Sharing What Works

March 22 – 24, 2017 Orlando, FL

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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.

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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 in Management and Strategy Track

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: 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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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: 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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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: 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: 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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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: 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: 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: 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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10:45 AM Thu, March 23

Track: Management and Strategy

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?                                

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10:45 AM Thu, March 23

Track: Management and Strategy

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.

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10:45 AM Thu, March 23

Track: Management and Strategy

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.

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10:45 AM Thu, March 23

Track: Management and Strategy

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

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1:00 PM Thu, March 23

Track: Management and Strategy

Our training team faced a serious challenge when we inherited a nation-wide network of manufacturing sites with no formal on-boarding programs. The current training most people were doing was overwhelming, with new employees expected to go through over 200 procedural documents, dozens of PowerPoints presentations, and site-determined on-the-job training. No surprise, this chaotic approach led to low moral, high turnover, and numerous production errors. We knew we needed to rethink this on-boarding, but how?

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1:00 PM Thu, March 23

Track: Management and Strategy

The increasing technical demands of eLearning development are putting pressure on instructional designers. Gig artists (such as Fiverr.com) seem like the perfect solution to get work done.

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1:00 PM Thu, March 23

Track: Management and Strategy

Whether for an individual or an organization, learning is fundamentally about change—change in knowledge, in understanding, in wisdom, or in behavior. And change is challenging. It’s hard to change and to grow, and people often resist it. Anyone, therefore, who is in a learning leadership position and seeks to help their people and their organization grow must understand the dynamics of change.

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1:00 PM Thu, March 23

Track: Management and Strategy

Today, all learning is a blend, whether by design or because the individual learners have made decisions to pursue and develop personalized learning paths. While that’s great for them, it can be problematic for designers of the learning experience. Designers aren’t always as successful as they can be because they try to implement new tools and design techniques without understanding how to integrate them into the larger blend or support personalized learning paths.

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1:00 PM Thu, March 23

Track: Management and Strategy

Modern learning and development strategies often seek to leverage peer-to-peer learning in one form or another; strategies include workplace collaboration, social media-based learning, personal networks, peer mentoring, and communities of practice, among others. L&D professionals may find, however, that promoting peer-to-peer learning is not as easy as enabling communication technologies and assigning roles. Learning leaders are sometimes surprised by inactive enterprise social networks and weak peer-to-peer support for learning.

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2:30 PM Thu, March 23

Track: Management and Strategy

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?

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2:30 PM Thu, March 23

Track: Management and Strategy

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?

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2:30 PM Thu, March 23

Track: Management and Strategy

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.

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2:30 PM Thu, March 23

Track: Management and Strategy

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?

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2:30 PM Thu, March 23

Track: Management and Strategy

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.

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4:00 PM Thu, March 23

Track: Management and Strategy

With custom development, you can break out of the box and do more than what your standard eLearning tools can do. This requires a new skill, though: knowing how to direct web developers to create custom eLearning. What do you need to know to speak their language without having to learn to code yourself?

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4:00 PM Thu, March 23

Track: Management and Strategy

You create and develop rich content for your organization, but learners often don't engage with learning and development unless it’s assigned in a specific learning plan. This lack of awareness can hinder cultivating and creating a culture of learning.

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8:30 AM Fri, March 24

Track: Management and Strategy

Do you have a difficult time estimating how long a project should take? Do you typically go over your project time estimates, or have some projects that take a lot less time than you thought they would? Would you like to hold your team accountable to realistic time estimates, but don’t have the data to support it? If so, you need a new time-tracking approach so you can more accurately determine your time estimates for training projects.

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8:30 AM Fri, March 24

Track: Management and Strategy

Autodesk’s learning ecosystem is vast, extending far beyond the walls of the corporation to help customers use its tools most effectively. It’s no surprise, then, that driving this change internally at a company-wide scale has been a complex undertaking. There are lots of silos to bridge in order to serve customers well, holistically, and seamlessly.

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8:30 AM Fri, March 24

Track: Management and Strategy

Traditional training requires an event mindset and often stays in the learners’ brains just as long as the event. Hilti needed to find ways to transfer knowledge that builds skills, and then to retain that knowledge until the point of application.

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8:30 AM Fri, March 24

Track: Management and Strategy

In nature, an ecosystem refers to the combination of a community of living things, the non-living elements that make up their environment, and the many ways in which those individual elements interact. In order for an ecosystem to thrive, the individual components must connect and support one another, balancing each other so that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Ecosystems exist in the workplace as well. Understanding the structure and dependencies of an organizational ecosystem can help you build a better learning and performance strategy.

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10:00 AM Fri, March 24

Track: Management and Strategy

Status update. Touch base. Weekly meetings. Scope creep. Project plans. Tasks. Milestones. Deliverables. All these things can overwhelm you when managing projects—but they don’t have to! It turns out there are ways to juggle and advance your numerous projects while at the same time maintaining a semblance of serenity.

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10:00 AM Fri, March 24

Track: Management and Strategy

It can be difficult to motivate employees to learn. Often, they either don’t think the materials apply to them or they believe they don’t need to know anything more to succeed.

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10:00 AM Fri, March 24

Track: Management and Strategy

Global. Digital. Mobile. Agile. Disruption. The business landscape is changing rapidly. New technology, new industries, new entrants, new customers, and an evolving workforce are sparking new expectations for every company. How do you respond? Can you advance human performance through innovative design?

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