In a recent study, 69 percent of employees under age 40 claimed that training opportunities are an important factor in their decision to stay with their current company/position or leave.

What role do trainers and Human Resources executives play in creating platforms for a more diverse set of voices to be heard, and seriously considered, when important decisions need to be made?

It’s important to build self-confidence and engagement in your own development to demand what you feel you deserve.

Your online courses will be successful if you can give your customers what they are seeking - but first you have to know what they want. In this LMScast Joshua Millage and Christopher Badgett will tell you how to create with the customer in mind, and that begins with learning to see from their perspective. One of your greatest challenges as an online instructor is getting past what you envision for your students and finding out what they envision for themselves. There are 3 key questions to consider in designing your courses: Who are you serving? What are you solving? How are you different? Knowing your customers is the primary key to reaching them. Segmenting your market helps you identify your target market and its sub-markets. For example, in developing the LifterLMS platform we wanted to address the eLearning market, so we focused on edupreneurs, but we primarily wanted to create a tool for solopreneurs - especially those new to course development. You need to know exactly what you want to create and then seek a market that you can profit from. You might build a sensational training program, but if your intended customers can’t afford what you’re offering, they can’t buy it. Research your target audience to determine what they can afford, and how deep their passion for your subject is. The more they want to learn what you can teach them, the more money they will be willing to spend for it. Understand your end-user’s persona. What kind of person will want to take your course? What is their lifestyle? What are their primary interests? The best way to learn about potential customers is to find them, interview them, and connect with them. Then you can build solid customer relationships that result in return customers and referrals for your courses. Ask for feedback from your students and listen to what they tell you with an open mind. Let their input drive innovation as you expand your course offerings. Also watch what other edupreneurs are doing to see what works and what fails for them. Have a vision for the future of your business, including the prospect of growing into follow-on markets once your beachhead market is profitable. Making your online courses work requires a balance between defining what you want to build, and learning how to create with the customer in mind. Our LifterLMS course development platform will help you build your courses using these principles. You can try a demo of LifterLMS and see for yourself what it can do for you. Remember that you can post comments and also subscribe to our newsletter for updates, developments, and future episodes of LMScast. Thank you for joining us. Joshua: Hello, Everyone. Welcome back to another episode of LMScast. I’m Joshua Millage. I’m joined today with Christopher Badgett. Today we’re talking about how to create from the customer’s perspective. Chris, you have a funny little poster over there on your wall that has to do with this topic. Tell me more about that. Christopher: Awesome. That poster is basically a roadmap created by Bill Aulet. I believe he’s a Stanford entrepreneurship teacher. I could be wrong on the school, but one of those schools. He’s launched several successful startups himself with co-founders, but essentially he has created a roadmap for entrepreneurs to follow, which is on the wall. I’m always looking at it, because it’s not … First off, my hat comes off to you educator entrepreneurs out there, because it’s not easy. The hardest thing to do in the world is make to make something out of nothing. It could be fun. It could be exhilarating, but one of the biggest traps we can get into is thinking you have all the answers in your head and not having a customer focus. This roadmap up here which I also have in this book right here, and I can bring it a little closer, starts with how to really focus in on customers and the smart way to approach it. Joshua: That’s cool. Can you walk us through some of the steps there? Christopher: The first part, and I’ll say this if you’re talking to what I would say a real entrepreneur and you’re trying to get feedback, really the number one questions are who are you serving, what are you solving, how are you different. Those are key things. If we don’t have a target market, we’re missing the boat. It’s a total waste of time. Most people they’re not focused enough. They may have identified a market like let’s say moms, but you usually need to go another layer down like what kind of moms. The very first steps according to Bill Aulet in his book Disciplined Entrepreneurship is to segment your market. What market are you going after and then within that market, identify the beachhead market. I think we can talk about that a little bit in terms of LifterLMS. There’s a lot of people in the e-learning space, but our beachhead that we want to go after is and that we’ve gone after successfully is the education entrepreneurs, the solopreneur who’s putting together their training program or starting to put together a training program that includes other teachers, but that’s our beachhead market. If you think about a beachhead, you think about in the World Wars storming the beach enormity. Once you take the beach then you can start looking at where to go from there, but it all starts with defining that beachhead market and also doing your research and figuring out what the total addressable market or TAM is. Joshua: Got it. That’s something that really resonates with me is you want to make sure you’re building a product or a service in a market that can sustain the type of the company that you want to build. If you want to grow a large company with lots of revenue, the market has to have a lot of money. You can’t build into a market that doesn’t have a lot of money. I think that