Sharing What Works

March 22 – 24, 2017 Orlando, FL

Register Now Includes:

Mark your calendars now for Learning Solutions 2018. Join us March 27 – 29, 2018 at The Rosen Centre in Orlando, FL! Learn more.

Learning Solutions Sessions

Learning Solutions 2017 Conference & Expo offers over 160 sessions covering eLearning best practices, how-tos, case studies, and emerging trends. These sessions will help you develop new skills and knowledge, which will help you build more engaging and effective learning experiences.

Find sessions on topics like these:

Specialized Focuses

In addition to the great tracks at Learning Solutions 2017, there are a number of specialized sessions curated to help you put your skills into practice immediately.

AlignED sessions focus on what higher ed and corporate learning professionals can learn from one another. These sessions are equally applicable to both academic and business environments.

Making Measurement Work sessions focus on the practical applications of data and analytics. They also show how organizations are being strategic in their approaches to measuring learning.

BYOL (Bring Your Own Laptop®) sessions and workshops ensure that you receive in-depth, hands-on training and enable you to follow along with the instructor step-by-step.

To give a brief overview of their sessions, many speakers have provided sessions trailers which are located on the description pages of those sessions. To view a complete list of these trailers, please visit our YouTube playlist page.

Sessions on Wednesday, March 22, 2017

7:30 AM Wed, March 22

 

Kick-start your day with Morning Buzz, the ever-popular “Early Bird” discussions. This is your chance to grab a cup of coffee and meet other conference attendees in a relaxed, casual environment, so you can share your best practices, insights, and tips while learning from one another’s experiences.

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7:30 AM Wed, March 22

 

Kick-start your day with Morning Buzz, the ever-popular “Early Bird” discussions. This is your chance to grab a cup of coffee and meet other conference attendees in a relaxed, casual environment, so you can share your best practices, insights, and tips while learning from one another’s experiences.

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7:30 AM Wed, March 22

 

Kick-start your day with Morning Buzz, the ever-popular “Early Bird” discussions. This is your chance to grab a cup of coffee and meet other conference attendees in a relaxed, casual environment, so you can share your best practices, insights, and tips while learning from one another’s experiences.

Read More

7:30 AM Wed, March 22

 

Kick-start your day with Morning Buzz, the ever-popular “Early Bird” discussions. This is your chance to grab a cup of coffee and meet other conference attendees in a relaxed, casual environment, so you can share your best practices, insights, and tips while learning from one another’s experiences.

Read More

7:30 AM Wed, March 22

 

Kick-start your day with Morning Buzz, the ever-popular “Early Bird” discussions. This is your chance to grab a cup of coffee and meet other conference attendees in a relaxed, casual environment, so you can share your best practices, insights, and tips while learning from one another’s experiences.

Read More

7:30 AM Wed, March 22

 

Kick-start your day with Morning Buzz, the ever-popular “Early Bird” discussions. This is your chance to grab a cup of coffee and meet other conference attendees in a relaxed, casual environment, so you can share your best practices, insights, and tips while learning from one another’s experiences.

Read More

7:30 AM Wed, March 22

 

Kick-start your day with Morning Buzz, the ever-popular “Early Bird” discussions. This is your chance to grab a cup of coffee and meet other conference attendees in a relaxed, casual environment, so you can share your best practices, insights, and tips while learning from one another’s experiences.

Read More

7:30 AM Wed, March 22

 

Kick-start your day with Morning Buzz, the ever-popular “Early Bird” discussions. This is your chance to grab a cup of coffee and meet other conference attendees in a relaxed, casual environment, so you can share your best practices, insights, and tips while learning from one another’s experiences.

Read More

7:30 AM Wed, March 22

 

Kick-start your day with Morning Buzz, the ever-popular “Early Bird” discussions. This is your chance to grab a cup of coffee and meet other conference attendees in a relaxed, casual environment, so you can share your best practices, insights, and tips while learning from one another’s experiences.

Read More

7:30 AM Wed, March 22

 

Kick-start your day with Morning Buzz, the ever-popular “Early Bird” discussions. This is your chance to grab a cup of coffee and meet other conference attendees in a relaxed, casual environment, so you can share your best practices, insights, and tips while learning from one another’s experiences.

