Neuroscience is one of the hottest topics in training and education, so it’s no surprise if you’re drawn to this research as a source of wisdom for your learning designs. Yet despite its promise, neuroscience is a fairly young field. Questions remain. Are neuroscience findings valid? Are they relevant to learning design? Are they useful?

Outsourcing of T&D is becoming more frequent, providing a large gap for freelancers to fill. But deciding to move to freelancing means you’ll need to find answers to a wide range of business concerns that you likely never had to worry about as an employee. What kind of business should you establish? How can you thrive in a competitive landscape? What do you need to put in place to protect both your new business and yourself?

Imagine leading a national division that’s hiring hundreds of people a year. You have a structured onboarding program and the jobs are attractive, but there are high levels of attrition and the onboarding program is being applied inconsistently. Local managers are also inconsistent in how they take responsibility for onboarding their new hires and say they’re too busy to change. How do you shift what you’re doing to make your onboarding more effective and help retain new employees?

Building an effective and efficient learning strategy for your organization is a complex undertaking. That’s why it can be extremely difficult to know where to start, particularly if you’re creating a brand-new approach. What resources do you need, and how should you prioritize which goals and challenges to go after first?

As technology changes day-to-day life, it is fascinating to imagine what the future will bring. For L&D professionals, however, it’s very hard to keep up the pace. What technology will be trending and will change the way people live and learn, and what technology will be nothing but hype? Has augmented reality really disrupted learning? And how about virtual reality and wearable tech?

Web video is seeing massive growth, and learners are not only consuming video but also making it. The literature indicates that there is an abundance of both underuse and overuse of videos in learning environments. Long, not engaging, and ill-prepared videos are very common.

It is every company’s goal to have an onboarding experience that gets new employees up to speed quickly and helps them truly understand the company’s brand. When a team at Coca-Cola Beverages Florida looked at what they could do to innovate their onboarding and make it more effective, one new technology came to mind: augmented reality (AR). AR can create immersive experiences and let people add new layers of content to the world around them. Could it also work to help new hires become contributing team members as quickly as possible?

Last year, the US National Park Service (NPS) gave a presentation at Learning Solutions Conference regarding its newly designed Common Learning Portal (CLP), which provides integrated access to formal learning, informal learning, and social learning materials via an intuitive interface. The CLP has now been deployed.

Animation and movement can be key features that help the learner pay attention to what’s important on the screen. When done well, motion and animation can be effective tools to leverage; but when done poorly, they are a waste of development time and a distraction to the learner.

Virtual training participants notoriously multitask during live online sessions, which means they miss out on learning opportunities. In addition, there is a common misconception that an online presentation is the same thing as virtual training—it’s not. So virtual classroom designers and facilitators struggle to capture the attention of their audience and keep participants engaged throughout a session so that learning transfer can occur.

Growth, attrition, and change in the fast-paced, deadline-driven work environment all pose challenges for staff development, and relying solely on formal training efforts is no longer realistic. Given these challenges, how can an organization support development for staff in a fiscally responsible and effective manner? What technologies and strategies can help support this learning, as well as knowledge creation and transfer among staff?

Enterprise employees need critical information on the job at the time of need. How do today’s learning professionals leverage mobile technology and deliver the right content to the right users at the right time? They have to take into account the complete user experience, including user context, device capabilities and limitations, mobile interface design, and more. How do all of these variables translate into effective mobile performance support?

When Nielsen took on the task of investing in a learning ecosystem, the team wanted to do more than just launch it; they also wanted to know whether it was effective. But how would they measure the success of this new approach? User research told them the key was that people wanted to find what they needed quickly, and if they didn’t know what they needed, the system should direct them to the right content. So with the metric of success decided, the next challenge was how to measure it.

The world is at a tipping point: Technology connects people, social approaches build community, and the “social age” drives ever more change. But what if people can’t cope? Failure is seen at an individual, organizational, and technical level. How can people become resilient and truly socially dynamic, fully adapted to face the ever more diverse and disruptive challenges they face?