that’s a really good point to make because it is important to focus on a niche, but the niche needs to have enough money. A good example of that is the classic dog training. Why do people talk about dog training? Well, because pet owners are ridiculous. They’re price insensitive like crazy. They spend ridiculous amounts of money. Christopher: Or new parents with a baby coming. Joshua: New parents with a baby, but it’s focused enough and you can find these people that exist in groups to talk with them and make connections and grow a business. Christopher: Absolutely. Just on that note, another thing you do with the beachhead market is you want to identify that end-user persona. In the marketing world, we call that a customer avatar. That end-user persona, you want to identify what’s going on in their life, what they’re like, what their interests are, the demographics or psychographics. You also want to go out and do interviews with real ones that are out there in reality who may need this product idea you have or the service. As Steve Blank says, get out of the building and go do some interviews before you build a single line of code or start developing prototypes and things like that. Joshua: Right, absolutely. I would agree with that. He also says no prototype survives its first interaction with a customer or no product. I think that’s pretty good. I don’t think any course will either in a lot of ways. There definitely needs to be a 2.0 and make adjustments for people. Christopher: Absolutely. I think it’s important to point out too that some of the entrepreneur education out there or materials if you’re trying to figure out how to launch a business or create a product or service, sometimes you get mixed messages. If you study an entrepreneur or serial entrepreneur like Mark Cuban, he’ll say his number one thing is ubiquity. When he goes after something, he wants mass market. I know one of the things in his portfolio of businesses I believe is Magnolia Pictures, a movie production company. Most people watch movies at some point in their life or if you’re looking at Steve Jobs and you look at the iPhone or the smartphone, almost everybody or a huge mass market is into smartphones. Now there’s segments within that, but if you’re new to the game, I think ubiquity is really hard and it’s a long shot. There’s something called survivor bias where you only hear about the Mark Cubans and the Steve Jobs that actually made it. That road is paved with failed businesses. If you take a disciplined approach and you really start with a very clearly defined beachhead market with the end-user profile, with real people that are saying, "Yes, what you have sounds interesting," you do your lifecycle analysis of what their experience is through your offer and all businesses have a diffusion of innovation and they grow and die, so it’s important to just be realistic about all that stuff, but let your customer drive that innovation. Let that end-user persona drive the innovation. Let them tell you where they think you’re wrong and listen to them. Joshua: And not be overly emotional so that you shut down which I think a lot of people do, a lot of people do. Christopher: A business is like having a baby. You got to let the baby out and you got to get feedback. Joshua: Definitely. Christopher: You can’t take it personally. It’s like its own creature. Joshua: Right, exactly. That’s really good. What else, Chris? Are there other steps in this map? Christopher: I just want to identify that a lot of … There’s a lot of opportunity if you think in the fourth dimension or in time. You got to have your marathon pants on if you want to start a business, if you want to be an entrepreneur. It takes some serious stamina. Part of that that can give you hope and faith when you’re thinking about your customer perspective is when you think about your beachhead market, your early adapters, your innovators, the people who are most likely to listen to you and use your product, the people who you can give the most aggressive messaging to that you really are like carving out a name for, if you look past them, if you get success with the beachhead market, then there’s other what are known as follow-on markets, other customers, other market segments, so it’s important to realize that just look long term. Don’t take shortcuts and try to go straight to the follow-on markets or be too general, but at the same time don’t feel like you’re stuck with your early adapter beachhead market. If you look at the e-learning space in general which we’re in, if I was in the content game, the publishing game, the last place I would create content around would be development courses because it’s a market driven by developers that naturally the Udemys and the Lyndas of the world, the Pluralsights, all these places started … They’ve been doing development e-learning for a decade. There’s a new arc that’s just coming online with other offline things like yoga or lifestyle courses and things that are now coming online. These are follow-on markets. It’s important to look at where different industries are at if you’re going to play the publisher game. Joshua: Yeah, absolutely. I think that’s some great ideas. You’re right. You can gather some of the best innovative ideas from what other industries are doing. I think that’s a great point. Cool. Well, we’re coming down to the end of it. I think my suggestion for people which we mentioned earlier is always get out of the building and talk to your customers and try and find some common things, but don’t think that you also have to build everything for everyone because if you do, you’re not going to wind up happy there either. It’s a balancing act between the two. That’s my final thoughts. What about you Chris? Christopher: I just want to piggyback on what you’re saying and echo your statement about having an open mind when your customers talk back. Just be open because that’s where the real nuggets of wisdom and value that you can then mine as an entrepreneur and develop come from. Joshua: Absolutely. All right. Well, thank you everyone for listening. We’ll see you next week with another episode of LMSCast. See you. The post How to Create With the Customer In Mind appeared first on LMScast.

