Convincing sales professionals to take the time for career development is an age-old challenge. They just want to sell! However, for them to be most effective at their job they need development—especially at the beginning of their careers. So how do you provide the in-depth sales development content that they need in a way they’ll actually engage with?                                

eLearning and instructional professionals constantly crave new approaches to design, and they regularly grapple with how best to incorporate design thinking into their workflows. Many experienced designers find themselves struggling to enhance usability, influence perception, and make better design decisions. For the instructional designer, the ability to add techniques that “teach through design” can validate creative prowess and yield enhanced interactive and visual solutions in learning materials.

While instructional design and effective learning approaches are paramount in eLearning, aesthetics can’t be ignored either. That’s because the page layouts and overall design of your projects influence both your client’s feelings about the quality of your work and your audience’s confidence in the course. But most instructional designers and developers aren’t trained graphic designers, leaving them at a disadvantage when it comes to building professional, modern eLearning projects.

Many L&D professionals have found that the traditional approach to online courses doesn’t always generate consistent quality when it comes to learning outcomes. Because of this, it’s tempting to try new approaches to solve this dilemma, such as gamification and other strategies. But without a deeper understanding of how to apply these new approaches in a meaningful way, you could end up just using superficial applications of them and miss out on their ability to increase knowledge transfer.

Social and informal learning are happening in your organization. The degree to which they happen varies due to context, tools, and culture. Regardless, each is a significant factor in individual, and therefore organizational, performance—too much so to ignore. The 70:20:10 principle and framework approach addresses these issues, but making this vision a reality has been a difficult undertaking due to traditional views about learning.

Video is rapidly becoming a much more common method of learning delivery than it was even a few years ago. But when you get started with video, it’s important to recognize that you can’t just use the exact same approaches you used in the past for creating eLearning or ILT—this medium has its own unique design rules. To use video as effectively as possible in L&D, you need to look at how this medium really works—from a neurological and a practical point of view—and how that affects the way you design content for it.

Support for Flash continues to erode. Mobile browsers stopped playing Flash years ago, and reports suggest the end of full support for Flash in Google’s Chrome browser is imminent. More and more, it’s becoming obvious that Flash is not a long-term solution. But if you have Flash content in your online training materials, what can you do about it other than completely rebuild?

Virtual classrooms are increasingly popular due to the ability for learners from any location to access education in real time with a teacher, and to participate in an environment that simulates a face-to-face classroom. However, a major area of concern has emerged: the tendency for learners to multitask, rather than remain attentive and focus on the content being delivered.

L&D personnel, from learning leaders to instructional designers to technology innovators, all face a common challenge: how to secure executive buy-in for the tools and resources necessary to create powerful learning experiences.

L&D practitioners have always struggled with extending the learning experience to help make workplace learning less of a one-time event and more of a long-term process. Social tools are one way to shift this approach, offering great opportunities for increasing our reach before, during, and after formal training. But sometimes when using social tools in the same ways we use them in our personal lives, we miss opportunities to leverage them differently to support extended learning and engagement with our audience. There's so much more that these tools have to offer than just asking people to join discussion groups!

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

The Internet is a terrific knowledge repository. The sheer size of the content stored on the web is unimaginable. Within organizational intranets, the amount of content that is available is also impressive, but is it good content? Is it the right content for the right purpose? Is it up to date? Is it understandable? The more you have to ask these questions about online content, the less efficient your search for the right information will be. Even more of a concern is that you might be more likely to find bad content, act on it (believing it is correct), and suffer the consequences

When a new LMS administrator joined Whole Foods Market, she found herself in a decentralized organization right in the middle of scoping out a new LMS implementation. In only six months she would need to take this project from the early stages all the way to a systems launch. While not everyone may face this exact situation, if you’re considering implementing a new LMS, chances are you’ll experience many of the same pain points and challenges she had to face to make the launch happen.

Knowledge retention for traditional training events is often low. Don’t worry about it. Instead, invest where all learning and performance support really happens—the classroom (10 percent), from colleagues (20 percent), and on the job (70 percent). The magic happens when you can develop and maintain all content in one effort and use it everywhere; that includes at your fingertips—when, where, and how you need it. 

“If you taught them this, why don’t they do it?” Educational services staff at Saint Vincent Hospital got tired of hearing this question and started looking for a new learning paradigm for the institution. They found a solution in performance support. By blending learning opportunities and performance support for associates before a class, during a class, and on the job, organizations are able to significantly impact job performance.