It is well-said that change is the only constant in the world of learning. Various groundbreaking developments in the last two decades have transformed the corporate training landscape. Instructor-led training sessions are gradually making way for eLearning courses. Unlike sessions held in brick and mortar classrooms, online courses can be accessed anywhere, anytime. These courses enable people to draw their convenient learning schedules, without disruptions to their work. E-learning courses can be developed quickly, at low cost, thanks to rapid authoring tools. This goes a long way in ensuring that the dynamic training needs of firms are met efficiently. The online medium helps deliver training of high and consistent quality as it is instructor-independent. It is highly environmental-friendly and helps organizations reduce their carbon footprint. Also, eLearning courses can be translated into multiple languages easily and are very useful to provide top-notch training to international, multilingual workforce. These benefits of eLearning have resulted in the widespread adoption of eLearning. Here are 5 interesting statistics about the popular training format. Hope you find this post interesting. Do share your views. Related PostsOnline Courses in Native Languages for Effective Corporate Training Things to be Considered Before Developing Multilingual E-learning courses6 Amazing Statistics on Learning Management Systems - An Infographic

At gomo, we never stand still, and are always improving our product based on our planned roadmap and feedback from our customers. Since launch, we’ve been providing lots of minor updates, but the first major upgrade, gomo 2.1, is available now. And because gomo is in the cloud, subscribers get these updates as soon as we release them, which is why you will now find the new gomo 2.1 features available to use in your own gomo courses. We’ve added a host of new features and capabilities to make everyone’s life even easier - both for multi-device authors and for students who are learning with gomo content. Alongside a wealth of minor tweaks and performance improvements, the major new features in gomo 2.1 include: Screen templates Creating highly interactive screens just got even easier. Some complex gomo screens took a lot of setting up in the past - we’ve now made life much faster with our new screen templates - in some cases reducing the effort from 20 steps down to two! Pick a pre-configured screen template and gomo will create the screen layout and add all of the items needed for the chosen screen type. Just drop in your content and hit the publish button. gomo 2.1 screen templates The new screen templates currently include: Media Audio asset (left and right) Video asset (left and right) Presentation Comic strip Film strip Hotspot image Hottext Menu (grid) Menu (list) Text and graphic (left and right) Question Assessment results Drop down on graphic Graphical multiple choice question Hotspot multiple choice question Select from list With this new feature in place, we will be regularly adding new templates in as the list of our screen interaction assets continue to grow. Display conditions gomo courses have always responded and adapted to the target device (desktop, tablet and smartphone), filling the screen and orientating themselves correctly. The addition of display conditions now allows authors to easily create device-specific content, or content based on the value of a project variable. For example, a detailed graphic on a desktop or tablet display might become unusable on a smartphone screen. Authors can now choose to replace the graphic with a simplified version that works on the smaller screen. gomo 2.1 display conditions With gomo 2.1, display conditions can be applied to ALL assets in a course. So it’s possible to have less text on a smartphone, shorter videos, alternative audio and any other adaptations that you desire. Multiple language support via XLIFF translation export/import (beta) gomo now makes it easy to create courses in different languages. Once a course is built, you can duplicate it and export the course content to XLIFF format for your translation agency. When the translation is complete, simply re-import it into the duplicated course to instantly get the foreign language version of your course. gomo 2.1 XLIFF translation export Brand new themes Themes are used in gomo to control the look and feel of your courses. gomo comes with a number of themes to get you started as quickly as possible. gomo 2.1 adds the ‘Night Sky’ and ‘Elegance’ themes.  If you would like to see the Night Sky theme in action, you can do so via our online demo. gomo 2.1 ‘Night Sky’ theme Don’t forget that these are just the starting point. You can configure themes to your heart’s content in gomo to give you beautiful content that matches your branding seamlessly for e-learning that really feels like yours. Brand new assets We have a variety of brand new screen interaction assets for you. These include: Accordion The accordion asset allows for the expanding and collapsing of text blocks on a page. It’s a nice way of presenting a series of statements and allowing users to step through them as they expand and collapse. gomo 2.1 accordion asset Carousel The carousel asset provides a horizontal storyboard for text and image content so you can present your content as a storyboard. gomo 2.1 carousel asset Image wall The image wall asset allows you to present image-based content as an interactive image gallery.  Clicking on an image will display the content full screen and display additional text content which relates to the selected image. gomo 2.1 image wall asset Content separator The separator asset is a simple content separator that allows you to break up content on screen using a solid, dashed or dotted line. gomo 2.1 content separator asset iFrame (beta) Still in beta, but available as part of the 2.1 release, is our iFrame asset.  The asset will allow you to embed externally hosted content within a screen and can be used for HTML5 animations, YouTube videos and more. gomo 2.1 iFrame (beta) New actions With gomo 2.1 we have also enhanced our range of actions.  For the assets that support actions (e.g. button assets and hotspot image), the following actions are now available: Link to a resource You can now link directly to resources associated with your project (e.g. PDF files) Set image states Using actions, you can now dynamically swap the images on screen. Set variable Using the variables you have defined for your project or group, you can now set these dynamically using actions Minor updates and usability enhancements Based on your feedback, we have made a number of enhancements to gomo to improve usability.  Notable enhancements include: Colour picker The content editor now includes a colour picker to easily select the colour you need Media library refresh When uploading new content to your resource library, you can now see the additional resources in the content editor by clicking on the refresh button Text input asset variable support The text input asset now supports variables for default text Custom fonts If the range of default fonts isn’t enough for you, we have added support for two custom fonts, allowing you greater flexibility in how you present your text content. To see the new features in action for yourself, register for our gomo 2.1 webinar on August 22nd. Mike Alcock will demonstrate the new and improved gomo, and will answer any questions you have about our multi-device authoring tool. The post Introducing gomo 2.1 appeared first on gomo Learning.

