You have a slew of tools to choose from to author eLearning, but regardless of the tools, creating a unique user experience that engages learners is important and often relies on your skills as a storyteller. One way to improve your eLearning storytelling skills is through comic book theory. Using special tricks and tips from comic books and graphic novels, you can create a unique user experience—no matter which authoring tool or platform you use.

It’s not uncommon for many projects to be organized through chains of email after email. But it’s hard to keep track of all the answers to questions, reviewers’ comments, and version control of the documents you need for managing a project. Is there a way to streamline your project management processes to make them easier to manage and follow?

We’ve all been there: the dreaded project meeting where stakeholders tell you exactly what to create and how long it should be. You work very hard over several weeks crafting the product they expect. The result is a training solution that is late, bloated, over budget, and failing to change employee behaviors. With scenarios like this one, it’s no wonder that, according to Harvard Business School, only 10 percent of corporate training is effective. This problem led one team to hunt for a solution that would revolutionize the process of designing learning experiences.

Conventional wisdom says that people can self-provision their learning and professional development through internet-enabled access to resources and social networks. But studies indicate that employees are not necessarily skilled at managing their own professional development and leveraging digital tools for learning. With an abundance of resources available, people may become paralyzed by too much information and too many choices. And they may not have the time or savvy to find what they need and use it to develop their knowledge bases and skill sets. Nonetheless, you don’t want to resort to structured training programs as the only path for learning.

As teams compete for scarce resources, investing your current resources in activities that have a high rate of return is critical to not only surviving but using learning to solve your business’s biggest, baddest problems.

It's not every day L&D professionals get to spend time in the trenches conducting a true needs analysis, learning firsthand about the needs of leaders and the barriers that impact their performance.  We did and survived to share what we learned, translating this analysis into customized yet scalable performance-based solutions. The strength of leadership at the mid-level is critical to employee engagement and organizational success.

A recent survey by Donald H. Taylor, chairman of the Learning and Performance Institute, revealed that L&D is falling out of love with enterprise collaboration and Forrester Research has shown that roughly 80 percent of enterprise social platform implementations fail. In recent years, social technology has fractured into social intranets, enterprise social networks, and chat platforms. What are we to make of this? Has social lost its way? Have expectations been over-inflated? Should L&D let go … or do more?

Artificial intelligence technologies are transforming homes and workplaces. The World Economic Forum has started to talk about what is happening as the fourth industrial revolution. When you start to think about AI and L&D, it raises many questions: What do AI technologies mean for L&D? What is the impact on the capabilities that organizations need to be developing in people now and into the near future? How can you use AI technologies to enhance and automate L&D work? What is the reality of what you can do now? What is really happening with AI in workplaces now? AI can be a confusing area with jargon like decision trees, k-clusters, and regressions. Even most technically focused L&D people are not math and data experts.

The majority of what people learn comes from practical experience on the job. However, they don’t learn everything they need just by doing their jobs. You have to be ready for exceptions when they arise. Learners need reinforcement of important topics to help avoid bad habits. They look for opportunities to expand their knowledge and skills beyond their current roles to further their careers. Unfortunately, with limited time and competing priorities, employees often are unable to make continuous, targeted learning part of their work.

People are constantly bombarded with requests for their attention, many of which unfortunately go ignored. It’s frustrating to consider that when you share educational content, most people will forget 90 percent of it after just two days. Why go through all the trouble of painstakingly developing content, if most of it won’t be retained for the long term? With the brain more likely to forget something than remember it, it’s critical to understand how the brain processes information and tends to remember it, and then to apply that knowledge when designing instructional content.

Disasters happen when teaching in a virtual classroom: connections fail, audio echoes, and files crash. In order to get the problem(s) solved and get the session back on time and on track, you’ll need more than a good idea. You’ll need a plan.

Infographics are great tools to convey complex information in an elegant way. They can be the basis of engaging classroom training, interactive eLearning, or intuitive resources. And you can repurpose them for sales, marketing, HR, and conferences. But, creating a good infographic can be hard. You don't want it to just be nicely designed bullet points. To be effective, it must tell a story.

Though there’s been great interest in learning personalization in recent years, the truth is that we have been trying to use systems to adapt teaching to individual learners for decades. The key to successful implementation of learning personalization is not through the use of the best learning management system or latest technological trend.