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.

Interviewing is a common way to gather information and a widely used approach in learning and development, HR, and marketing research. Capturing this information on video for analysis and reuse is a good way to extend the life of captured content. However, many people don’t know what makes one interview more effective than another in what they capture and the questions being asked.

Learning organizations jump feet first into emerging trends without the right people, in the right seats, on the bus. The result of this approach is waste. Video production requirements go beyond the basic understanding of consumer electronics and, within the intersection of learning and development, can result in a considerable learning curve for quality production outcomes.

Subject matter experts (SMEs) have expert knowledge to share. For rapid development situations or just-in-time training, SMEs can contribute good, solid content videos that can be shared with learners—and they can create the videos when they have the time or when a situation arises that would be a great video example, such as demonstrating a process or recalling a dangerous situation.

Practice makes perfect. Few would argue with that statement, but how do you provide enough time for ongoing practice and meaningful feedback with time-crunched employees?

The use of online video has become an essential part of teaching and learning. At the same time, it is challenging to provide accessible video accommodations for audiences across platforms and languages. Google thinks that all video material should be universally accessible—why not caption?

Organizations transforming their businesses for new digital platforms and marketplaces need to make such transition as effective and painless as possible. During the rollout of new software platforms, companies need to continuously monitor the impact that new digital procedures and processes are having on workforce acceptance and customers’ engagement. More effective and intelligent solutions are needed to make companies cross the digital chasm—without falling into it.

Juggling the related-but-different needs for effective formal learning and informal performance support can be daunting. So how do you keep your project from falling short in delivering client needs on time and within budget? How do you adjust when client needs are often changing? Agile provides a framework for adapting to change as it happens and working with the client to deliver the content most needed by learners.

Business leaders often request training when there are better options available. Even when they do need “courses,” it’s often only to check off a box. In these situations, you have a responsibility to validate that creating a course is the most effective and efficient approach. Even when courses are appropriate, they’re rarely enough on their own to drive the change organizations need.

As a performance support professional, you “get it,” but what if your leadership doesn’t? How do you prove that PS is the way to address a business issue and move your organization toward innovation? This session will review a step-by-step framework for developing a proof of concept and demonstrate several budget-friendly tools you can use to make PS come alive.

When investing in technologies and applications to enable effective workforce performance support, who is buying? Who is investing time? Who manages them? Who creates the assets? Who deploys the assets? Who are the beneficiaries? 

Two of the most popular technologies used to engage learners today are video and mobile. Videos are becoming increasingly interactive, even on mobile devices, but developing these videos can be complex. Where does an organization start?

The explosion of mobile devices has revolutionized the web design world, which has shed approaches based on centuries-old printing methods to embrace a new grammar of design, responsive web design (RWD). But the world of learning has not caught up. Like learning any new language, working in RWD means learning to think differently. Thinking differently, though, gives you an opportunity to change how you design learning experiences for the better.

For many organizations, the front-line staff would most benefit from mLearning, yet challenges arise when this audience has different levels of technological adoption and is geographically dispersed. For all learners, mLearning needs to be intuitive, effective, and simple. How can L&D professionals make the best possible mLearning solutions that truly deliver on the learning objectives?

There is a lot of mediocre training out there. This can be attributed to a shortage of time and money available to corporate training departments. Many of the DIY development tools currently in use yield passive learning experiences that are not engaging and do not require critical thinking or problem-solving skills. We are out to change that by using game-based technologies to improve engagement and produce measurable results.

As training audiences are deployed with mobile devices to use for training and performance support, performance technologists often face challenging logistical and infrastructure constraints when building performance solutions.

The convergence of mobile delivery, micro-learning, and new authoring tools provides great opportunities to innovate where limited time and budget are available. Much mobile-delivered micro-learning focuses on spaced repetition and memorization. Micro-sims go beyond knowledge and comprehension and require learners to synthesize and apply concepts in realistic contexts.

L&D is vital to the continued growth of any organization, but how do you develop relevant content that your employees can relate to? And how do you keep your employees engaged and involved in the process of learning?

