As you know well, we’re an online learning technology company. But that doesn’t mean we want to send face-to-face training to its grave. In fact, online learning is most effective when it gets blended with traditional, classroom-based learning! For instance, rather than just using one online module to cover a topic, you might break that topic’s training programme into several stages. So, for example, here’s what a five-stage blended learning programme might look like: Online learning - Learners complete an online unit which eases them gently into the topic. Applying learning on-the-job - Leaners apply their new-found knowledge back in the real world (Just because we love online learning doesn’t mean we forget that this place exists!). Their experiences can be recorded as case studies to see how they’re getting on. Face-to-face workshop - Learners prepare work for highly-interactive workshops. Rather than traditional classroom dictating, they can be super-engaging and make sure that everyone gets involved! Written assignment - Learners go away and spend some time putting together a report to demonstrate their understanding of the topic. Writing something like this for the first time since school might seem scary, but with all the training to this point writing it ends up being a breeze. Consolidative learning - Now your learners are experts in this topic! But let’s not stop there. Online learning and a test can be delivered via an LMS at a later date to keep the topic fresh in their minds and make sure that the knowledge has been embedded properly. According to Training magazine, 29.1% of training hours were delivered with blended learning techniques in 2014, and that number is rising each year. Clearly the world of learning and development is catching on to what makes blended so splendid, so make sure you don’t get left behind. The benefits So, it’s clear that blended learning can offer a robust training programme which covers every angle, but have you considered some of these benefits? Teamwork - Alongside having a social learning management system to foster collaborative learning, getting the chance to bounce ideas off of each other in a workshop is a fantastic way to help each other’s understanding. Direct access to experts - You can ask questions to experts at any point during online learning, but being able to bombard them with everything at once during a workshop is the perfect way to check that you’re on track. Embed training - By learning in a number of environments (online, in the workplace, in the classroom) and through a number of methods (eLearning, workshops, written assignments), a learner gets to wear every hat while thinking about the topic, giving them a much more rounded understanding of it. But what about the cold, hard stats? What real-world results can blended learning bring? Well, just ask our client Steinhoff! They wanted their learners from Bensons for Beds to get completely comfortable with their Comfort Station. It’s smarter than your average bed, and works out exactly which bed and mattress is the perfect match for you. They blended eLearning with workshops and in-store observations, and followed up with more eLearning to make sure their learners stayed on the straight and narrow. The results were unprecedented. Normally their teams convert sales at a rate of 15-20%, but following this blended programme they’ve been converting at a whopping 45%! This means that one in every two people to try the Comfort Station now goes on to buy a bed! Surely you’d like to see results this good, so what are you waiting for? How we manage blended learning Organising a blended learning solution can be a nightmare if your online and offline elements can’t speak with each other. That’s why we’ve made it easy for our Academy LMS to act as a hub when running any blended programme. Classroom booking - You’ve managed to attract your learners to your shiny new Academy, but you need to rally them into a classroom. No problem! Classroom events can be managed through the Academy, where learners are able to book onto the courses that appear on their calendar. Upload work - Your learners have worked tirelessly to craft their assignments, so why make handing them in difficult? They can upload them directly to their Academy, and your assessors will get a notification telling them they’ve got something to mark. Curricula - Struggling to keep track of who’s completed what? Creating a curriculum for each unit will wrap up every stage of the blended learning progress and keep track of what’s been done. So learners won’t be able to pass the unit until they’ve completed all the training and uploaded all of their work. If you’re itching to find out more about blending traditional classroom training with technology, check out our white paper:  The post Why blended learning is splendid learning appeared first on Growth Engineering.

