To hire a vendor to assist with an eLearning project, your organization may require you to issue an RFP (request for proposals) and obtain multiple quotes. When you get the quotes back, they may vary significantly. How do you know which one to choose? But the better question starts at the beginning of the process: How do you obtain accurate, apples-to-apples quotes from quality eLearning vendors? To receive good quotes, you need to issue an RFP that provides appropriate and clear information for the vendor to accurately price and schedule your project. Once you have accurate quotes, then you can decide which vendor is best for the project using a criteria-based, methodical approach.

It can be challenging  for an instructional designer to manage scope creep and have difficult conversations throughout the course of the project, however you can minimize the likelihood of those things happening with the right tools in your toolbox, and a friendly, approachable attitude.

With so many tools at their disposal, how do L&D professionals create effective learning ecosystems that meet the diverse needs of their learners? The key is focusing on relevancy, choice, and motivation. By listening closely to your learners about what, when, and how they want to learn, grow, and develop, you can deliver personalized experiences that help them fit professional development into their busy day. Learner-driven experiences offer the ideal mix of microlearning and macrolearning, from short how-to videos to in-depth learning paths. Done right, they will inspire your learners to build new skills and knowledge, put what they’ve learned into practice, and reflect on what went well and what could have gone better.

Many people in the eLearning field are trying to use gamification and serious games to spark employee engagement and drive learning retention. Everyone is working to make the best serious game that will enhance the learning objectives and retain learning. The biggest setbacks for some of these serious games and gamified learning experiences have been little to no planning, tough-to-pinpoint metrics, little to no implementation strategy, and insufficient or nonexistent post-deployment support.

As more learning and training is delivered online, instructors and trainers no longer have the opportunity to get to know all their learners by meeting them face-to-face. This disconnect often leads to missing or ineffective assessments as eLearning developers increasingly hope their learners understand the content, but lack the tools to adequately measure the level of understanding. How do you know if your eLearning assessments are effective? Are you testing learners’ content knowledge, or do your assessments measure their deduction skills? In this session, you will explore common test-writing pitfalls and discover how smart test-takers excel without learning the content.

Interactive video often has a wow factor that’s hard to deny. What’s critical for L&D, though, is thinking beyond the wow factor to ensure interactive video truly supports learning and performance improvement. Interactive video offers a range of design models, each with different strengths. Understanding how to align those strengths to different learning needs simplifies your design process, reduces development costs, and produces the best results for your organization.

DemoFest is a huge science fair-like event; a collective showcase of eLearning examples from conference participants. As you move from table to table, exploring a wide range of learning solutions, you can discuss the tools, tech, and processes with those who built them. Although it’s an exciting evening of discovery, diving deep into each of the projects can be challenging.

Everyone likes stories. Using storytelling techniques to spice up otherwise dull training modules is a great idea. Situating learners in a realistic context encourages them to apply skills and retain knowledge longer. But it’s not easy to write engaging narratives. Scenarios written by educators tend to be prescriptive, predictable, and preachy. Even worse, they feel contrived and artificial. Learners know when they are being manipulated to think or feel. Outwardly, they may click the right answer, but inwardly they resent it. Recent studies have shown that this sort of training may actually produce a reverse effect, compelling learners to feel more opposed to the training lesson than before they participated. So, how do you write a real-world learning scenario that isn’t contrived?

You’re tasked to begin multiple new eLearning projects simultaneously and are responsible for successful and timely completion. You initiate the work and quickly find that other stakeholders with differing expectations are now involved. The pressure is on to keep the project on track and on budget with limited resources. What do you do? There are many factors that can derail projects. Breaking ground on new development and keeping track of multiple assets can be daunting for new or seasoned designers and managers. Reproducing quality work that meets your expectations can be tricky on a tight budget or schedule. Additionally, frustrations run high when work is submitted that misses the mark and must be redone, or is grudgingly accepted.

A neurology medical affairs team at a large pharmaceutical company was facing the perfect storm. A low-priority product with an anticipated launch in over two years had become one of the global company’s most important assets overnight, with a new launch timeline of months. Training was in the process of being converted from self-led to automated. A single trainer was tasked with developing a comprehensive curriculum in a new area (typically 15 to 20 hours) to deploy via LMS. The existing team required training and completion of a new certification process. The team also underwent expansion during this time, which required that the new hires completed onboarding and therapeutic training simultaneously. Management wanted the team to begin the training on the product in three weeks!

If you hire the wrong instructional designer, you risk wasting time and money and losing credibility in the eyes of your stakeholders. It’s important to first understand your needs and then look for an instructional designer with the right design experience, level of creativity, and communication skills to make your projects successful. Join this session to discover a recruitment process that can help you identify the skills you need and source the candidates who possess them.

Most L&D teams are keenly interested in exploring ways to combine their macrolearning needs—traditional ILT classes and VILT sessions, tracked online learning, and structured compliance programs—with microlearning initiatives leveraging mobile, game mechanics, and social interactions. While most legacy LMS platforms have yet to include compelling microlearning features, there are ways to design and integrate legacy macrolearning platforms with modern microlearning solutions to achieve tech-enhanced learning success.

xAPI has been around for a few years. You’ve been hearing about what it is and how it’s used in a conceptual sense. But what about the real world? This session will discuss a company that has made a long-term investment of time and money in existing learning technologies. They were interested in leveraging xAPI but had questions: What could they track with xAPI? Would they need to scrap everything and redesign from scratch? Could they use their current rapid development tools, or did they need to learn a new technology? What benefits could they realize from xAPI?

The standard advice you hear about eLearning narration has taken you down the wrong path. You’ve been told to “billboard important phrases,” “speak at a comfortable and steady pace,” and “e-nun-ci-ate your words.” All this advice has done is turned you into a predictable and boring script reader. “Billboarding” causes you to sound unsure of what you’re saying. That “comfortable pace” is slow, repetitive, and disengaging. And “enunciating” makes you sound like a robot. Since the beginning of civilization, people have passed along information through speech. Narration engages your learners by connecting with them at a primitive and emotional level—a human level. It’s time to throw out the old advice and start talking to your learners like a human.

Over the past 10 years, access to mobile devices and the incredible user experiences designed by companies like Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, and Google have dramatically altered the expectations of learners, resulting in disappointment when they come into contact with many learning solutions. Strictly using typical learning design tools and methods isn’t leading you to the leap in learner experience you need to position yourself for the future as a value-add platform for employee acquisition and retention. In a recent LinkedIn Learning research report, nearly two-thirds of learning professionals wouldn’t even recommend their own learning solutions to their learners. It’s a travesty that so many are working so hard to create products they don’t love and don’t recommend.

Apple announced its new ARKit in 2017, enabling iOS devices to view and interact with augmented reality. In 2018 they took it a step further by coming out with ARKit 2, enabling 3-D object recognition, persistent experiences, and even shared experiences between two devices. So how do you get started with Apple ARKit, and what application does it have to learning and performance support?

With the wide range of tools, apps, and online resources being launched all the time, it’s not always easy to stay on top of what might help you out in your day-to-day work. It’s also easy with this stream of new options to miss out on great new updates or techniques that can allow you to use old favorites in new ways.