Read More

7:30 AM Wed, March 22

 

Kick-start your day with Morning Buzz, the ever-popular “Early Bird” discussions. This is your chance to grab a cup of coffee and meet other conference attendees in a relaxed, casual environment, so you can share your best practices, insights, and tips while learning from one another’s experiences.

Read More

7:30 AM Wed, March 22

 

Kick-start your day with Morning Buzz, the ever-popular “Early Bird” discussions. This is your chance to grab a cup of coffee and meet other conference attendees in a relaxed, casual environment, so you can share your best practices, insights, and tips while learning from one another’s experiences.

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10:00 AM Wed, March 22

Track: Mobile

Are you looking for amazing ways to create content using your mobile device? In this session, you will learn how to use your phone or tablet to brainstorm, create audio- and video-based recordings, and animate, using several mind-blowing apps. You’ll leave the session feeling inspired, and you’ll have practical information to apply to one or more apps when you get back to your device. 

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10:45 AM Wed, March 22

Track: Instructional Design

Whether you’re looking to showcase your work internally, seeking employment, or prospecting for clients, developing and maintaining an up-to-date portfolio will help you articulate what you do well. With a little forethought and planning, your portfolio can become one of your most valuable tools, opening up conversations and possibilities beyond your expectations.

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10:45 AM Wed, March 22

Track: Instructional Design

Traditional eLearning can be dull and demotivating, a reality that runs counter to human nature. People eagerly consume and comprehend new ideas whenever they find the content engaging. They want eLearning that leverages learners’ innate desire for autonomy, mastery, and purpose.

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10:45 AM Wed, March 22

Track: Virtual Classroom

Are your virtual classes stagnant? Do you find you’re using the same tools—polling, whiteboards, chat—that you've used for years? Are your participants multitasking, despite your efforts to draw them in? Do you want to find new ways to engage your audience? If you need to shake up your approach to virtual classrooms, then why not look to the future and consider how new technologies and new mindsets will influence your virtual training's effectiveness?

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10:45 AM Wed, March 22

Track: Games and Gamification

Many professionals in eLearning are attempting to use gamification and serious games to spark employee engagement and drive learning retention. Everyone is working to make the best serious game that will enhance the learning objectives and retain learning.

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10:45 AM Wed, March 22

Track: Data and Measurement

Your access to learning-related data has grown dramatically over recent years. But just because you have a large volume of data doesn’t mean it necessarily provides value. While tools like xAPI make it increasingly easy to acquire data about learners’ activities, this information provides little benefit if you don’t know how to design to acquire meaningful data, interpret that data, or improve your learning design based on what you’ve discovered.

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10:45 AM Wed, March 22

Track: Video

Implementing a video strategy is always tricky when juggling budget line items. There’s the risk of throwing too much money at equipment, and the risk of not making the right choices that will produce the level of quality your team expects.

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10:45 AM Wed, March 22

Track: Media

Do you know how to create an effective diagram? Can you create a graph that tells a story? Because visualizing abstractions can improve comprehension and facilitate learning, an important skill in L&D is the ability to convey abstract concepts and statistics in a meaningful way. But if you don’t know how to design the best type of graphic to meet your learning goal, how will your explanation be a success?

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10:45 AM Wed, March 22

Track: Management and Strategy

On time. Within budget. What they need (even if that changes!). These are moving targets, and yet you’re expected to deliver all three. The software development industry is embracing agile methods to address these issues, and there is much that the eLearning development world can learn from it. Agile provides a framework for adapting to change as it happens and working with the client to deliver content that learners need most.

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10:45 AM Wed, March 22

Track: Media

Education and training departments work under tight budgets and deadlines. In this environment, the temptation to use images and media from the web increases, especially in light of the plethora of social spaces that are used to share such objects. But what can you use? Under what circumstances? And how do we give credit where credit is due?

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10:45 AM Wed, March 22

Track: Tools

Video can be a powerful tool in training, but many of the quality video tools are expensive and difficult to master. The average developer just does not have the budget, the skills, or (most importantly) the time to become proficient in a high-end video editing tool.