eLearning production doesn’t happen by magic - not usually anyway. It’s easy to forget, when you see a shiny new eLearning unit, that buckets of blood, sweat and tears have been poured into it. A whole team of instructional designers, subject matter experts and graphic artists have toiled endlessly to produce the content that you take for granted.   One of the biggest challenges faced by instructional designers is that of managing the eLearning project and making sure it gets delivered on time and to the expected degree of awesomeness. Sometimes, despite their best efforts, these projects can fall short. In fact, in a survey of over 1400 professionals,  86% of respondents cited lack of adequate collaboration for workplace failures.   Collaboration, dear reader, is in fact the secret sauce to making sure your eLearning project runs like a well-oiled machine, like a dream come true, indeed, like magic! So what can you do to improve collaboration in eLearning production? Well… 1. Open a dialogue Many delays and hold-ups are caused by inconvenient breakdowns in communication. Clear lines of communication are essential in any project, and eLearning production is no different. Before you even start, make sure that you have a solid infrastructure in place to keep all parties informed of progress, whether that’s an online social forum, or a network of strings and tin cans! 2. Know your role As a project manager, it’s easy to fall into the trap of assuming too much responsibility. You need to accept that nobody expects you to know everything! Your team members are your best asset and you need to use their knowledge and skills to the advantage of the project. Make sure that everybody involved in the eLearning development knows what is expected of them, and give them the tools they need to deliver it on time. You wouldn’t try to put up a shelf using a banana, would you? The eLearning world is no different. Know your strengths and apply the right tools where necessary. 3. Keep it in context Everyone learns in different ways and some people simply won’t grasp a concept until they can see it with their own eyes (it’s estimated that around 65% of the population are visual learners). Try not to rely too heavily on spreadsheets and content outlines - chances are, they make perfect sense to you… and only you! If you start the project with a graphical mock-up of the finished eLearning unit or a basic slideshow that’s easy to understand at a glance, you can alleviate a lot of confusion at an early stage, and avoid costly mistakes. Better still, if you let your team see the eLearning unit as it’s being created, they’ll have a much clearer understanding of where the project stands, and what’s left to do. 4. No mess, no fuss Unless your eLearning unit is entirely text-based (maybe you’re experimenting with the limits of boredom…), it won’t take long before your list of graphics, video and other assets stacks up. Ideally, all of the assets you need will be available at the same time, but more often than not, you’ll find that they’ll trickle in from a number of sources as the project progresses. Although it might seem like a minor point, it’s easy for assets to go astray, costing you time that could have been saved. This is why it’s important to set a standard for how your assets are managed. Make sure everyone has access to the same central location and that they’re clear on where everything should be uploaded. 5. Set a date Nothing motivates quite like a scary, looming deadline! It’s a sad truth that if you want something done ‘whenever’, it’ll never get done at all. Instead, people will tend to prioritise the tasks on their lists that actually have deadlines. If you want your eLearning project to go off without a hitch, you need to make sure that your whole team is aware of the delivery date and, more importantly, the impact their contribution will have on it. 6. Make it fun Who said that eLearning production has to be one mindless, heart-breaking chore after another?! True, no matter what your role might be, it can be a thankless task. Any good project manager should recognise this and fill that big, ungrateful gap with something that keeps the rest of the team engaged. Have you got an asset manager who’s particularly organised? Well, you should recognise it - in public, to great acclaim. Encourage some friendly competition among your team by awarding badges. They don’t have to be medals made of solid gold; the gesture itself is all that’s needed to let people know that they are doing a good job.   If you follow these 6 steps, you and your team will be on a collision course with success, but there’s a secret, hidden, seventh step that will wrap the other six up in a tidy little package…   7. Unleash the Genie! Genie is a collaborative authoring tool that had all of the functionality you’d expect from an eLearning development wizard with the added power of collaboration. With Genie, you can assign custom roles specific to each team member and invite them to edit your eLearning projects. The platform is completely social, meaning that everyone can stay abreast of all of the latest developments and maintain a constructive dialogue. Not special enough for you? What if we told you that every piece of Genie eLearning is designed to be as game-like as possible? Each eLearning unit can be easily built using one of Genie’s game templates creating a magical experience for your learners unlike anything they’ve seen before. And it’s not as if the learners get all of the fun; Genie is completely gamified, giving your whole team the opportunity to earn badges for contributing to the project. For now, we’ll let you sit down and come to terms with that barrage of awesomeness - and when you’re ready, you can pop over to unleashthegenie.com and test-drive it for yourself… …or just do it now. Go on - make a wish and click the button!  The post 6 Ways to Boost Collaboration in Your eLearning Production appeared first on Growth Engineering.