If you have never used activity and game templates before, you might think that having templates available in your course authoring tool might make things "a little bit better"—but in reality, the net effect can be transformational both for you and for your students. Our international course production team typically creates thousands of hours of training per year. What is one of the top things they are thankful for this year? Fabulous templates. In all training, but particularly in online courses, you as an author need to interact regularly with your learners to help keep them alert, focused, and actively exploring your content during the online training. Although most systems allow you to incorporate activities and games created outside of the course-building tool, production is much faster and more efficient when you have templates built directly into the tool. Consider the advantages: Great for you No experience required: Top teachers crave interactive elements in their courses—but may not have the graphic design or programming experience needed to efficiently bring those to life. With easy-to-use built-in tools, that barrier no longer exists. Quicker, more flexible course development: With built-in activity and game templates, you can design great interactions pretty much as fast as you can think and type. All your attention can go toward creating great content that supports learning. Even better, once developed, if you put your interaction in front of a focus group and find that it does not quite have the impact you wanted, it’s just as easy to revise it, or replace it with something different. Templates offer plentiful opportunity for fast, low risk, low cost experimentation—allowing you to deliver an optimal experience to your learners while still meeting deadlines and budgets. Faster time to market: Sometimes the course creation work you do needs to be accomplished "at the speed of light" to address an immediate problem in the organization, or to latch on to a market opportunity. That does not mean the work has to be flat and PowerPoint-esque. Use templates to achieve instructional goals while optimizing time to market. Rapid revisions: There are times when you need to revise your course content—sometimes very quickly if a rule or law changes. With templates, you can do it yourself, immediately—no need to reassemble teams and start up whole processes. Just access the course builder, type the revision, save, and republish. Problem solved. Consistent look and feel: Visual consistency can help make your course feel professional and polished. Templates are a great way to quickly achieve this. More efficient quality assurance cycles: Built-in e-learning templates can also help minimize the time spent reviewing a course to make sure it is ready for students. Since the template’s interactions have already been thoroughly tested, all you have to review is the content itself. Great for your students Supports Learning: Keeping learners actively engaged in the learning process is critical for their success. As a general benchmark, try to work in an activity every 3-5 slides (5-8 minutes of content). Scaffold up the difficulty of activities as learners progress through the materials and gain mastery. Allow learners to challenge themselves and explore side cases through the meaningful interactions you create. Adds Variety: Page after page of the same type of content—even excellent quality content—can begin to lull the learner. Activity templates can help you easily change the pace and alternate periods of passive absorption of information with periods of greater activity during which the learner gets to take concepts out for a spin. Prevents Cognitive Overload: People need breaks and the opportunity to allow new ideas and knowledge to soak in. With templates in your course-building toolbox, it is super easy to break content into meaningful chunks, and create opportunities for practice related to those chunks. With 360training’s free and freemium course creation tools (LCMS), not only can you author great online courses for next to nothing, but can access easy-to-use built-in activity and game templates. Check out our authoring program FAQ page for more information about becoming an author and providing courses to your internal team, selling courses yourself, or selling courses through 360training.com and our network of resellers. Online templates can have you and your team giving thanks—but more importantly, it can help you create engaging, active learning that carries that thankfulness to every student your courses touch. —Shazia Wajid and the 360 Authoring Team