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10:45 AM Wed, March 22

Track: Tools

The Americans with Disability Act (ADA) requires that employers provide “reasonable accommodations to qualified applicants and employees.” But many instructional designers worry that accessible content will be less interactive and thus less effective. Others want to do more but don’t know where to begin. In the end, many often just create a printable text version of the content and call it good enough. You can and should do better than that for your learners.

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10:45 AM Wed, March 22

Track: Management and Strategy

For years, the learning and development field universally agreed on the value of a learning culture. L&D professionals believe that a learning culture will help people grow, develop, and support the transformational needs of the organization. However, people have traditionally spoken about learning culture in very binary terms: Either an organization has a learning culture or it has nothing at all. This is incorrect. Every organization has a learning culture at a varying level of maturity. Your responsibility is to identify where your organization is and where it needs to be, and to help evolve the culture to support the pace and direction of the business.

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11:00 AM Wed, March 22

Track: Video

Retention and engagement are two drivers you focus on when trying to design effective learning experiences. That said, it can be difficult to find solutions that manage to retain your audience’s interest, present the content you need them to know, test their knowledge, and adjust materials based on the results. But a blending of technologies is emerging that uses the pairing of attention-grabbing media with more adaptive approaches to achieve all these goals and more: interactive video.

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11:00 AM Wed, March 22

Track: Media

Augmented reality has been around for decades, but it has recently resurfaced and become a hot topic. Every day you are bombarded with new solutions utilizing this idea. However, many of them just multiply the simplistic and common way of thinking. People used to associate AR with mobiles and glasses. Is this field really so limited? Let’s redefine augmented reality to find new ways of designing innovative and disruptive learning solutions.

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11:00 AM Wed, March 22

Track: Instructional Design

Sales training can often seem like the toughest nut to crack. You plan, design, learn new tools, hire consultants, and still you haven’t moved the needle. The sales team is the lifeblood of the company, generating revenue every day. The demand is high and the pressure strong. Those who are charged with training them face an equal challenge: improve productivity, accelerate deals, and enable individual and team success. How can you accomplish it, especially if you are a team of one?

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12:00 PM Wed, March 22

Track: Tools

Time is money, and so are happy clients! Come spend some time with the Articulate team and learn how you can speed up your workflow, help your budget, and increase your productivity with the tools in Articulate 360.

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12:00 PM Wed, March 22

Track: Games and Gamification

Eight seconds: That’s the time you have to grab an employee’s attention. Five minutes: That’s how long you can hold it. Both are down by 50 percent in 10 years. Twenty-one: That’s the number of times people shift attention between smartphone, tablet, and laptop. What’s causing this attention deficit problem? Every day hundreds of emails, chats, texts, notifications, calls, and meetings compete for your employees’ attention. What tool can you use to grab and keep their attention? Training games. Games complement and improve the effectiveness of traditional training. Come learn more and play the Jump Game. High score at the session wins a $250 gift certificate.

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12:00 PM Wed, March 22

Track: Instructional Design

Whether you are creating a new project, developing an app, or launching a new platform, come learn about the latest strategies in brainstorming, prototyping, and designing your experiences. This session will highlight tools, techniques, and workflows to help you kick off any project the right way. Learn how to communicate a concept, beginning with low-fidelity prototypes; gather user feedback; and translate into high-fidelity prototypes before you start development. Get pumped and ready to get ideas out of your head and make them reality!

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1:00 PM Wed, March 22

Track: Management and Strategy

Managing eLearning projects so that they meet requirements and finish on time and on budget can be tricky! Project scope might be a moving target, development never-ending, and reviews subjective at best. Sure, there’s a body of project management knowledge out there, but how do you determine just how much project management you need?

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1:00 PM Wed, March 22

Track: Data and Measurement

Education providers know that taking online courses isn’t the only way to learn. They want to invent new learning formats and experiences that better meet their members’ needs. However, the types of learning opportunities trackable by traditional learning management systems (LMSs) is limited. The Experience API (xAPI) specification is flexible enough to track a wide range of experiences, but it’s a new technology, and barriers to adoption still exist.