Online video-based instruction can be just as ineffective as traditional face-to-face lectures when learners are passive recipients of information. The “testing effect” describes the observation that the process of remembering concepts or facts increases long-term retention of those concepts or facts. The creation of question-embedded videos offers a practical way to increase user engagement and increase long-term retention.

Incorporating gaming techniques (serious games, social games, and gamification) within educational programs and corporate training experiences is one of the hottest topics in the learning and development field today. If your organization isn’t already leveraging the power of gaming, then this session is the perfect way to quickly assess whether and where mobile gaming and gamification techniques are right for your organization.

Let’s face it: Learning content is getting out of control. Designers and developers can’t find anything and end up reinventing the wheel. This is a symptom of content overload, a condition as organizations try to make content more bite-sized, modular, and mobile to meet the needs of modern learners. Learners are experiencing it, too. As organizations adapt learning strategies, content strategy must follow.

Mobile first is the standard in today’s learning and development industry. Companies need ways to be able to reach their sales reps wherever they are. Many companies do not have the means to develop device-agnostic mobile applications for learning in the time frame needed to provide just-in-time learning. Mobile messaging can offer a just-in-time learning solution without the development time.

Do the people who most need your mobile learning reside internationally, although you are apprehensive of taking on a global launch? Do you want to learn more about the considerations that impact your global mobile learning success? Maybe you have a solid plan, or maybe you are ready to take the jump and want to validate your strategy with a global organization on the same journey.

The 70:20:10 model holds that 70 percent of learning happens informally on the job. However, there are a lot of distractions at work that inhibit the amount of learning that can be achieved—deadlines, coworker interruptions, meetings, etc. Also, since learning is an afterthought when performing your job, it’s a fairly inefficient process, especially when compared to the other 30 percent, where learning is typically the overarching theme.

Adobe Captivate is a widely used authoring tool for eLearning courseware and mobile learning experiences. Now Adobe offers developers the opportunity to create responsive animations to their mobile learning projects.

Many people accept that the way to extend learning solutions to the moment of need is through performance support. But while L&D professionals recognize the value of this approach, actually knowing how to take existing projects and transform them into solutions that truly support people in the moment can be a challenge.

“If you taught them this, why don’t they do it?” Educational services staff at Saint Vincent Hospital got tired of hearing this question and started looking for a new learning paradigm for the institution. The solution was found in performance support. By blending learning opportunities and performance support for associates before a class, during a class, and on the job, organizations are able to significantly impact job performance.

Learning and development professionals strive to meet on-the-job performance support needs in a typical work environment. Now, imagine the needs of a laboratory where employees are responsible for manufacturing radiopharmaceuticals (radioactive drugs). Cardinal Health technicians operate in a highly regulated lab environment with ever-changing operating procedures that affect a manufacturing process in which one misstep could impact a patient.

We all know that video is an incredibly effective learning method. Learners can remember up to six times more from trainings and classes that incorporate videos than they do from those that don’t. Many trainers, however, are not sure how to most effectively use videos; simply showing clips is not the best method. In fact, it’s a missed opportunity!

With its shift of learning away from information overload delivered in large chunks to learning in more manageable increments within the context of work, performance support is already an improvement on traditional methods of training. Looking to further improve learner performance, in this session we’ll discuss the possibilities of imagining “support” as “learning” with insights from psychological and neuroscience research. Building on unconventional notions about the nature of memory, constructing learning methods on a “remembering” curve, and attending to the learning environment are just a few of the opportunities we will explore in this open conversation with panelists.

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.

Most performance support systems assume an environment where Internet and a tablet or laptop are available. However, there are situations in which access to Internet devices is not possible, like in remote education or when sales agents work in remote areas. In such places, SMS is the only channel for delivering performance support.

Including media in the training you create can be a fantastic way to make your content easier to understand and remember. But you don’t always have the time and budget to hire someone to create these design assets for you, and sometimes stock media just won’t cut it. There is another option, however: creating media yourself. And you likely already have two tools that can help you out—your smartphone and tablet. By knowing more about the apps and tools that can help you create some of the media needed, and by using a device you already own, you can be more efficient and keep project budgets down.

