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?