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1:00 PM Wed, March 22

Track: Tools

Do you have a large number of similar courses to develop in a short amount of time? Is it painful for you to build one-off custom courses for material that just changes slightly? Would you like to build an efficient course development template so that all of your courses have the same look and feel, can be rapidly produced, and still can be customized? JavaScript with Storyline is the answer!

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1:00 PM Wed, March 22

Track: Instructional Design

The term “bench strength” is frequently used in relation to leadership, so it isn’t surprising that many organizations are keen to create development programs for their future leaders. However, many of these programs fail to adequately prepare employees for the demands of assuming a leadership role.

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1:00 PM Wed, March 22

Track: Instructional Design

Very often, training is created in isolation. Stakeholders may believe that “one and done” constitutes a solution; however, in reality, training needs to be reinforced and scaffolded. The eLearning you create is one piece of the puzzle, but it needs a bit more to really stick.

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1:00 PM Wed, March 22

Track: Instructional Design

Too many eLearning courses are just data dumps full of facts, details, and nonessential content. These kinds of courses also often lack the necessary context to explain how all this information applies to the real world, making them both boring and ineffective. eLearning should be redesigned to better reach the audience and share content with them in a way that’s engaging and practical. And one simple but effective way to do that is through interactive stories.

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1:00 PM Wed, March 22

Track: Data and Measurement

Do you struggle with how to prioritize all of your training requests? Are you able to say no to some projects, or do you just take on every one that comes your way? Do you want to bring more rigor to the processes and strategies your team uses to accomplish your training goals? Then there’s a tool you’ll want to use to analyze your work and back up your decisions—data.

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1:00 PM Wed, March 22

Track: Data and Measurement

Going to RFP (request for proposal) for an LMS can be a daunting process. With all the special protocols, the nondisclosure agreements, and the thick cloud of secrecy that envelopes all parties involved, it can be frustrating and isolating. But once you accept that there’s no avoiding the pomp and circumstance of the process itself, you can begin to strategically position your company to choose the right LMS.

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1:00 PM Wed, March 22

Track: Video

If a picture can convey a thousand words, imagine how much more a video can convey. Videos are fast becoming a standard means of sharing knowledge and training information in organizations, but using them effectively has a number of challenges. How can you ensure they’re searchable, archivable, and relevant for your audience? How can you easily organize and manage these dynamic training assets, including user-generated content? And once you’ve created videos, how can you drive traffic to your online video portal so this content is actually viewed by the people who need it?

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1:00 PM Wed, March 22

Track: Instructional Design

During design and development, SMEs and 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.

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1:00 PM Wed, March 22

Track: Instructional Design

Science fiction has always challenged people to see their world in new ways, from a glimpse at an imagined “long, long time ago in a galaxy far, far away” in Star Wars to envisioning a potential future centuries from now in Star Trek. Movies like The Matrix, Inception, Minority Report, Blade Runner, and so many others have proposed mind-blowing ideas like alternate realities, parallel universes, transporter beams, and time travel. One of the many reasons this genre is so popular is that it poses a wide range of “what-if” questions and allows its audience to play with possible answers. But these ideas can do more then just entertain you—they can also inspire your work in L&D.

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1:00 PM Wed, March 22

Track: Tools

3-D virtual simulations give you the opportunity to create an immersive learning environment with interactive and engaging experiences. Articulate Storyline has emerged in recent years as a popular eLearning authoring tool, but it lacks built-in tools or methods to create 3-D virtual simulations.

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1:00 PM Wed, March 22

Track: Video

YouTube is the world’s biggest online video provider and second-largest search engine—and that presents some amazing opportunities for L&D. But selling this free tool to stakeholders and gatekeepers in your organization can be a challenge, particularly if they’re having trouble envisioning YouTube used for purposes beyond entertainment. Do they need to see a working sample first? Do you?

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1:00 PM Wed, March 22

Track: Media

Finding ways to make learning “stick” with technology is always a challenge. Augmented reality (AR) is one of those “make it stick” technology options available for education and training. However, AR can seem overwhelming, expensive, time-consuming, and difficult to use in everyday learning development. These assumptions cause developers to overlook the potential this technology holds for their learners.