While technology has transformed people’s lives, L&D has primarily stayed the same. Sure, the industry has evolved by utilizing technology to access and track content, but it is still focused on the traditional course mentality. Should you be going down the same path with mobile learning? What are the opportunities for mobile to help promote a fundamental change in how and when you provide education?

When they go right, video projects can go incredibly right! But when they go wrong, they can go very, very wrong. The stakes are higher with eLearning in video form because of the costs, expectations, and limitations in making updates to content.

When hiring entry-level employees who need to be able to start work immediately, you need to ensure they have the skills required to complete the job. It isn’t always practical to have a manager supervising them through each step of their job when working on a tight deadline. Using online video, the new hire can learn the processes of the organization while completing work.

Educational video distribution is a moving target, and the options for distributing video can be daunting. Apple, Amazon, Google, and others all have separate ecosystems for video distribution. The ultimate solution for many is to have a presence in each ecosystem; however, learning exactly how to prepare videos, apps, and metadata content for each can be time-consuming and confusing.

Video is all around us. But what does video actually do to the brain? And are there best practices to keep in mind when you use video for learning? A nice video is not always a good video for learning purposes.

Incorporating video in a responsive performance support project can be daunting. Video done for vertical delivery comes with specific dos and don’ts. This session shows how to use vertical video, the new Adobe Animate CC, and Adobe Captivate to make cost-effective, rapid mobile performance support modules.

Creating a mobile app for training can be hard. Tracking user progress and completion in your mobile app? Harder. There is a lot to consider when looking to create and leverage mobile applications for training purposes, but the tools and techniques are available.

As organizations realize the value of mobile learning, an increased number are jumping at the opportunity to offer their employees mobile training opportunities. Currently, many mobile learning applications focus on delivering content. However, the most effective learning comes from applying information, especially with peers. How can you create mobile learning opportunities for learners to practice new concepts and receive real-time feedback from peers?

JLG, a leading manufacturer of lift equipment for various industries, needed a way for site supervisors to verify whether an operator had the proper certifications to operate any given piece of equipment, down to the specific model. The company struggled with providing immediate compliance instructions.

The quickening pace of change and increasing learner expectations demand learning approaches that can be produced quickly, at lower cost, and are easily accessible and readily available. Removing employees from the workflow for classroom sessions is not always feasible, nor does it provide the necessary just-in-time support. At the same time, the knowledge and information learners must have to support customers has expanded. Finally, the workforce is more distributed, more virtual.

Video is beginning to dominate the focus of learning and development. The technology and techniques for creating effective video content are now reaching most people responsible for using this medium to improve organizational performance. With a plethora of approaches around animation, motion, and streaming, where is one to begin?

Video is not a new medium, but not every instructional designer or developer intuitively knows how to create video or what makes it good. It’s important to understand the qualities that make for great videos. Organizations need data to drive decisions, and research is available to do just that.

There’s no question that video is trending upward and becoming more viable as a workplace learning and development (L&D) solution. Still, one significant barrier is focusing on the video itself—the videography and/or animation and editing that leads to the final product. Like all solutions from an L&D perspective, it still needs design. For video, that design document is a script, and it’s one of the most vital and most often ignored steps in the video production process. But how does someone with an L&D background learn to write better scripts?

Performance is not just an end result but a continuous flow of interactions between the individual and the environment, leading to a defined goal. Organizations normally try to keep this process in line through periodic evaluations or other methods, but tracking performance at work on a continuous basis with a geographically dispersed workforce is a challenge. This can result in failed objectives or substandard outcomes.

All too often, embedded performance support (EPS) is seen as a technology or a software application to purchase. While both may come into play, EPS is a discipline that drives new skills in L&D as well as new methods and, potentially, new technology. History shows that being ready to pursue adoption of EPS is not the same as being in a state of readiness to sustain the adoption.