43 Shared Gone are the Office Space days of isolated cubicles where workers are expected to keep to themselves. In this social day and age, cubicle walls have come down, desks now meet in friendly islands, and workers want to learn from the others around them. In fact, 31 percent of people leave their jobs due to a lack of empowerment according to one study, while according to another, 33 percent leave due to a lack of perceived growth potential. The good news? You can address both of these problems by creating a culture of self-directed learning (SDL) at your organization. Doing so cultivates employee engagement by giving them both the opportunity to learn and to teach, which cements concepts and majorly boosts agency. Plus, when employees teach one another, the result is a very cost-effective staff training strategy. What’s to lose? Here are seven ways to structure your work environment for self-directed learning.Read more »

29 Shared PowerPoint-to-video technology has been continuing to make inroads at iSpring, and we’re proud to announce the latest victory: iSpring Pro 7.1 now includes PPT-to-video with direct publishing to YouTube. PowerPoint to MP4 With iSpring Pro 7.1, now you can save your video presentation on your computer as an .mp4 file, the top choice among industry professionals for crystal-clear quality at a reasonable file size. More than that, you can even find your own balance between quality and size by adjusting the audio and video compression settings. If you have a specific device in mind for playback, you can adjust the image dimensions for a perfect fit on any screen, large or small. Read more »

36 Shared There’s been a lot of buzz from our clients lately about the iMoot online Moodle conference, which will be held from May 28th to June 1st. We’re proud to announce that iSpring and our trusted partner, actXcellence, are among the sponsors of the event. Not only that, their president, Guido Hornig, will be delivering an extremely enlightening presentation, How to use PowerPoint as an authoring tool e.g. for SCORM. Read more »

27 Shared The four primary learning styles present unique opportunities for online trainers. Whether your e-learners respond best to visual, auditory, kinesthetic or reading content, the mobile learning environment naturally complements each of these styles. Understanding and teaching to all your learners in a balanced way can have a tremendous impact on the engagement levels and success of your online training course. Visual Learners: Visual learners respond best to visceral material, such as vivid images, bright colors, shapes, and design elements. Do not underestimate the importance of an eye-catching, well polished presentation to these students. Although your presentation design may seem trivial compared to the course material, having a well-crafted PowerPoint presentation can help these learners visually organize and internalize content. In a corporate learning environment, we recommend using fresh, cool colors such as blues, grays, and greens when accenting content to keep your presentation bright, but professional. Use images and videos that relate to your material to accentuate important information. Try to steer clear of generic icons or abstract images that don’t have a meaningful relationship with your content, and always take time to pause and discuss the importance of each image to strengthen your visual learners’ mental connection.Read more »

24 Shared Sometimes it can be difficult to add the right mix of elements to your online course with hopes to increase student and employee engagement. "Engagement" and "Gamification" are two terms that seem to be big in the e-Learning world right now - and they go hand-in-hand. What is gamification exactly and what are the different ways to engage your online learners? Gamification in e-Learning is the use of game theory and game mechanics in non-game contexts to engage and motivate your online students. That means adding interactive PowerPoint presentations with built-in quizzes or drag-and-drop features. But that isn’t all you can do with gamification - check out these 5 tips for successfully "gamifying" your online courseRead more »

24 Shared iSpring’s product line has been enjoying many superb enhancements of late, what with the roll-out of the 7.1 product line; and among those enhancements is full-fledged support for the latest Tin Can API version 1.0+ e-Learning standard. But if Tin Can is anything, it certainly isn’t standard. Read more »

15 Shared The iSpring engineers have really been pouring on the gas, and the results speak for themselves. The May update of iSpring Cloud brings a couple of exciting new features, plus some cool enhancements to already existing features: New: support for hyperlink tracking New: support for user profile avatar change (JPEG, PNG, GIF images) Enhanced: new account creation & password restore Read more »

32 Shared Do you wish you could teach your employees more easily, more frequently and from the comfort of their desks or homes? Are you intimidated by the idea of hiring an informational designer or finding a crack team of e-learning pros? Do you like to do things on your own, but are not sure how to kick off your own corporate learning program? Deep breaths. Believe it or not, most companies have an excellent tool for e-learning course creation on their desktops right now. It’s called PowerPoint. What? you’re thinking. But isn’t that just for presentations and stuff? Can I really teach with it? Traditionally, the use of PowerPoint has been limited to long, stodgy presentations awash in bullet points and terrible stock vectors. But you can break the mold, making awesome e-learning and even mobile learning presentations with nothing more than this Microsoft staple. Here are seven tips for rocking the process. Read more »

9 Shared In the Internet age, people routinely go online to learn. Perhaps they want to lose weight, or make the perfect Mother’s Day soufflé, or fix their dishwasher without calling in a repairman. Whatever the case is, such folks display the best traits about learning: they stick with the problem, they engage fully, they experiment on their own, they return to the problem if necessary. They are motivated; they have a "need to learn." If only you could ensure all your employees would feel this way when you pass out learning materials, right? Unfortunately, this is in many cases a pipe dream. Lack of motivation often characterizes employees who are learning independently, who may wish to complete the course as quickly as possible or are only doing it because they "have to." This lack of motivation reduces a learner’s ability to absorb and retain information, which is not what you want.Read more »

12 Shared More great LMS news from iSpring! We’ve completed compliance tests with another top-shelf Learning Management System, Intuition Rubicon, and the results are positive: SCORM 1.2 courses published with iSpring are fully supported in their system. Read more »