We live in a visual age. Images are now the official language of the universe. The massive increase in social networking platforms endorses the growing popularity of visuals as the primary medium of communication. From a learning perspective, various researches have revealed that our brains act as image processors. The human brain processes and retains visuals faster than text. Images are one of the many learning resources that we use in our online courses. They drive learner engagement and add to the learning process.  As online course developers, it is our duty to use every learning resource in the best possible manner to provide a rich, cohesive learning experience for our students. Here are few quick tips to help you get the most out of your elearning visuals. Stylization Properly stylized images add consistency and a professional touch to an online course. They balance the text and avoid clutter on the slide. Stylize your images in a uniform manner (and as per the course player dimensions) before adding them in your courses. If you are good with photo editing software, designing an image stylization template can be very useful and time-saving. If not, take advantage of the basic picture editing features of PowerPoint and work your way towards professional looking images. Use appropriate images Before you begin sourcing images for your online course, ask yourself: Do I need to have images for every slide? Will the images support the core content? Will the learner be able to visualize the content by looking at the images? Can it distract the learner from the core content? Will it increase the learning potential of the students? Images add depth to the content, but they should never be used in place of core content. Think of visuals as garnish: something used to support learning. Avoid images that distract the learner from the main message. Remember, at all times, learner focus should be on the core content of the course. It is better to have a white space on the course slide than to have an image divert learners’ attention. Explore different ways to use images Usually, online courses follow a standard vertical layout (visual right). While this is an industry practice, it is always good to experiment with other slide layouts available in 360training Learning Content Management System (LCMS) such as visual bottom, visual top, etc. Exploring different slide templates adds variety to the look and feel of your course and can be an excellent way to reuse and present an image uniquely. Be careful with copyrights Never use unauthorized images for your online courses. It is very easy to download images from the web, but all of them fall under copyright law. Always read the terms of use before using images from other sources. If you have a tight budget, edit and reuse the same images multiple times from your Learning Content Management System (LCMS) asset library, or to go with free stock images offered by some websites. Tip: When downloading images, always opt for high resolution images (and resize as per your requirements) to avoid pixelation. Don’t confuse the learners Don’t add images in your elearning courses for the purpose of breaking up the monotony of text. You are better off with no images rather than having decorative images that will take learners’ minds off the main topic. There you go! Images play an important role in elearning. They accelerate the learning process, help instructors convey abstract concepts, and serve as an excellent tool to maintain learners’ attention during an online course! The soul does not think without a picture. — Aristotle

We all have stories to tell. These stories come from different sources, from our own experience, our imagination, people around us, and so forth. Stories teach, delight, motivate, inspire. Stories are a powerful communication tool to make a point and help listeners understand a situation. No wonder stories have been used as a teaching tool for centuries. If you are planning to author an online course, you can leverage this powerful technique to create the most compelling, best-selling online courses with happy endings. Read on to find out how. Connection between the stories and the brain Before we begin, let me share a famous story with you: "Isaac Newton was sitting under the tree pondering about the mystery of the universe, when suddenly an apple fell and hit him on his head, thus giving him the idea of gravity, that later led to the discovery of the theory of universal gravitation." Have you ever wondered what made this story stick in our minds over the years? Trust me, you would have not remembered the classical theory of gravitation so clearly if it was told in pure physics, i.e. F = G (m1*m2 / r2) or in simple bullet points. Why? Because our brains love stories! Our brains collect simultaneous memories and stores them in the form of an episode. When we hear or read simple text, the language decoding part of the brain comes into action. However if we hear a story, we develop different emotions simultaneously, which activates overall entire brain function. The catch—longtime retention and recall of the content. As online course developers, we can’t present thrilling content all the time, but we can certainly deliver our course content in a way that grips learners’ attention and helps them make the most out of their online training. Tips to write good eLearning stories Here are few quick tips to ensure a happily-ever-after ending for your online courses. Write relevant stories. Before you begin your elearning tale, ask yourself: Which content can I use to create an informational story? What kind of story plot can drive the learner towards the learning goal? Which situation can help the learner paint the mental picture of the subject matter and create a bonding between the two? Remember: Keep your stories relevant to your courses. Transform real-life experiences into short stories and scenarios so that the learner can relate and grasp the material easily. Reality-based stories with supporting feedback help prepare students to face and resolve practical situations with confidence. Keep it simple. By now, we have realized the importance of