As an L&D professional, your responsibility is to practice based on sound empirical data. Yet too often practices are based on myths, superstitions, misconceptions, and hype. You’ve heard the claims: “scientifically based,” “addresses the modern learner,” and “this is the future of learning” are just a few of them. And this matters; you not only could be wasting time and money, but actually undermining your own objectives! How do you cut through the fog and find the real value?

Learning experiences are born from content, and your organization invests heavily in building that content. This material is developed by different departments that often aren’t communicating, decreasing its impact and potential. Without an enterprise-wide content ecosystem that connects multipurpose content, these assets get locked up into learning, marketing, and support content “pickle jars,” unable to electrify your connected customer and learner journeys. Today, there’s so much inefficiency, waste, and copy/paste in content creation. But the landscape is evolving! In the near future, all of your content may be united by a content ecosystem. What can you do today to prepare for this?

Why do organizations train, and why do they train so much? Simple questions; complex answers. Despite all the L&D industry knows about performance improvement, people still tend to throw training at problems, or accept client requests for courses even before they know why. And, too often, the courseware doesn’t even work. This isn’t because the training is necessarily bad, but because people shouldn’t have done as much of it in the first place. Organizations train to compensate for bad documentation or teach workarounds to bad processes. They train to fix culture and morale problems. They train to meet compliance requirements and then report attendance over competency. They train repeatedly to be sure everyone “gets it.” They train to “CYA.”

Software training lacks variety, and offering only ILT and outdated HTML tutorials didn’t help Shoptech Software’s case. Training was boring, lengthy, and costly to attend. Participation was stagnant, and customers were utilizing phone support more than training. Shoptech needed a better solution for their manufacturing clients. They needed a learning system with a combination of technologies and resources designed to solve clients’ immediate problems.

L&D has wrestled with the idea of measuring impact for decades. Unfortunately, most of the methods used as “proof” of impact are simple correlations. And most people know the adage “correlation does not equal causation.” This session will help participants understand different, more practical types of analytics, and how they can provide much more impactful insights than simple correlations.

Most of the training videos produced by trainers are for software. Some of them are really engaging, but many are boring and turn people off rather than helping them learn a new program. Sometimes the training videos are nothing more than nasal voice-over with a mouse moving on the screen. But it doesn’t have to be this way. Many editorial and production techniques that media professionals use to make television interesting can be applied to software videos to make them more engaging and better support learning.

Talent development professionals want to get the best results from learning programs. Yet, most experts agree that only about 20 percent of learning is implemented in the workplace. And this percentage has held steady for decades. Would you accept, as a client, a 20 percent transfer rate for a service or product? In an era of growing accountability, it’s the mission of talent developers to increase the rate of transfer. Because in the end, it’s only on-the-job behavior that matters: The business only benefits when learning positively impacts performance. Ensuring learning transfer is therefore an important challenge facing talent developers today. But how can you make sure your learning programs have a high rate of transfer? What makes learning really work?

In the 2018 LinkedIn Workplace Learning Report, employers reported leadership, communication, and collaboration as the most crucial skills to learn from L&D programs. Yet when it comes to developing these complex skills, many current offerings may teach what to do but lack opportunities to practice and apply them. Learners may try games, role-plays, or pre-recorded simulations, but are you truly moving the needle on performance? In light of shrinking budgets, limited time, and lack of effectiveness, how can you demonstrate impactful gains at scale?

The best communicators frame their ideas in a story. Unfortunately, as effective as storytelling is, it remains one of the greatest struggles in the business world. L&D professionals often “firehose” their audience with data and fail to communicate strategic insights. The result? You lose your audience to boredom, confusion, and misinterpretation. And worse, you’ve lost your chance to provide value and connect with your audience. But weaving tales alone isn’t enough to spur your customer, prospect, or manager to take action. It’s the arc of story combined with powerful data and visuals that infuse the right balance of logic and emotion to generate decision-making.

Course accessibility is a common task for developers and creates many questions. What makes a course “accessible”? How can you use Articulate Storyline to make courses accessible to a variety of audiences? How can you easily create closed captions and alternate text for your courses? What are some best practices when planning and developing WCAG or 508-compliant courses? How can you test courses to ensure accessibility?

Augmented, virtual, and other emerging “realities” provide opportunities, and challenges, for assessment of human performance at individual and team levels. These tools introduce endless possibilities for observing learning behaviors, but it can be tricky to align those behaviors with precise learning objectives for clean assessment and data collection.

With over 1,300 learning systems around the world, it is no longer easy to find the right one. As a result, buyers look at various resources for information but may be unaware that the right system for them exists. This session identifies the 10 best learning systems around the world, based on 19 criteria. Find out who ranks high for next-generation learning, learning engagement platforms, and skill-based learning.

As tools and strategies emerge that enable us to better support learning in the flow of work, more and more organizations are looking to focus on workflow learning solutions. But like any new approach, it’s important that we don’t just assume that something is effective because we believe it will be, or that it feels right. Measuring the effectiveness of our efforts is key to understanding our work and to reporting the benefits of our programs, and that includes workflow learning programs.

The project deadline is upon you, and you’ve just received the approved content for final development. As a team of one (or a few), it’s once again time to shift from instructional designer to graphic designer to get your material out the door. The content is text-heavy and there’s plenty of it. So how can you level up your content to achieve effective visual design and user interface in a short timeline, with limited resources and personnel?

Your employees did the compliance training, the required certification, the new module, etc., but a week later you realize that they retained nothing. They were watching Netflix on their other screen, or they only remembered the content long enough to take the quiz at the end. Companies often overlook content that begs to be gamified—the very niche, complex, or boring content. Your new-hire orientations, compliance training, required or annual certifications that your employees are completing because they have to, are the exact trainings that require your game design investment to ensure the content isn’t glossed over—and that your employees actually learn and retain the content and skills they need to succeed at work.