For an organization, its sales force is its biggest asset. However, training a team that sells new products day in and day out is a huge task! With new versions of products and their features to learn and sell every day, you need a platform that transcends all the difficulties of training your sales force and helps deliver quick and market-oriented results. In this post, we will explore the three reasons of choosing eLearning to train your sales force. Imagine you’re making a sales pitch and you’re stuck on a particular feature that you can’t seem to remember. What will you do then? Well, the answer is easy - creating eLearning courses on your products and their features; you will have the added advantage of delivering information in real time. Even the minutest of information can be easily updated and delivered with the help of rapid authoring tools such as Articulate Storyline, Adobe Captivate and Lectora, which take only minutes to add and update any kind of new information. The biggest challenge any sales representative faces is addressing global audiences. There are certain features of a product that are only available to a select region or target market. This is where eLearning is helpful, because you have a virtual library at your disposal that is not only content but also region and target specific. During classroom sessions, you can miss out certain aspects of the product training; however, with eLearning all resources can be saved and are readily available for learners whenever they need them. This way, as a sales representative, you will never falter while addressing your target market area and audience. As a sales representative, you’re always on the move, and classroom training can be a hindrance in this case. With eLearning, you have a plethora of delivery platforms such as desktops, laptops, tablets, and smart-phones. Learning on the go encourages those on constant move to choose when and where they would like to get trained, whether in the comfort of their homes or in a cafe while sipping coffee! I hope this post has helped you understand the benefits of choosing eLearning for training your sales force. If you have more interesting reasons, feel free to share them. Related PostsEmpowering Sales Forces with Product TrainingUse Cloze Activities to Assess Product Knowledge of Your Sales Force 3 Things to Include in Your Online Product Training