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1:00 PM Wed, March 22

Track: Tools

Workplaces are awash in email traffic, competing demands, and hard-to-maintain courseware, while businesses try to operate more responsively to the needs of both the marketplace and its stakeholders. To better work within this complexity and remain relevant to the business, L&D needs to rethink the methods it uses to support learners. While expensive, enterprise-weight solutions exist for this dilemma, there is a simpler approach you can consider that has shallower learning curves, stronger impact, and greater extensibility—Slack.

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1:00 PM Wed, March 22

Track: Management and Strategy

With the financial advantages of big data gaining global attention, business leaders are recognizing the need for better reporting and improved accountability across all organizational divisions. New innovations are enabling unprecedented analysis of deep data and measurement of training effectiveness, business impact, and training ROI. The advanced data enabled by next-generation training will allow businesses to make smarter decisions and formulate competitive strategies based on robust and timely insights.

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1:00 PM Wed, March 22

Track: Management and Strategy

In order to transform the learning organization into a center of excellence, learning leaders must consistently and deliberately deliver measurable business value. But in most organizations, learning is an afterthought to the strategic process, relegated to a reactive, execution-only role.

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1:00 PM Wed, March 22

Track: Performance Support

When was the last time you heard a term in your business but couldn’t really say what it meant? “Performance support” is popping up more and more, but can you really define it? Share the basic concepts underpinning it? Describe the business results other companies are experiencing?

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2:00 PM Wed, March 22

Track: Mobile

When new hires start, they usually feel excited but overwhelmed by the volume of learning required to become job-ready. An easily accessible line manager has a significant positive impact on the learning curve; however, managers are often very stretched themselves with tactical responsibilities, which can result in the needs of new recruits being relegated. In this session, you will learn proven techniques on structuring an effective mobile program that fully supports your new hires. This includes blended learning activities, tracking progress via powerful reporting capabilities, and connecting new hires to a focused network of subject matter experts who can provide virtual check-ins and feedback.

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2:00 PM Wed, March 22

Track: Games and Gamification

Are you using a PowerPoint-based eLearning tool only using half of its capabilities? Do you wish that you could add gamification to your eLearning and/or classroom content, but you’re not a scripting or programming wizard? This session will explore several easy ways that PowerPoint-based eLearning tools can help you achieve gamification for your learning content without any typing of scripting/programming code. If you would like to learn some easy PowerPoint and QuizMaker tricks to achieve gamification, and you don’t have programming or scripting expertise, this session is for you!

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2:30 PM Wed, March 22

Track: Instructional Design

Most learning programs have the goal of supporting behavior change, even a change as simple as getting people to do their jobs better. Organizational learning traditionally measures desired outcomes in terms of “learning objectives,” which are fairly straightforward to identify. In contrast, identifying the root cause of behavior change problems is considerably more complex.

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2:30 PM Wed, March 22

Track: Instructional Design

eLearning professionals are expected to take on a wide variety of very different roles. Sometimes you’re the eLearning developer, graphics designer, narrator, or videographer. Other times you may act as the project manager, researcher, or even the department’s tech guru. It’s no surprise that this can be a daunting and sometimes scary prospect for those new to the industry, leaving them feeling insecure, overwhelmed, and unsure of where to begin.

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2:30 PM Wed, March 22

Track: Instructional Design

In the customer training world, L&D professionals often have difficulty convincing their customers to complete coursework. This audience consists of busy professionals who increasingly want training they can take at their own pace, on their own time. While in theory this approach has benefits for both companies and customers, in practice there can be real challenges in trying to convince customers to prioritize this non-mandatory training over their other pressing work tasks and deadlines.

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2:30 PM Wed, March 22

Track: Games and Gamification

In order to provide top-notch customer service, call center agents are required to master an ever-growing number of knowledge and skill sets during training, including sales skills, enterprise tools, products, and policies and procedures. As traditional assessments are often limited to isolated application, facts, or memorized data at lower-level thinking skills, they tend to fall short of testing whether the agents can actually apply their learning and perform on the job.