LMS, LCMS, LRS… There’s enough lingo in the world of online learning to give even the most weathered ID a headache! But don’t fret! We’ve put together a handy glossary to help ease you into our wonderful world. It’s worth bookmarking so that you can check back on it whenever you stumble upon the latest buzzword that’s floating around. Online learning glossary API - This acronym stands for ‘Application Program Interface’. Essentially, it allows two different types of software to communicate with each other. Take our Academy LMS for example. Our API allows you to integrate the Academy with your HR system so that you can upload all of your learners in one go rather than doing it manually. Blended learning - Online learning doesn’t always completely replace traditional classroom-based learning. Blended learning describes programmes which blend together online and face-to-face learning. Cloud-based learning - This means that all of the software and resources involved in the learning is stored in the enigmatic cloud. This is a good thing because it means you don’t have to download or install anything to access your learning, and you can access it using any device. Content authoring tool - Learning is great, but you need content to be able to do it! A learning content authoring tool will generally create SCORM-compliant content which can be hosted on most LMSs. Our recently launched Genie is an example of such a tool. Discovery Method - You might hear us banging on about this from time to time, because this is our unique approach to content creation, designed to engage the learner. It gets the learner to plug in their own experiences as they work through the content, and then recalls it later on so that they can think about their new-found knowledge in context. It also tracks any inputs and automatically builds a personalised study plan to be downloaded at the end of the unit. Our Genie content authoring tool lets you utilise the Discovery Method in your own content. eCommerce - Short for ‘electronic commerce’, it is the process of buying things online. So if you enable eCommerce on our Academy LMS, you can create a catalogue page and charge for courses and curricula. Gamification - This is our area of expertise! Gamification is the process of applying gaming mechanics to non-gaming situations in an effort to inject excitement and engagement into boring activities. So on our Academy LMS your learners will earn badges and levels, and compete against each other to climb leaderboards as they learn. Source - http://elearningindustry.com/top-gamification-statistics-and-facts-for-2015 HTML5 - The latest version of Hypertext Markup Language, which dictates the structure of web pages. It lets you deliver all sorts of multimedia via the web page, without having to download additional plugins like Flash Player. It’s also supported by all the main desktop and mobile browsers, so systems designed with HTML5 in mind should work properly on any device. ID - An ‘Instructional Designer’ designs and develops not just the learning content, but the learning experience. They work with subject matter experts to design the content, design the assessment methods and create all the multimedia and additional materials to accompany everything. Instructor-led training - This is more akin to traditional classroom-based training, where an instructor will teach a group of learners in a physical location. This could be one stage of a blended learning process. Interactive classroom - This is a method of blending online learning with classroom-based learning. So with our Academy LMS, an instructor leading a classroom can push assignments to the learners during the session and get instant feedback to check they’re keeping up. LCMS - A ‘Learning Content Management System’ is focused on creating online learning content. They let developers interact and share assets and materials used when creating content, but place far less emphasis on managing the learner experience than you find in an LMS. LMS - A ‘Learning Management System’, such as our Academy LMS, is all about managing the people. They come jam-packed full of features and host libraries of learning content. They let you design the learning path you want people to take, manage online and offline training, and run robust reports to track everyone’s progress. Source - http://elearningindustry.com/top-lms-statistics-and-facts-for-2015 LRS - A ‘Learning Record Store’ works with Tin Can API to keep track of a learner’s data. It allows for robust reporting, and could potentially follow a learner around between jobs. mLearning - Meaning ‘mobile learning’, this enables online learning to be accessed from portable devices, such as their mobile phones. It basically means that you can learn on the go! MOOC - A ‘Massive Open Online Course’ is one which takes place over the web and lets a huge number of people sign up and learn free of charge. PENS - No, this isn’t anything to do with written exams! This actually stands for ‘Package Exchange Notification Services’. It allows one-click publishing from and authoring tool directly to an LMS. SaaS - No, we’re not giving you any sass, this actually means ‘Software as a Service’. It means that the software is centrally hosted and licensed out to clients. Our Academy LMS is an example, and it means that you get automatic updates and easy administration. SCORM - This stands for ‘Sharable Content Object Reference Model’ and is the current standard in eLearning content. Basically, if your content complies with SCORM, then it should be able to run on most LMSs. Skills gap analysis - This generally takes the form of a short test which assesses a learner’s existing competencies. Specific areas for improvement are highlighted and relevant learning content is pushed to them to help them target their learning. SME - This doesn’t mean ‘Small and Medium-sized Enterprises’, but rather ‘Subject Matter Expert’. These are experts in particular topics, who often assist Instructional Designers in building learning content. On our Academy LMS, learners can also ask questions to SMEs, and the answers are recorded as FAQs to help everyone in the future. Social and collaborative learning - This learning methodology follows the viewpoint that two heads really are better than one. By discussing their learning together, groups of learners can really boost their collective knowledge of a subject. This social method of learning also engages them much more with the topic, meaning the learning is absorbed and stored more effectively. Our Academy LMS features a whole suite of social features to enable the 90% of learning which happens outside of formal training. From a Facebook-style newsfeed of comments to real-time live chat functionality, no learner can ever feel lonely! Tin Can API/xAPI - Known as both the Tin Can API and Experience API, this is an up and coming way of allowing communication between learning content and learning systems. It records learning experiences and stores them in an LRS, allowing for robust reporting. Now that you’re an online learning expert, we bet you’re itching to find out more about our gamified, social LMS! Why not request a demo today to find out why it was named the world’s #1 LMS for 2015?  The post Online Learning Glossary - Know your LMS from your LCMS! appeared first on Growth Engineering.

