It’s a daunting challenge to transition from individual contributor to frontline leader; a challenge that requires new leaders to develop what can be a bewildering variety of new skills. To succeed, new leaders must practice those skills on the job, but few actually do. As a result, many leadership development programs focus on providing great training events only.

Over the last decade, there has been an industry-wide emphasis on developing learning objects with embedded gamification elements. However, taking the concept of gamification past the singular learning objects to the more global, overall learner experience is more of a rarity.

As adoption of the xAPI begins to take hold, the convergence of working and learning offers instructional designers the opportunity and the challenge to do more than ever before. The xAPI allows for more robust and interesting tracking of the learning process, including learning that happens outside the LMS and on the job. As an instructional designer, are you ready to step up to this challenge?

In early 2014, Jane Bozarth’s husband was diagnosed with a large tumor perched atop his brain stem like a golf ball on a tee. The story of his surgery and recovery—“Performance Matters,” which appeared in The eLearning Guild’s Learning Solutions Magazine—became the most popular piece she’s ever published. This session will explore the story, its associated observations, and issues learned throughout relevant to L&D.

Subject matter experts (SMEs) are the lifeline of work for instructional designers, trainers, and facilitators of learning. SMEs bring the content to life and provide both relevance and context. However, it can often seem like you and your SME are speaking two different languages, causing the instructional design process and, more importantly, communication to break down. How can you work better with and coach SMEs through your design and development processes to better ensure a positive working relationship and, most importantly, a successful learning initiative?

Have you ever wished you could wave a magic wand to make your narrated voice work sound clean and crisp? Well, there is no magic wand, but a digital audio workstation (DAW) comes close. Broadcast professionals spend hundreds if not thousands of dollars creating their ideal audio post-production environment, but with careful planning you won’t need to spend a penny.

Video has long since been a medium that evokes emotion and sells products through dynamic storytelling. In the past, however, it has been a passive medium. Fortunately, new knowledge and advancements make it possible to create more interactive video outputs.

Producing virtual sessions can be a technical challenge, especially when some participants are located in areas with low or sporadic Internet connections, either domestically or around the globe. Virtual learning professionals located in such environments require effective, simple, on-time support: before, during, and after training deliveries.

Feedback not only serves to inform learners completing eLearning modules, but it can also motivate or demotivate if not properly constructed. How feedback is targeted, displayed, and conveyed can greatly impact any eLearning course’s success. Are you doing all you can to provide your learners the insights and information they need to learn all they can?

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, as you likely already have with 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 using a device you already own, you can be more efficient and keep project budgets down.

Many learning and development (L&D) organizations today are well positioned to enable executives within their enterprise to drive change—rapidly capitalizing on emerging changes in technology, process, and skill. However, not all executives outside of L&D view it as an essential, foundational partner. In fact, according to a recent survey of senior learning professionals conducted by the Human Capital Institute, a great challenge facing CLOs today is gaining executive buy-in and overcoming the view of L&D as a cost center.

The Experience API and emerging technologies afford organizations the opportunity to create adaptive learning ecosystems of functionality to support learners. Designing learning ecosystems and adaptive systems requires a shift in design approaches. While the Experience API can provide common tracking similar to SCORM for a learning management system, it really extends the ability to collect data with value between systems. This intersystem data value, combined with new design approaches, unlocks a number of use cases.