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2:30 PM Wed, March 22

Track: Management and Strategy

Acquiring, onboarding, and retaining new and existing customers is critical to the success of any business. The challenge most organizations face in this is figuring out the most effective way to engage and educate their customers at key points in the relationship lifecycle. The ability to manage the tactical requirements such as timing, learning programs, and customer behavior is critical to its success.

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2:30 PM Wed, March 22

Track: Video

Video is all the rage, but what constitutes good video? In the YouTube era, many developers have been taught to point their iPhone and shoot with little thought to aspects like visual composition, lighting, and editing. When you’re shooting video, a number of small, easily adjusted factors often make the difference between a quality video and one that’s unwatchable.

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2:30 PM Wed, March 22

Track: Instructional Design

With so much of your design work focused on smooth navigation, creating engaging content, and crafting complex interactions, you may overlook a basic issue: Can people actually be successful with the course? Design flaws such as overload, ineffective use of multimedia (especially narration), and poor assessment items are just some of the ways an “engaging” course can still cause people to stumble.

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2:30 PM Wed, March 22

Track: Tools

PowerPoint is often the basis for much of the training material you use and the eLearning and mLearning content you create, and yet it’s text-heavy, dull, and boring. This is not effective; it results in disengaged students and click-through eLearning.

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2:30 PM Wed, March 22

Track: Media

Searching for new and innovative ways to present content is an ongoing challenge for most instructional designers. If you’re stuggling with this yourself, you may want to consider using an inconventional option—comics and comic-style art. Comics are a great way to share content in an engaging and effective way, and their growing popularity has helped them grow in acceptance within L&D. That said, if you’ve never created comic-style content, it’s hard to know where to begin—particularly if you need assistance acquiring or creating your visuals.

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2:30 PM Wed, March 22

Track: Mobile

Mobile learning is rapidly becoming a must-have for organizations big and small. For most designers, getting started is a huge hurdle they have yet to overcome. Considering all the new technology, platforms, authoring tools, and skills required to make it all work can paralyze even the best learning pros.

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2:30 PM Wed, March 22

Track: Tools

With the frequent releases of eLearning products, it can be hard to keep up with all the new features introduced with every version. But if you don’t look into these updates, you could miss great new features that can make your course creation easier or even allow you to do brand-new things with the tool.

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2:30 PM Wed, March 22

Track: Management and Strategy

Every organization is a complex ecosystem with a multitude of elements. Unfortunately, many L&D teams fail to take a holistic approach—or even recognize that L&D doesn’t own workplace learning on its own. Instead, they focus on their sphere of influence, which often revolves around formal training. Employees are left to struggle with mixed messages and contradictory priorities, which lessens the perceived value of L&D, stifles employee potential, and hinders long-term business growth.

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2:30 PM Wed, March 22

Track: Data and Measurement

Rapid responses to “Code Blue” resuscitation events are critical to patient outcomes. MedStar Health has developed several training interventions over time to improve performance, but data from these activities were captured in disparate tools or not collected at all. Without a centralized method for analyzing data, understanding the impacts of different elements of the training program was not possible. This illustrates a common problem in blended learning approaches.

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2:30 PM Wed, March 22

Track: Performance Support

The National Park Service (NPS) had a milestone year in 2016. That centennial year didn’t just kick off a second century of stewardship of America's national parks—it also catalyzed a renewed focus for the NPS on employees. To better address the challenges this group faced, the NPS decided to shift its L&D paradigm to a broader learning and performance ecosystem approach.

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2:30 PM Wed, March 22

Track: Management and Strategy

All too often, new learning theories and technologies come along with little or no vision for how they complement existing approaches and strategies. As each emerges, learning leaders are left holding the bag, trying to make these new approaches work. 70:20:10 is a great math formula to throw around, with few disagreeing with its premise. The problem is taking it from theory to reality and integrating it into your existing ecosystem. 

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3:00 PM Wed, March 22

Track: Mobile

When creating mobile learning, serious issues exist with the level of interactivity, adaptive screen layouts for multiple modalities, the time and resources needed to create the solutions, and the lack of a highly efficient method to update content that does not take significant time or a programmer.

