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.