storytelling in elearning; however, a huge amount of text with tons of confusing words can have a disastrous effect on your online courses. Don’t overwhelm learners with complicated language and confusing plot. Write simple, short stories, as they stick more in learners’ minds and keep them focused. Power up stories with visuals. A picture is worth a thousand words. Intensify your elearning stories by adding visuals. Choose easily relatable images that best fit the situation. Not every story has a happy ending. Effective stories reflect reality and that is why they succeed in touching the reader’s heart. Just like any good story, your elearning story should be close to reality and highlight common obstacles people encounter in life. Not every good intention has a positive outcome. Not everything goes as smoothly as we plan. By adding reality factors in your stories, you can prepare your elearners for practical situations and keep them guessing about the twists that are about to come. Follow the story telling arc. Ever wondered why you remember the Cinderella story even though it’s been years since you have heard it? Every good story has few basics. Let’s examine the components of the story telling arc with reference to a food safety course: A good beginning: John has recently joined a restaurant as a Food Safety Manager. Dilemma (turning point): John notices that food safety standards are not met. The hero fights back: John reports this to the restaurant’s owner, but his complaint is not taken seriously. John tries to convince the employees to improve their food handling practices, but to his surprise, the restaurant owner threatens to fire him. Critical choice: John has a tough decision to make. Either he reports this or loses his job. John decided to report the malpractices to the relevant authorities. Climax: The authorities inspect the restaurant premises and uncover bacteria that could result in botulism in several containers of improperly prepared pickled fish. Had this been served to customers they could have become very sick and died. Everything changes: The restaurant owner and staff experience an enormous wake-up call. They had no idea the practices our hero had been talking about for months were really that important. They start re-examining how they prepare food and putting measures in place to ensure that their food was fast, delicious, AND safe. Lessons learned: Never avoid malpractices around you. People who do not report malpractices are as guilty as those who are actually involved in the crime. While it is not important to add all the components of the story arc, having the basics (beginning, dilemma, choices, and lesson learned) can effectively help learners relate to and understand the topic. Whatever the style you choose to apply, it should stir up learners’ emotions and successfully deliver the knowledge that you intend to pass on to the learner. Parting Thoughts Online course developers work hard to create an immersive learning experience for their online students to grab their attention, motivate them, and help them get the best out of the subject matter. By incorporating storytelling techniques, you can inspire your elearners, build a strong emotional bond between the learner and the course content, and provide the best learning experience to the students. Have a great elearning story to tell? Share it with us!

Learning is challenging. It requires learners’ attention and interest. Measuring what is being learnt is even more challenging. It demands teachers frame assessments in a way that not only tracks learners’ performance and tests their knowledge of the subject matter, but also challenges their thinking skills and reinforces learning.  An effective test is about more than writing good questions. It is also about having the right test design, so that you are not only evaluating learners, but also providing a learning opportunity that overcomes learning barriers and facilitates learning transfer. Here are few quick tips to help you design effective assessments for your elearning courses: Determine the purpose of an assessment Don’t throw assessments in your courses just because you have to. Before adding an assessment, determine its purpose. Are you testing to grade students or just involve and motivate them? Is this a short quiz, a practice assessment or the final exam of the course? If you want to stir up students’ attention, why not add a short game or a simple activity in place of an assessment? Deciding all this beforehand will help keep things organized and consistent. It will also help course developers set the important features of the test such as target number of questions to ask, the complexity level of the test, number of attempts permitted, the time frame for the test, and so forth. Write assessments after writing the learning objectives of the course The secret behind effective assessment lies in writing them as soon as you are done writing the learning objectives of the course. Why? Because it is the time when you are 100% focused on what you want to teach in your elearning course. Identify the learning goals of your course and write questions about each of them. Write as many questions that you can think of after reading the learning objectives of your lesson/course, organize them by level of difficulty (i.e. pre-assessments, quizzes, practice exam or final exam), and add them in their