecosystem as it is tasked with delivering more content in less time. Well-designed performance support solutions provide task-based information in a layered approach for intuitive fingertip access to specific resources at the performer’s moment of need. But how do you really design for the moment of apply?

Preparing to implement a performance support process requires forethought and planning, but it doesn’t need to be daunting or overwhelming. In this session, we will explore ways you can prepare for a successful implementation and share real-world examples of how outlining the right steps beforehand will ensure the best outcome. 

In the 21^st century, it’s increasingly challenging to keep people engaged in content. Today’s learning professionals must employ new technologies to influence and change attitudes and behavior. Interactive video is one of those technology solutions that the market is gravitating toward, and for good reason. However, there are many different solutions out there, and not all are created equal. When instructional designers and eLearning professionals are selecting technology for their programs, where should they begin?

Employees learn many of their job competencies from one another. But it’s hard for a manager to know what they’re learning, from whom, and how well they’ve learned it. These informal interactions are almost impossible to track, and it’s hard to keep bad habits from spreading. If managers had a way to track and guide this informal learning, it would become a powerful part of employee development.

Mobile learning has tremendous value, but for many organizations, going mobile is a big step. That’s why, when trying to develop a mobile learning culture within your organization, often the hardest part is convincing internal stakeholders. Amid budget constraints, complex infrastructures, IT restrictions, and philosophical misalignment, how do you make a compelling case for mLearning within your organization?

Optical character recognition (OCR) technology can take your magazine article, brochure, or PDF, single out letters on the image, and put them into words, enabling you to access and edit the content. Similarly, facial recognition software breaks down an image and can provide data related to gender, age, and ethnicity. Couple these with interior location technology, and you have the potential for powerful organizational learning opportunities.

Text expansion is an inherent challenge with localizing any content. Accommodating the additional scripts or subtitles poses different technical and content challenges than do traditional eLearning courses developed using authoring tools.

Increasingly, companies must use innovate ways to add to the bottom line. Unlike previous disrupters in mobile and eLearning, Gear VR, powered by Oculus, takes video experiences to the next level. Where does virtual reality fit into an organizational learning strategy? How does an organization effectively move forward to maximize its capability?

Performance on leadership development competencies, like coaching, influencing, and speaking skills, has an ineffable quality difficult to capture in words. If you want to explain what’s great and what to work on while evaluating participants, you or they will miss something in the translation from behavior to observation to words on a page.

Concise visual metaphors facilitate the best learning. Think back to high school, college, or a meeting where you experienced that “aha” moment while someone was drawing on a whiteboard. How can you reproduce this learning experience online with a small budget and without an art degree? Whiteboard-style recordings can be just as effective as the fancy Flash or HTML5 videos you might produce with more expensive software.

Undefined business processes, untested and incomplete systems, continually changing requirements, and scope creep—sound familiar? One or all of these conditions can wreak havoc on a project and cause it to continue on well past its targeted end date. How do you develop content for a project that continually evolves? How do you maximize limited resources under these conditions? How do you survive the project that never seems to end?

This session addresses learning designers’ challenges with determining which type of performance support is suitable for a given audience, their role, and the tools they have access to in their work environment. At the Bank of Montreal, access to technology-based performance support varies widely and affects how learning and transfer materials can be designed.

With the release of the “granite” version of cmi5, the next generation of SCORM has finally arrived. To take advantage of cmi5, you will need a new tool set in your development kit. First, you need to know how to send xAPI statements that conform to the cmi5 specification. Then you need to know how to read and write to the xAPI State and Agent services following the cmi5 rules.

Mobile learning is one component in a whole learning ecosystem. Many organizations have discovered what does not work: simply pushing existing content out to mobile as though it were merely an infrastructure. To design and deliver effective mobile learning requires a new design mindset: a mindset for mobile. This will help the organization adapt its approach to truly unlock the power of mobile learning.

mLearning has been on the radar for a few years now, but many organizations are still getting started. And that’s a vulnerable position; there are a number of mistakes that are easy to repeat if you haven’t been paying attention and really gotten steeped in the possibilities. Further, the field is changing rapidly. Yet with some basic models that help you “think different,” you’re ready to take advantage.

Most instructional designers have experience creating storyboards prior to developing eLearning solutions. The storyboarding process enables the designer to work through a concept and test various ways of structuring content. Storyboards are also used to communicate design concepts to eLearning developers when working in teams to build training solutions.

Skill training in first aid had changed little since the Knights of St. John formalized the process in the 11^th century. The focus had been on in-class demonstrations, in-class practice, and paper-based exams, and students updated their skills only every three years. Fast forward to 2016; people aren’t learning that way anymore. So how do you transform hundreds of years of subject matter expertise into a 21^st-century learning solution? Follow St. John Ambulance’s journey from inspiration at mLearnCon 2014 to leaping forward to embrace evolution through mobile learning.

Video is the go-to medium in society, and it can be a valuable tool for delivering performance support and training. Most companies are searching for metrics to evaluate the impact of learning content produced, including videos, and asking learning teams to demonstrate ROI: Does their content produce measurable benefits? Which design techniques result in the best content? Without being able to successfully leverage analytics, learning teams cannot answer.

For trainers or educators who need to stay relevant and maintain their creative edge, a fundamental knowledge of basic video production and editing is essential. Creating effective, professional-quality video training for delivery on multiple devices, including smartphones and tablets, presents a variety of design challenges that require specialized planning with attention to image composition, duration, script writing, recording methods, and editing techniques.

Finding ways to make learning “stick” with technology is always a challenge. Augmented reality (AR) is one of those “make it stick” technologies. With AR, you enable students to interact with the world using their mobile devices. This can improve their understanding of lessons through direct interaction with the objects around them. Now add video to AR projects, and you’ve combined a popular medium of instruction with cutting-edge tech.

Capturing intellectual property has become imperative as more employees job hop or retire, taking the company “secret sauce” with them. L&D pros need to adopt efficiencies for SME video interviews in order to leverage their wisdom for state-of-the-art knowledge transfer.

The performance support industry has been searching for a true “blended learning” solution for years and has fallen short because it has been about blending training only. That has limited instructors’ impact and reach beyond the classroom, leaving them to be seen as event-based only.

Moments after a performance support solution has been introduced, it is quite possible that it contains irrelevant or inaccurate information due to the constant state of change businesses are experiencing in technology, policy, and process. A core tenet of performance support is that it is immediately helpful. Often, it takes just one irrelevant or inaccurate experience to cause a user to abandon a performance support solution permanently.