A couple of months ago, eLearning Jedi, Christopher Pappas listed 10 of the most challenging challenges faced by instructional designers today. Since we’re always fighting in the corner of instructional design superheroes, we thought it’d be a useful exercise to examine these 10 hurdles and ask ourselves what we’re doing to ease the burden. So, without further ado: 1. Designing and developing powerful eLearning courses. The fundamental challenge before any ID is creating a course that does what it’s supposed to. To do that, they need the necessary tools to build that learning experience and the means of assessing its success. We’ve developed our eLearning authoring tool, Genie, to make the building process as straight-forward as possible, letting the ID concentrate on the important business of crafting a powerful message. Once the game-based unit has been unleashed on the learners, our Academy LMS takes over with its slew of reporting options as well as giving the learners the opportunity to rate and comment on the experience. 2. Identifying key issues. In the whole field of learning and development, one of the most important jobs is to identify knowledge gaps and address them. This can be challenging when, as is often the case, the subject is long-winded and not very engaging. Again, Genie’s eLearning game templates can help instructional designers to split these topics into digestible chunks that are actually fun to consume - like a big packet of Haribo Starmix. 3. Choosing the right instructional design model. For many instructional designers, the model they choose to build a coherent learning journey is largely a matter of personal preference. The jury is still out as to which one is the most effective and learning professional can just about come to blows over whether Kolb would beat Gagne in a fist fight. At Growth Engineering, we’d rather not to get involved, and simply stick to providing solutions that help implement them! 4. Managing the eLearning project. Excellent organisational prowess is one of many superpowers possessed by great instructional designers. Delivering learning collateral promptly and to budget is one of the more practical challenges faced every day in the online learning community. Much of the work we do is focussed on removing obstacles that can cause delays in eLearning implementation. Using Genie’s eLearning templates shortens the delivery time by removing the need for development. Our authoring tool is also packed with project management tools to help coordinate assets and team members. 5. Crafting the art of communication. Instructional design is essentially the art of communicating a message to learners in the most effective way possible. We facilitate the genius of instructional designers by giving them the means to communicate in as many ways as possible. Genie lets eLearning wizards build text, video and audio into units as well as offering several options for knowledge recall, including The Discovery Method - our own training methodology that encourages learners to examine their own experience. 6. Dealing with people. "Hell is other people", said Sartre… but he was a bit of a miserable old sod! No eLearning project can be successful without the input of subject matter experts and other parties, even if it sometimes seems like they are standing in the way. The secret to dealing with people effectively falls down to three things: collaboration, collaboration and collaboration! We’ve always been staunch advocates of the power of collaboration in all walks of life, and that’s why we’ve built a strong social element into all of our learning technologies. These allow for real-time communication which is essential for avoiding unexpected surprises! 7. Resolving problems effectively. No matter how solid your project plan might be, the aforementioned surprises will inevitably occur. Instructional Designers are prized for thinking on their feet and adapting their approach to accommodate new information. At Growth Engineering, we’ve seen how easily slip-ups can happen and we’ve learned that the only way to deal with them is to tackle them head-on. We’ve also learned that an unintuitive UI only delays the resolution of these issues and that’s why we put the user experience first when it comes to developing our platforms. 8. Overcoming mistakes. So, what happens when you really screw things up? Even though the instructional designers of the world are legends, they are not invincible, and it’s all too easy for their confidence to be shaken. We must admit, it’s difficult for an online application to heal those wounds, but a few wise words can go a lot further. One of the most helpful things we, at Growth Engineering, can do is to repeat Christopher Pappas’ inspirational words: "The instructional design challenge here is to overcome these mistakes and keep walking. Just like learners can actually benefit from mistake-driven learning, so can you. As a creative eLearning professional, realize that the creative process often involves trial and error, and sometimes it’s impossible to innovate, unless you fail first." 9. Always keep learning. No instructional designer would choose their career path were it not for a true passion for learning. At Growth Engineering, we live and breathe learning and we firmly believe that engagement is the key to delivering a message that really sticks. We use gamification to make the experience fun and engaging for learners, but we go one step further: we’ve gamified our LMS and our authoring tool to make sure that course creators are also awarded for their efforts. This means that they too are encouraged to go further, reach higher and learn more! 10. Staying current with technology. This is the final point in Christopher’s list of instructional design challenges and we think it speaks for itself. The field of instructional technology is growing every year and the only real challenge is finding the technology that works best for you and your team. We stay at the forefront of this development by catering for the learners of today, rather than the outdated methods of yesteryear. It’s our mission to break new ground in learning technology and focus on what really matters - making people love learning again! The above challenges won’t magically disappear overnight, but we hope to make them a little easier to overcome and to let instructional designers do what they do best - create learning superheroes! Check out our white paper to find out more about how we’re taking the pain out of eLearning production.  The post Rising to the Instructional Design Challenge appeared first on Growth Engineering.