respective assessment item banks. The practice of pre-writing assessments will help you reinforce your learning objectives, and you will not end up asking things that were not even included in the course. Help students prepare for the test Online training lacks interaction between the learner and the teacher. Every course has a major take away that online teachers want to test, which may be overlooked by the learner. The best method to help learners get the most out of your elearning course and do their best in the elearning assessment is to help them prepare for it. How? Reinforce the concepts that were taught earlier by adding them in the form of activities or practice exams. Also, it is always a great idea to have a lesson summary at the end of each module, which can serve as a great review tool. Shuffle those questions Always enable the "randomize questions" option in your course authoring tool.  It is a good idea to jumble the questions of your test, so that the learner is not presented the same set of questions multiple times (in case he or she fails to pass the test in first attempt). Be careful with "randomize answers" option, especially if you have "all of the above" or a logical order in your answer choices. Content Remediation In classrooms, if teachers find students’ performance lacking, they provide remedial instruction to overcome those learning gaps. Similarly, in an online training, if the desired performance goals are not met, content remediation is applied. Content remediation is providing the essential knowledge or skill to learners (in case they fail to pass the quiz or exam) before they can move ahead in the course, or complete the course. While configuring the course policy of your elearning course, always keep the remediation feature in mind. What is the learner expected to do if she or he fails the exam? Should she or he be allowed to proceed in the course, or take the entire lesson or course all over again? Closing Thoughts Not every elearning course needs to have multiple quizzes and final exams. The number of quizzes and/or the length of your final exam are hugely dependent on your course type. If you are aiming to author a simple PDF course, just having a final exam at the end would suffice. However, if your course consists of various lessons and modules, adding quizzes at the end of each lesson would be a great way to check your learner’s performance, and provide the best experience to your students while they acquire new skills. Try out these tips in your elearning courses to keep your elearning assessment focused and effective!

What comes to your mind when you hear the term ‘Blended Learning’? It’s not a new term and yet has numerous connotations. Amidst the vast information available today on what it is and what it isn’t, the basic definition says: "Blended learning is a formal education program in which a student learns at least in part through online delivery of content and instruction with some element of student control over time, place, path, or pace." Today, the Internet has taken over as the information bank with tremendous resources available online in the form of books, videos, posts, etc. With a simultaneously booming technology industry, the avenues for online learning are endless. What benefits will blended learning offer compared to elearning training? How can one make the most of the blended approach while providing the optimum learning experience? Traditionally, a blended approach has meant shifting part of the training to an online media - either as "additional reading" or "a mandatory online reading assignment". Of course, this approach reduces actual classroom time and contributes highly in reducing overall training costs. From my analysis and research on the forms of training and engagements available today, I believe making some change in the approach can significantly increase cost benefits for the training provider and increase the value of the learning experience for the learner many times over. Instead of using technology or online tools as a support mechanism for classroom training, what if we use classroom for support? As part of the training design, the students access lessons via online training, videos, podcasts, etc. before the classroom session. The in-class session can then be used for more engaging activities like discussions, role-plays, practice exercises etc. that will help the students apply their learning. In-class sessions can also be used to cover advanced concepts. In short, they learn at their own pace independently and apply the learning in a classroom environment. Since most of the training will be self-paced, all benefits of elearning rollouts can be utilized. At the same time, the in-person connection allows the students to engage with fellow students and tutors. They can also practice the concepts they’ve learned. Some key benefits include: This approach of blended learning is also being referred to as ‘Flipped Learning’ or ‘Flipped Classrooms’. How can you change your training design to flip the classroom training experience? About the author: Kavita Lad works with InfoPro Learning as a Sr. Project Manager and Instructional Strategist. Kavita manages high-value customer projects through her keen knowledge and experience in instructional design, project management and learning strategies.The post Change the Blend in Blended Learning appeared first on .

