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.

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.

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.

Working with different subject matter experts (SMEs)—each with their own working style, personality, and expertise—can be a challenge. And that challenge can be amplified further when you need to work with multiple SMEs at the same time. How do you, as an instructional designer, know how to get the content you need from your SMEs to create effective and engaging learning experiences?

The conversation around 70:20:10 has been growing in popularity in recent years—with good reason. People are learning and getting support in a host of different ways, and 70:20:10 helps us see our work through a lens much broader than just traditional training methods. But in order to really be impactful, 70:20:10 needs to be more than just an idea. How do organizations put the concept of 70:20:10 into action?

Do you experience skepticism from stakeholders about the validity of the L&D function? Do you miss out on opportunities to demonstrate your value as a business advisor because you’re left out of the conversation from the start? And does this cynicism in the field lead to self-doubt and impact your career mobility? Many people can relate to this uphill climb and even experience impostor syndrome: the self-belief that you are not as skilled as people think you are and that you’ll be called out as a fraud. Because L&D is so often ill-defined and misunderstood, it provides fertile ground for impostor syndrome. So how does an L&D professional demonstrate value despite constant roadblocks or when impostor syndrome hits?

The most expensive instruction is that which doesn’t work. This discussion will look at the actions and behaviors that have been scientifically proven to affect learning. You will explore the ways in which instructional design requires more than content delivery and common sense. You will look at robust, evidence-based principles of learning to discover new ways to build the kind of training that is genuinely effective at creating performance change and helping organizations achieve their objectives.

How often do you read text on an electronic device? (You’re doing it right now!) Research shows that people read digital text differently than printed text. But does your eLearning strategy consider these differences?

A number of myths persist about people’s allegedly ever-shortening attention spans—but what does the science say? Neuroscience, behavioral economics, and consumer psychology all offer insights into how we manage and allocate attention. Additionally, our ability to manage attention and focus seems to be related to our abilities to allocate willpower and influence how we make decisions.

Most organizations have required training that becomes a chore for individuals to complete. Many learning and development functions are ultimately defined by these required trainings. In addition, managers and leaders must resort to fear or discipline to get individuals to complete the requirements on time. This session will provide a unique approach to “flip the script” and actually motivate individuals to complete their requirements while reducing the time spent. This allows learning departments to focus on more elective programs, and reduces the negative impression associated with training.

It’s no secret that people today are always on, and always on the go. Professional development competes with meetings, travel, deadlines, and the constant pull of email, instant messages, texts, and more. It’s no wonder today’s employees have so little time for learning! For L&D teams, it’s a challenge to reach people, much less engage them in meaningful experiences. A team at Capital One’s Tech College discovered how to engage their audience with microlearning content that’s relevant, always on, and built by in-house experts. Their microlearning strategy meets a broad range of learning needs—from teaching foundational tech concepts to all employees, to offering hands-on practice that applies interpersonal skills in the Capital One Developer Academy (CODA).

It’s that Herculean challenge, the digital makeover. Take a biweekly face-to-face simulation, costing the firm millions of dollars in travel, expenses, and staffing, and turn it into a rich digital experience. Prepare learners with tools, resources, and training to begin their career. Also, make sure they feel welcomed, understand expectations, and are grounded in the firm’s structure, priorities, and methodologies. Oh, and you have four months to do it!

Sometimes there isn’t one correct answer. Training is straightforward when teaching a set way to do a task or explaining the best way to handle a situation. It is not so easy when even subject matter experts disagree about the right course of action. When your SMEs lack consensus, what do you teach your workers? Should you include the ambiguity that naturally occurs in complex situations as part of your simulations? How do you create computer-based simulations that are realistic, but not too complicated to develop and manage?

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?

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?

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.

Branching scenarios can engage learners and provide relevant decision-making practice. They can help learners become competent at skills faster than other training approaches. While branching scenarios can be very valuable, nothing is the right solution for every training problem. Branching scenarios can be challenging to design and time-consuming to build. That might leave you wondering: When is it worth the time and effort to create a branching scenario? When do the benefits of branching scenarios outweigh the costs to create them? Are there any easier alternatives that could work, or might even work better in some situations?

You’ve created great training, but you hear complaints that employees still can’t do their job after passing your class. That’s frustrating! Many customers believe that if employees knew how to do their job, they would do it. After all, that’s why they get paid! Those are the same people who think that the best way to improve performance is by offering and conducting more training. The truth is that employee performance is influenced by several factors, one of which is closing the skills and knowledge gap through more training. And even the best-designed and best-delivered training will fail if the other five performance barriers (including training) are not addressed.

You know that most media—including eLearning—is failing at representation. You see it every day. And not only is it leaving people out of the picture, it’s less effective as a result. Maybe you’ve tried to make your work more inclusive but haven’t been able to find great media, haven’t been able to convince your stakeholders, or simply aren’t confident in navigating how to respectfully represent different genders, ethnicities, orientations, and abilities.

Take a look at these situations: (1) Your client insists on having at least one image per page. They don’t care which images you choose. (2) You realize that the course you are developing is very text-heavy, so you decide to add some images to break it up. (3) You find a really awesome image, so you add it to your next course. Sound familiar? Probably. So ask yourself two questions: “Did I really think about the images before using them?” and “Were any of the images confusing, ambiguous, or irrelevant?” Be honest with yourself. How do you choose the images that will convey meaning for your learners?

While many instructional designers strive to create content that is effective for all learners, in reality, their designs often don’t accommodate students with abilities that are different from their own. One way you can ensure that your learning content facilitates learning among all learners is by designing to ADA compliance standards. Not only will doing so result in quality learning for everyone, it will also satisfy a legal requirement to which higher education institutions are beholden.

As more and more projects are built to accommodate multiple devices, the need to prototype grows. Whether you are creating a new project, developing an app, or simply launching a new responsive course, prototyping can help you better understand what’s working and what needs to be changed.

Often, organizations deliver the same eLearning course to all their employees. This means each learner gets the same course with the same content no matter what they already know or what they have already done. This creates a one-size-fits-all approach without considering learners’ previous experiences.

Designers experience waste during the development of blended learning curricula. Multiple meetings, storyboards, learner personas, and prototypes create a framework for the finalized product; however, failure to eliminate process redundancies (waste) will produce no standard products. What if there were a methodology that could streamline and standardize instructional development among designers, learners, and customers?

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.

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!

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.