Think back to your school days. You likely spent a lot of time in stuffy classrooms, listening to a teacher speaking to you for an hour. The moment you opened your mouth to try to talk to the person next to you, you got shot down and sent to the dreaded Naughty Table… That’s no way to learn! Were you engaged with what was being dictated to you? Back in the early 20th Century, a young Russian man named Lev Vygotsky was formulating his Social Cognitive Learning Theory. It took far too long to catch on, but a key part of his theory is that we tend to learn best by socialising with our peers. You might be forgiven for thinking that an online learning solution will strip away any chance of social learning, but that’s absolutely not the case with our Academy LMS! The benefits There’s a reason why nearly one billion of us visit Facebook on a daily basis. We’re social animals who crave interaction with our peers. When we get that interaction, not only are we more engaged with what we’re doing, but we begin to build habits and are far more likely to repeat our actions in the future. Sounds great! But how does this help a learning and development team? One of the biggest problems you might face when running a learning management system is in convincing your learners to keep coming back! Unfortunately, for many people the stereotype of online learning is that it’s about as dull as debating the existence of worms. But as soon as you whack in some social features, your learners will be as fired up as Mount Vesuvius in AD 79! Take our client GAME as a perfect example. Their learners are using their Academy as a real social network, and GAME is feeling the benefits. Chloe is clearly loving the social features on GAME’s Academy! The learners keep checking in to chat to each other and post photos of the best costumes worn to their store promotions. To put this into perspective, from April-July 2015, their 3,600 learners logged in more than 40,500 times. That’s nearly 12 logins per user! And in case you’re worried that social activity is no good if no-one’s learning anything, over the same four months these same learners completed more than 61,000 pieces of content - 17 per learner! That’s before you even consider the benefits brought by having a community of leaners helping each other to understand and apply their knowledge. Clearly, fostering these communities is the way forward. How we encourage social learning You can find social networks designed for businesses knocking about on the market, but if you have an LMS, you’d greatly benefit from incorporating social elements within the same virtual space. Thankfully, our Academy LMS was built to engage learners, so it’s packed full of all the features you’ll find on your favourite social network: What’s Happening? Feed - Similar to Facebook’s newsfeed, this is a stream of updates and discussions started by other learners, all of which can be liked and commented on. Insight Groups - Like focused chatrooms, you create insight groups around specific topics, to keep discussions relevant to the matter at hand. As an added incentive, learners earn experience points and climb leaderboards by participating. Comments under learning - Learners can rate each piece of content and leave comments underneath. This is a great way to start a discussion about it! Live chat - Pop-out chat boxes let learners have discussions in real-time while they get on with work, learning, or pretending they’re not actually watching cat videos. Access to experts - Learners can ask questions to subject matter experts at any point to check their understanding. The discussions are saved as FAQs for everyone’s benefit. Interested in reading more about what makes social learning so brilliant? You’re in luck, because we’ve got a white paper about it!  The post Why social learning is super learning! appeared first on Growth Engineering.

So, it looks like all of the cool kids will have authoring tools by the end of the year. According to the 2014 Training Industry Report, 37% of companies intend to purchase authoring tools/systems in 2015. If you count yourself among that number, then firstly, welcome to the cool table! Now you’ve got the fun job of choosing one of the many eLearning authoring tools on the market. Of course, you know what your business needs, but just because we’re a helpful bunch, here are a few things to look for when it comes to picking the right content authoring tool. Easy to use Life as an eLearning developer is complicated enough. The last thing you need is an impenetrable user interface. This is particularly important when it comes to collaborating with other team members who might not be as tech-savvy. Keep your authoring tool simple, and your eLearning can shine to its full potential! Flexible options Not all eLearning authoring tools are born alike. Some let you build content around rigid templates (which is handy if you have a huge workload) and others give you more creative freedom (provided you read the 500 page user manual). Before you choose your Authoring tool, decide which is most important to you and how much time you have to dedicate to these projects. Fits your team Examine what you already have at your disposal. Do you have access to a top-notch development team with plenty of time on their hands? If you do, you’re one of the lucky ones! If you’re not that fortunate, you’ll probably want a simpler authoring tool that won’t require too much extra development. Mobile ready Who uses desktops any more?! Nobody, that’s who! With the rise of ‘Bring Your Own Device’ (BYOD) initiatives in online training, the tide is turning towards mobile learning. This is mainly because mobile learning works - because the learners can consume training wherever they go, they tend to study, on average, 40 minutes more per week! If you don’t want to miss out, make sure your authoring tool can support mobile learning. Reporting Check that the exported unit conforms to SCORM/AICC standards. It’s possible to run an eLearning campaign without the need for reporting options, but it would be pretty foolish to do so. Don’t you want to calculate the return on investment you’re getting from your training content? If you’re not reporting and analysing the results, you’ll be unable to learn from your mistakes and you won’t know for sure what’s going right and what could be improved. Compatibility Will your snazzy new authoring tool work with your faithful old learning management system? It’s easy to assume that they all will, but it’s not always the case. If you need your authoring tool to integrate with your LMS, be sure to check! Quiz creation You don’t want to spoon feed your learners with a click-through slideshow. Quiz questions are a must if you want to inject a little interactivity in your eLearning. Do your research on this point when you’re shopping around and make sure you find something that’s easy to use, and that gives you plenty of question types (both qualitative and quantitative). Multimedia support A hundred years ago, people would have been satisfied to learn from a book that didn’t even have any pictures. We’ve moved on a bit since then and now, your learners will only be engaged if you dazzle them with gorgeous images, clear audio and high-quality video content. An ability to handle an array of multimedia asset types is a must! Collaborative options Collaborative eLearning authoring is a growing field, and now is a good time to get involved! Having a collaborative authoring tool lets you assign custom roles, log in from anywhere and keep tabs on how each project is developing. Some of them can cut your development time right down by allowing for live, real-time client reviews. If you’re looking for something to really spark things off in your eLearning department, keep your eyes open for collaborative features! Fun You might think that making your eLearning fun, is an optional extra - a ‘nice-to-have’. Well, we’re advocates of engagement here at GE, and we’ve got buckets of statistics proving that people learn more when they’re enjoying themselves. When you’re choosing an authoring tool, look for something that offers gamification options or, better still, find an authoring tool that creates game-based eLearning! Keep these tips in mind when you go off a-hunting for a new way to create eLearning and you can’t go wrong! Alternatively, save yourself some time by hopping aboard the good ship Genie! Follow the link below to try our game-based, collaborative authoring tool for yourself!  The post 10 Things to look for in an Authoring Tool appeared first on Growth Engineering.