Education and training is a natural activity for humanity. However, the kind of knowledge imparted and the method used to impart it may differ depending on the needs of a human being or a group of individuals. Before education moved to the confines of a traditional classroom, training was imparted by way of experiential learning and lessons had ‘show me’ and ‘let me’ elements included in the training. Many of these were related to psychomotor domains like hunting, archery, rock climbing, and cooking too. In Harry Potter movies, Severus Snape’s classroom has a combination of a very traditional teacher-pupil relationship (where Snape is in complete control of the student’s behavior) and an experiential way of learning (where students mix ingredients to create their potions.) After being stuck in the groove with lecture-oriented classrooms for decades, the mode of imparting knowledge is shifting back to learning by action. Technology has revolutionized the world in numerous ways—a prominent one being education. Today training is more commonly imparted online—eLearning is the trend that has advanced to mobile learning or mLearning. An imperative question a learning expert asks these days is, "Which is the correct mode of training to promote an effective solution for a specific training requirement?" Bearing the same question in mind, let us discuss three modes of learning through: Classroom Training Elearning Mobile Learning or mLearning Classroom Training When designing a training solution, the main consideration for instructional designers is to choose the appropriate mode of training. An in-depth training and organizational needs analysis goes a long way in taking the right decision. A classroom training essentially entails a group of students, a facilitator/professor, and live labs with lab assistants for guided learning. When faced with a situation to make a decision on whether to choose a classroom learning solution, consider the following criteria: the use of psychomotor skills soft-skills training where the trainer’s response is critical more hands-on activities group interaction to meet the objectives development and enhancement of team work live demonstration of skills along with real-time assessment of the skill strict time schedules with time constraints but no location and cost constraints Often, a blended solution may provide a better option and can be used in the following ways: when training is chunked to enable part of the training to be delivered through a self-paced CBT or WBT and the remaining portion in a classroom with an instructor when training is taken in a classroom and CBT or WBT or videos are used as training aids during the training by the instructor a CBT or WBT is used as a precursor to classroom training for familiarization with subject matter Elearning ELearning is the buzz word that has been around for a few years. Its importance is increasing as a larger number of training institutes, government and corporate sectors incorporate eLearning into their realms of training. When recommending an eLearning solution for a training requirement, consider the following criteria: cater to various learning styles a blend of videos, simulations, animations, role-plays, and quizzes will add to the interactivity resulting in enhanced learning faster learning in half the time compared to traditional training is the main requirement cost of training is a major consideration size of the audience is huge and schedules for completion are tight the audience requires more flexibility in completing the course localization and geography are key elements of the decision change is the only constant and a quick update in one location has to be reflected simultaneously at all locations standardization is important learning effectiveness and ROI has to be monitored group interaction is not limited to a location and the use of blogs, wikis, message boards, and whiteboards will add positively for an effective solution a course is required to be saved and reused, eliminating trainer dependency Mobile Learning or mLearning As we advance in technology, the optimization of each tool becomes a norm. The latest device/tool to join this need for optimization are mobile phones. Mobile phones were already being used as music and video tools, cameras, computers to access the Internet and all social networking sites, banks for eCommerce, playing games, and now, as learning tools. Since learning technology is evolving, learning via mobile devices is becoming common. Situations and learning needs where an mLearning solution will be a good fit may be listed as follows: stimulating recall of prior learning by way of pre-work before ILT, eLearning, or even virtual ILT informing learners of the objectives and learning outcomes prior to the training for gaining attention summarizing the content of a learning topic/module soon after its completion reiterating learning by stimulating recall a few days or weeks after completion of training ensuring application of learning by way of assessments, pop-quizzes, and/or learning games continuation of learning through company blogs, wikis, and social networking is required sending podcasts for continued learning over mobile devices as a just-in-time solution communicating the salient features just before the next round of training to add value to the learning and keep the interest in training alive sending flashcards with regular updates instead of repeating the training every time there is an update providing learning on-the-move for travelling executives such as sales personnel with little time for even taking eLearning courses is of prime importance Varied forms of training and a wide spectrum of learners is the norm today because training is not only limited to schools, universities, or professional institutes. Training is also a vital HR function in most organizations. However, with the increasing use of technology in learning as in other spheres, making a decision on the right tool and selecting the correct instructional approach to meet with the training needs, analysis has become a major challenge, requiring the expertise of professionals. Knowing your available options and analyzing suitable solutions for a learning need will help in creating or delivering cost-effective, goal-oriented and skill-enhancing courses. About the author: Brenda Fernandes is a content quality analyst with InfoPro Learning, Inc. With over 15 years of experience, Brenda is an avid learning strategist with content development, instructional design and business analysis as her core areas of expertise. Brenda is a keen practitioner of harnessing the power of learning content to impact employee performance. 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