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3:00 PM Wed, March 22

Track: Tools

Many people in L&D work with technology that does their coding for them, enabling them to create something exciting without really understanding the code behind it. But if you don’t know how something works, then you can’t possibly control it, mold it, or make it better. The thing decides how it works, and you must simply abide. That’s why, even if you have no intention of making coding your full-time job, it can still be handy to have a basic understanding of how it works and when just a small amount of coding can make what you create even better.

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3:00 PM Wed, March 22

Track: Instructional Design

When your organization is located all across North America, it’s no surprise that it can be a challenge to deliver in-person sales training events. Sylvan Learning needed to find a different approach, and the best option was a blended one. But while blended learning made strategic sense, the team still needed to find a way to use this approach to engage learners while still providing the same level of interactivity as an instructor-led event.

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4:00 PM Wed, March 22

Track: Management and Strategy

You’ve seen it happen: Your eLearning project was making great progress when it hit the snag of the weedy review process. Stakeholders contributed feedback that needed to be addressed but that set the project back substantially. If only you had known sooner! While this is a common problem, there are steps you can take to ensure both that your stakeholders are heard from and that your projects move forward on schedule.

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4:00 PM Wed, March 22

Track: Media

In L&D, keeping people engaged and interested in the content you’re sharing with them is one of your primary goals. But in order to ensure what you’re designing feels fresh and current, it’s important to look for inspiration not just within the L&D industry, but in other industries that have similar goals. And one of the most innovative sources you can look to is web design. Like in L&D, web designers need to catch and keep the attention of a busy and easily distracted audience, and the design trends that have sprung up in this industry can help you find new ways to reach the people you’re creating content for.

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4:00 PM Wed, March 22

Track: Instructional Design

Instructional design focuses on only a small portion of the learning process—instruction. Much learning also happens through experience, supported by social feedback, content, and some formal instruction (70:20:10 sums it up). This broader approach that looks at the entire learning process goes by a different name: learning experience design (LXD). And while instructional design isn’t dead as a concept, it is finding itself being subsumed by LXD, allowing for a deeper perspective on how designers can provide the experiences that people need to develop job skills.

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4:00 PM Wed, March 22

Track: Instructional Design

By creating a learner profile, you will be better able to avoid building training that is ineffective, undesirable, and lacking relevance for your learners. By doing research up front about all aspects of your learners, you will be able to leverage those details to create impactful training that will capture their attention.

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4:00 PM Wed, March 22

Track: Management and Strategy

Since the 1970s, waterfall methodologies such as ADDIE have been accepted as the standard development approach for eLearning. Today, many organizations are required to keep up with rapidly changing content while also decreasing the time to deliver new courses. Traditional waterfall methodologies have become inefficient, and eLearning professionals have started looking to incorporate agile concepts into their processes to keep up with this new rate of change.

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4:00 PM Wed, March 22

Track: Media

You asked your voice-over artist for a natural, conversational recording, but what you got back is stiff and formal. You waste time going back and forth with voice-over talent about pronunciation or rewording. Too often, you need to re-record voice-over due to errors or confusion. You need a process to make your script writing more efficient and effective.

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4:00 PM Wed, March 22

Track: Games and Gamification

To support development of a graduate course on serious games at DePaul University, a yearlong study examined the questions to be addressed by this new mode of learning and assessments. Can you encourage people to experience failure in the spirit of learning? Can you build reflection and feedback loops into the learning process? Can you help people further develop their capacities for social interaction and collaborative problem-solving?

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4:00 PM Wed, March 22

Track: Data and Measurement

All groups within an organization need some way to demonstrate their value. However, unlike sales, L&D generally doesn’t have hard data to measure results. In the past, most learning departments have been limited to measuring only whether their users had accessed their programs—not the strongest metric of how their work contributed to the organization. But L&D isn’t the only group that faces these measurement challenges. Marketing also has similar barriers to finding data that shows its value, but some have found creative solutions to this issue. What can L&D learn from marketing when it comes to measurement?

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4:00 PM Wed, March 22

Track: Video

Having an educated team isn’t just a best practice; it’s a requirement. The more educated the team, the healthier the bottom line. The challenge lies in keeping teams informed and wanting to learn more about their roles in the industry. With dry content centered around policies and procedures, how do you create a story that engages a learner and makes an impact? By using animated videos that are relatable and fun!