So you’ve spent months polishing every tiny detail of your shiny new Learning Management System. It looks fantastic, it functions perfectly and it’s packed full of awesome content. Congratulations! There’s just one problem… After visiting once, your learners haven’t bothered to come back. This is one of the biggest problems we face in Learning and Development. You can force your learners into compliance by making the training mandatory, but why use the stick when the carrot can be so much more effective? (Plus, they help you see in the dark!) Don’t panic! We’re here to help with three ways you can lure your learners back, and make them feel good about it at the same time. 1. Outstanding onboarding After fine-tuning every aspect of your learning programme, why just drop all your learners in? Excitement is contagious, so it really is worth taking the time to generate some hype around your brand spanking new system. One of GAME’s posters One of our clients, GAME, is a perfect example of how to electrify your learners (in the best possible sense!) before they’ve even had the programme explained to them. They created a teaser campaign for their Academy, knowing that their game-savvy staff would be particularly receptive to it as it’s how the video game industry reveals the biggest releases. They commandeered the daily bulletin system, which sends information directly to each store, so that their Academy’s key features (badges/levels/leaderboards) could be teased without saying anything specific. With hype levels well and truly aroused, they sealed the deal by putting up posters in each store to keep the new platform at the front of everyone’s minds. Their efforts weren’t in vain. In the first three weeks of their programme, their 3,300 learners logged into their Academy more than 10,000 times and completed more than 20,000 pieces of content! 2. Email encouragement It might seem like email has been around forever, but it’s still generally found to be the most effective medium for marketing. Simply sending out regular emails to your learners letting them know that there’s some amazing new content for them to try out is a great way to give them a gentle nudge back in your direction. But what about when you need a little extra oomph to entice your learners back? Well, some healthy bribery always works! Take our clients Hewlett-Packard and Tech Data Corporation as an example. They regularly use email campaigns, but they back them up with real monetary incentives. One particular campaign in March offered a £20 Amazon voucher to anyone who completed the required content that day. They ended up receiving more than seven times as many logins that day as the average, and their learners went on to sell more than €4.2 million worth of the product, delivering a hearty return on investment! If all this talk of bribery has tempted you over to the dark side, you should keep an eye out for when we launch our brand new Rewards Centre. Built into our Academy LMS, this Centre will let learners spend the points they earn through learning on real-world rewards, such as cinema tickets and restaurant vouchers. 3. Get gamified You didn’t think we’d neglect to mention this, did you? As the creators of the world’s #1 gamified LMS, our Academy LMS, we know all about just how much value gamification brings to the table! So we know that gamifying training experiences will make a learner 86% more active and will make them spend 50% longer on their LMS. But gamification is also the perfect tool for encouraging repeat visits. Since introducing gamification features, our clients have seen a gargantuan 70% increase in traffic to their Academies! The allure of unearned badges brings back the completionists, who want to fill every inch of their badge cabinet. The chance to advance through levels brings back the glory hunters, who want to see proof of their progress as they learn. And the opportunity to climb the leaderboards brings back the most competitive learners, who want to get one-up on their peers. See, it’s not all fun and games, there are real tangible benefits! Now that you’ve discovered how to keep your learners visiting your LMS, you just need to make sure the content is all in top shape. Check out this post’s companion piece - ‘3 foolproof ways to spice up your eLearning content’!  The post 3 foolproof ways to bring learners back to your LMS appeared first on Growth Engineering.

