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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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. 

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.

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.

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.

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?

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?

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!

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.

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.

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?

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?

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.

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.

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?

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.