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4:00 PM Wed, March 22

Track: Tools

Creating effective learning experiences is not a job for a novice, although many novices are thrown into the role of instructional designer or developer. If beginners turn to the field’s expansive literature, which ranges from cookbook-style guides and blogs to scientific research, they are easily overwhelmed and typically turn to overly simplistic approaches. But even experienced professionals can come to feel they’re never able to do the job that should be done.

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4:00 PM Wed, March 22

Track: Virtual Classroom

With the business world changing at an ever-increasing pace, even L&D strategies that have served you well in the past may not be as effective in the present. At Aflac, one challenge was a traditional ILT approach to training that just wasn’t the right fit for the company anymore. The team knew that by aligning learning strategies and solutions to emerging technologies, they could not only make a bigger impact on the people taking their training, but also make an overwhelming impact on the company’s bottom line. And the change they made to do this was a shift to virtual.

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4:00 PM Wed, March 22

Track: Instructional Design

Organizations implement new software all the time, especially with the constantly changing technology landscape. A healthcare organization was tasked with training thousands of non-clinical associates, nurses, and physicians when it implemented a new electronic health record. The burning question was: How do you teach people new software in a way that sticks? How do you provide learners with authentic context to practice what they’ll actually do on the job?

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4:00 PM Wed, March 22

Track: Virtual Classroom

Webinar presenter shows up late? Someone’s dog won’t stop barking? Meeting room crashes? Audio problems? Virtual classroom issues like these can seem impossible to overcome when they’re happening live. The presenters of this session feel your pain and have been there too—and they’re happy to share what they’ve learned from experiencing these kinds of virtual classroom snags themselves.

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4:00 PM Wed, March 22

Track: Media

You’ve put hours and hours into analyzing content, spent days painstakingly storyboarding your product and drafting the scripts, carefully thought about the navigation choices—and yet you’re still met with “Great, but can you make it look nicer/better/modern/pretty?” when you show it to your client or stakeholders. What more can you do when you’ve utilized sound learning theory and development strategies, but you’re still expected to be a graphic designer on top of it all?

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4:00 PM Wed, March 22

Track: Management and Strategy

In recent years, learning has moved closer to the workplace. Classrooms have moved out of corporate learning centers and into training rooms co-located with offices. Providers are delivering online learning directly to the desktop more than ever before. The next challenge is to move learning directly into the workflow. To do this, you need to move beyond course delivery and into a broader, more comprehensive and strategic approach that focuses not just on learning, but on performance and productivity.

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4:00 PM Wed, March 22

Track: Management and Strategy

When one employee joined Purch, she was tasked with “mission impossible”: to build a learning organization from scratch for an extremely diverse workforce with limited manpower. After extensive analysis, she realized employees were learning much more from informal resources than conventional means. By transforming their mindsets and making smart investments in technology, Purch was able to create a learning organization that boosts engagement and contributes to a healthy learning culture.

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4:00 PM Wed, March 22

Track: Data and Measurement

You’re excited about the promise of an xAPI-enabled world, but you have a learning management system (LMS) and a host of SCORM-based courses that you need. You’ll need to make some strategic decisions, stay flexible, and manage the transition over time. What if you could get the most out of both an LMS and a learning record store (LRS) at the same time as you move to your next-generation learning and performance infrastructure?

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4:00 PM Wed, March 22

Track: Management and Strategy

Explore the results of a yearlong benchmarking study done with eight leading learning departments who have been implementing workflow learning for many years. If you’re struggling with the technologies, methodologies, change management, and approaches needed to grow your learning organization into an ecosystem that not only includes workflow learning, but places it front and center in your design, you’ll not want to miss this session.

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5:15 PM Wed, March 22

Track: Instructional Design

Have you always wanted to play Family Feud but are a bit camera shy? Now is your opportunity! Join this session during the expo reception, where we’ll be looking for audience participation to field two “family” teams. Topics may include best practices, emerging trends and technologies, and common pain points. A game of Family Feud wouldn’t be complete without each member of the winning “family” going home with a prize! Each member of the winning team will walk away with a Bose Wireless Speaker. Let’s play the Feud!

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