The world is slowly waking up to the truth that learning isn’t inherently dull, but there’s still a grey cloud of tedium hanging over much of the online learning landscape. We need to blow this fog away, we need to breathe some fun into online learning and we need to eradicate the zombie learner curse… Ladies and gentlemen, in the immortal words of Bonnie Tyler, we need a hero! Luckily, there’s a secret alliance devoted to the cause of effective learning. They’re known as Instructional Designers (a term whose very vagueness is a cunning disguise) and, like a team of shaolin monks, they’ve devoted their lives to honing their superpowers for maximum ass-kickery. Let’s take a look inside the typical ID’s utility belt… 1. Neural Pathfinding In essence, IDs work on manipulating the brains of learners and to do this, they need to know how the old grey matter works! IDs need to understand how people learn if they ever hope to affect the learning process. 2. Empathic Reading Of course, an accurate map of the brain is useless on its own. Sometimes the fastest way to a learner’s heart is… well… through the heart! Great instructional designers have an innate ability to appeal to the learners on an emotional level, as well as intellectual. 3. Body swapping Can you step into someone else’s shoes and look out of their eyes like a weird poltergeist? Instructional Designers can - there could be one inside you right now! They don’t do it for a voyeuristic thrill though. The ability to see the world from the learner’s point of view is essential if you want to give them a learning message they can relate to. 4. Human Sponge A funny thing happens when an Instructional Designer stands close to some information - they just absorb it, straight away! As you’d expect, those in the Learning and Development field are obsessed with learning new things, as well as delivering those lessons to others. 5. Divergent People value stability and the security of the status quo. Instructional Design superheroes, on the other hand, have a more innovative outlook. IDs cannot sit still, quietly relying on ‘the way things are done around here’, and the truly heroic ones will constantly encourage their team to brainstorm new ideas and think outside of the box. 6. Inner eye Did you know that Instructional Designers can look into the future? It’s true - before their eLearning project even reaches the storyboarding stage, they already have a picture in their mind of the finished product. By visualising the UI and the design of the eLearning, they’re in a better position to guide the project. 7. Super-scribe If instructional designers were superheroes, words would be the laser-beams that shoot from their fingers. Words are handy tools, but in the hands of an exceptional ID, they are powerful weapons against boredom and dullness. Whether they’re writing onscreen text, video outlines or audio scripts a real ID will have the word-crafting skills to captivate their audience. 8. Mind meld As with so many things in life, a lack of communication can be like kryptonite to an eLearning project. One of the key superpowers possessed by instructional designers is their ability to collaborate with SMEs and other team members with almost-telepathic efficiency. It’s actually quite spooky - in a good way. 9. Reactive Evolution Online learning doesn’t happen in an isolation chamber. It affects everything and it is affected by everything. Instructional designers need to have a broad knowledge of everything that impacts the way people learn. If there’s a breakthrough in the field of user experience or visual design - a super-ID will be among the first to know. 10. Gadgets Batman had them. Bond had them. Inspector Gadget was made out of them. If they’re going to emerge victorious in the battle against dull online learning, instructional designers need to understand their toolkit and make the best use of it. If they’re going to use an eLearning authoring tool, it needs to be the best authoring tool they can get their hands on, and they need to know it inside and out! If you’re an Instructional Design Superhero, and you want to add a powerful weapon to your arsenal, then you should see what we’ve developed in our secret underground research facility. Genie isn’t just any eLearning authoring tool - it’s supercharged with the power of gamification. Give it a try for yourself and see how easy it is to create truly engaging game-based eLearning units! Go on, unleash the genie and be more superheroey!  The post 10 Superpowers all Instructional Designers need appeared first on Growth Engineering.

Earlier on in the week we showed you three foolproof ways to entice your absentee learners back to your Learning Management System. Now that we’ve put that issue to bed, you’ll need to make that your training content is worthy of each learner’s time and effort! You could have the flashiest restaurant in all the land, but if your food wasn’t up to scratch, your patrons wouldn’t get anything positive from their experience. The same is true in the world of online learning. Your LMS may be a joy to behold, but if you don’t spend enough time preparing your ingredients and working on your recipe, your learning content will leave a nasty taste in the mouth. Here are three ways to spice up your eLearning dishes. Gamification and game-based learning Gamification really is our area of expertise. Though we’re best known for gamifying the learning platform itself through our world-leading Academy LMS, we also know a thing or two about how gamification can be used within the content itself. Quizzes can be a handy way of testing that new knowledge is sinking in properly, but they can also be pretty dull. That’s why we always make sure to liven things up a bit by setting time limits and offering gameshow-style power-ups (50/50s, time freezes, hints) to ease the pressure! A time freeze being used during a quiz. Of course, adding games to content is one thing, but turning an entire eLearning unit into a game is another. Thankfully Genie, the newest addition to the Growth Engineering family, is a game-based content authoring tool that solves the problem completely. With Genie’s templates, you can easily create game-based learning content. You can use the exact same assets you would have used anyway, but your finished product will be transformed into a game which is sure to engage your learners! Why not combine the gamified quizzes with the game-based content? Then you can serve up a small slice of what we like to call gameception! Personalised courses Think back to our snazzy restaurant analogy (is it lunchtime yet?). Would you rather they served stale pizza all made using the same cutter, or fancy personalised pizza cut into any shape you want them and baked just the way you like it with any toppings you ask for? It’s a no brainer. And it’s actually something that you can bake into your learning content! We designed our unique Discovery Method to personalise the learning journey. It lets people discover their newfound knowledge through reflecting on their own experiences. So as part of the eLearning unit, a learner will plug in their own experiences. Then, later on in the unit, this information can be recalled so that they can reflect on their learning in context. Finally, a personalised downloadable learning plan is created based on the inputs and answers given throughout the unit. If this all sounds very fancy, it’s actually one of Genie’s features, so it can be easily built into absolutely any course you want to create! Tell a story You’ve got all the fact and figures you want to relay to your learners, but how are you going to get them to remember them all? If you can find a way to tie everything together into a story, you’ll make a massive impact and make the information far more memorable. Since the times of the Ancient Greeks and Romans, people have been using the Method of Loci to help them remember vast amounts of information. A certain Gary Shang was able to use it to memorise pi to more than 65,000 digits! It basically involves imagining a location or journey and placing each piece of information at different positions. It makes recalling the information much easier, because you can imagine taking that journey and seeing all of the information along the way. So essentially it ties everything up into a narrative, which is exactly what you should be doing with your learning content. With scenario-based learning, your learners might work through a sales scenario from start to finish, making different decisions along the way. By learning in context they’re much more likely to remember exactly what they need when the time comes that they actually need it. Now that we’ve shown you how to create amazing content and reel your learners in to see it, you just need somewhere to host it. As luck would have it, we’ve got the perfect solution! Have you taken a look at our gamified social Academy LMS yet? You can take a free tour here:  The post 3 foolproof ways to spice up your eLearning content appeared first on Growth Engineering.

