Agile processes are all the rage due to their ability to create products faster and more efficiently. This means that instructional designers and other learning and development professionals are being challenged to approach their work with speed, flexibility, and accuracy. However, typical design and development processes fail to support this challenge.

eLearning and instructional professionals often have questions surrounding design vision, which is the range of motion of creative design ideas that they can incorporate visually into learning projects. Many find themselves struggling to be more creative and seek to extend their visual approaches to type, images, and composition. For the designer, more methods mean more opportunities to create better visual solutions for learning materials and content-driven courses.

Your company is growing fast. Your team has expanded way beyond the small, intimate group it once was. Demands are increasing. Development tools are changing. The new people have to be brought up to speed, now. And your industry is heavily regulated, so it has to be right. How do you maintain the independent spirit that made your company successful and still get all the work done?

Designing open and digital badges for evidence presented in curated learning ePortfolios, endorses and verifies the claims that a learner makes in this digital narrative—these claims are made against badge criteria and standards that have been co-designed by key stakeholders in the learning journey. Dartmouth College designed and developed badging to track the portion of a course that focused on digital scholarship skills where students could receive both a grade and a badge for each assignment, which would earn a progress badge, and completion of an entire training sequence or practice sequence would earn a completion badge.

Let’s face it. Learning proposals rarely elicit enthusiastic responses from clients, except when the solution includes video. Suddenly, the decision makers are paying attention. But those nods of approval start disappearing when the discussion turns to the cost, timelines, and sustainability of outsourcing video production. So you have two options: get out your wallet, or find a cheaper, faster, more flexible way to produce the videos you need.

How do you know if the money spent on training and development is worth it? One of the ways find out is by using analytics to assess who is using content: where, when, and how. Deciphering the ways to analyze a program’s effectiveness can be confusing. There is a lot of talk about big data, but what does it all mean? And just because there is a lot of data, does that really make any of it valuable?

During design and development SMEs, stakeholders sometimes suggest ideas or practices that are antithetical to good instructional design. For example, a designer might have a stakeholder who believes it’s best to simply film a daylong stand-up training session and deliver it as one video. In this case, like so many others, it’s helpful for the designer to identify research findings to help them understand why learning should be designed differently.

Despite its growing popularity, online facilitation remains a mystery to many faculty and workplace learning professionals. Often restricted by learning management system platforms, online facilitators feel constrained when designing, developing, and delivering high-impact, high-engagement learning events.

Performance orientation and discovery efforts should be a priority before making any decisions about what kind of training should be developed, if any, and how to design, develop, and deliver training using embedded performance support assets.

In today’s device-rich world, it’s absolutely essential to make your eLearning courses available on all types of devices, irrespective of their varying screen sizes, in the best possible manner. Creating responsive courses helps you achieve this goal and helps meet learners where they are.

Many speakers have aptly discussed the need for experiential, problem-based learning. These talks leave educators, consultants, and designers excited and motivated for change. But still, they are left wondering what makes experiential learning successful? And, even more, they don’t know how to effectively use technology when implementing experiential learning.

Organizations are increasingly looking beyond the confines of learning management systems. Where organizations were once focused on content delivery, they’re now switching to user-generated content and more social, connected learning experiences. As devices and sensors are added to the learning environment, datasets have marched toward the realms of big data. Yet, as is so often the case with data-driven strategies, connecting data with action can remain a mystery.

Training events often fall short of delivering results in the workplace. Training can be too far removed from application on the job, and in many cases there is a reliance on outmoded models that fail to take into account the dynamic environment of the modern workplace. The demand for information and action is accelerating. This paradigm requires a different approach to supporting performance and development, including real-time access to people, process, tools, and content, linked to the unique needs of the individual.

If you taught them this, why don’t they do it? Educational services 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—Saint Vincent is able to significantly impact job performance.