What’s your zombie learner survival plan? What have you packed in your bug-out bag? What will you do when your brightest and best are reduced to spine-chilling flesh crawlers intent on taking a bite out of your training campaign’s return on investment? Perhaps you’ve seen it before: sunken faces, lifeless eyes and lips coated in drool. And that smell! These are all tell-tale signs that you’ve failed to engage your team in their training content. And whilst zombie learners may not be able to climb ladders, they do have a nasty habit of infecting others with frightening levels of indifference.  Before you know it, your Learning & Development department will be in a state of decay. But don’t fret. It’s not too late to turn things around. Here are our SIX top tips for transforming zombie learners back into learning legends. Quarantine your zombie learners Once disaster strikes, the only thing you can do to prevent a full-scale outbreak is to quarantine those who have been affected. If you’re considering rolling out a training and development programme, it helps to be pro-active in this regard. Create a ‘pilot group’ of learners, give them pre-launch access to your content and your training portal and analyse the results. Through the use of engagement based statistics (number of log-ins per user, amount of content accessed, time on site, etc.) and learner surveys, you should be able to judge whether your solution is ready for the wider world. Take stock and head for higher ground Zombies aren’t good with steps and they can’t swim (due to the wide-scale muscle atrophy across their body). As such, it seems like the safest place for you would be the highest diving board down at your local swimming pool. With that kind of vantage point, you’ll be able to review the situation, figure out what’s going wrong, correct mistakes and start planning for the future. You’ll also have an opportunity to practise your form and unleash your inner Tom Daley. Aim for the heart AND the head Zombie hunter veterans will tell you to aim for the head and to use a blunt instrument, but we take a different approach. The only way to stop zombie learners from spreading throughout your organisation is to ensure that your team loves their training content. That’s right. LOVES. Not likes. They should love it to the same degree that the cookie monster loves cookies (a lot). ‘How do you make them love it?’ I hear you ask. Well, that’s an entirely different question. Stay mobile What’s the one thing we all know about zombies? They’re slow. A garden snail could out-pace them in a foot-race. If you’re able to stay on the move, they’ll never catch up. Here’s what we’re getting at: you should do your utmost to deliver a mobile learning experience, so that your learners can access their training content from their mobiles or their tablets at their convenience. This links nicely with our next top tip… Deliver content in bite-size chunks Heed our warning: if you don’t deliver you content in easily manageable bite-size chunks, your zombie learners will turn you into bite-size chunks. Modern day professionals have to-do lists that are as lengthy and imposing as a python, so there’s rarely time to indulge in epic 3 hour long learning binges. Break the content down into easily consumable nuggets and deliver it at regularly scheduled intervals. This will have the added benefit of triggering a low-level pavlovian response in your learners and it’ll give them a reason to keep frequenting your learning portal. Team-up Did you ever see the film about the lone-wolf zombie hunter who saved the day all by himself? No, you didn’t, because such a movie doesn’t exist. There’s always safety in numbers, so it’s important to encourage collaboration and communication across your learning platform. Here at Growth Engineering, we’re a firm believer that learning’s better when we do it together. In some cases, a social learning approach can invigorate dull training content and prevent a zombie learner uprising. Find out how L&D wiz ‘Rodger’ dealt with an alarming zombie learner breakout within his organisation, in Growth Engineering’s inaugural comic, ‘Night of the Learning Dead’ (see what we did there?). Enjoy. Oh and if you have a zombie learner predicament of your own, do get in touch. Unlike your zombie learners, we don’t bite. We’re highly trained zombie learner terminators, ready to wield the chainsaw of learner engagement at a moment’s notice.  The post 6 Top Tips for Terminating Zombie Learners appeared first on Growth Engineering.