gomo 2.0 has been available to the public since 2nd April. We thought it would be interesting to look back over the first three months in the life of our e-learning authoring product and see what sort of reaction we’ve had so far. We launched gomo 2.0 to the world at Learning Technologies in January. Although the product wasn’t ready for purchase at that time, we wanted to give the world a sneak preview of our brand new adaptive and responsive HTML5 authoring tool. To say that we were overwhelmed with the level of interest would be an understatement - non-stop demo requests led to over 200 enquiries at the exhibition. Interest continued over the next few months as we made the product ready for sale and by the time we were ready for launch on 2nd April we had almost 1,000 enquiries in our database. Two further exhibitions in the USA (Learning Solutions and mLearnCon) confirmed how ready the market is for a cloud-based, adaptive and responsive HTML5 authoring tool. Numerous organisations are frustrated with the limitations of their current authoring tools, especially when it comes to delivering content to iPads and smartphones. Since launch, over 600 organisations have signed up for the 21 day free trial of gomo, and many of these are now happy gomo customers. This includes organisations such as Deloitte, JCB, Dunhill, Climate KIC, Constellation Brands, Cranfield University, ITC Learning, Grainger, Devon & Somerset Fire & Rescue Service, Centro Universitário Cesumar and many more. We are on track to exceed our initial forecasts for the success of gomo and expect growth to accelerate with July’s release of gomo 2.1 - our first major upgrade. We are hoping that the host of new features and usability improvements should lead to even more organisations benefiting from true multi-device learning. The icing on the cake at the end of our first quarter is this testimonial from the Climate-KIC Online Education Team: "We’re building entire MOOCs around resources created with gomo. It’s the easiest authoring tool we’ve used and brilliant for our team collaboration, whether we’re working from home or together in the office. The range of design options has really helped us get a good balance between simplicity of output and richness of learner activity. We love the way it adapts what we create to display on phones, tablets, laptops and PCs from one source. We’re hooked!" Sign up for one of our upcoming webinars to see the capability of our latest update, gomo 2.1, or get started with a 21 day free trial today to begin creating beautiful multi-device learning today. The post gomo 2.0 - the first three months appeared first on gomo Learning.

Articulate storyline is a highly effective tool for developing eLearning courses.In each slide, we will have a title at the top. This slide title can be created with the help of the text box option from the menu bar. But, we can also INSERT the slide title, without using text box, through variables. Here are the steps to create a slide title with the help of variables. Step 1: Create a variable as shown here. Define a variable name (can include characters/numbers) Type as a text field Leave the value field empty Click OK Step 2: Place the variable name in the slide, with a percentage symbol on both sides (%SlideTitle%). Now, adjust the text box based on the required position. Step 3: In the respective slide, follow the steps below to adjust the variable. Action : Adjust variable Variable : Variable name (Ex: SlideTitle) Operator : equal to assignment Value : Slide title name that we want to display (Ex: Welcome) When : Timeline starts Object: preset slide. Step 4: Check the output using the preview The value you have entered in Step 3 will be displayed. I hope you find this blog useful. Do you use any other method to create screen titles for eLearning courses? Please do share. Related Posts2 Ways to Insert Slide Numbers in Articulate Storyline How to Enable Content After Visiting All Buttons in Articulate StorylineHow to Combine Your Adobe Captivate Projects Into Single Course?

If you’re already a gomo customer, you’ll know how simple it is to design e-learning for mobile and tablet. Not only does gomo output responsive, adaptive content, but the recent gomo 2.1 update with its addition of display conditions makes it easier than ever to tailor each version of your course for different devices. If you’re new to the world of multi-device design, here are some of our top tips to get the look and feel right first time round. Text Generally speaking, the smaller the screen, the less text you should be using. If you’re designing e-learning for mobile, your learners don’t want to be scrolling through screen after screen of plain text, so keep it brief. On a similar note, the font you choose will need to be very clear, and you must choose a size which will be visible on all screens. Images Detailed diagrams and images won’t be especially mobile-friendly, forcing users to zoom in and out to see everything in the same detail they would on a larger screen. When you are designing e-learning for mobile, make sure your images are bold and clear, and remember the colours may display differently on a phone or tablet than a desktop. Videos All smartphone users know the frustration of waiting for a too-large video to stream on their mobiles, leading to annoying buffering and pausing. Keep videos short, sharp and snappy to avoid long waiting times for the best user experience, especially if you are opting to create a web app which uses an internet connection, rather than a native app. Interactivity Some activities in your course may work fine with a mouse or a keyboard, but touchscreens give you a whole new level of interactivity to widen your scope. When designing e-learning for mobile and tablet, think about experimenting with touch functionality to swipe, pinch, spin, drag and explore your content to give the best experience for each device. gomo really is the quickest way to build your own multi-device learning, whether you are designing e-learning for mobile exclusively or for a range of devices. From just £49 a month, you can create beautiful content with no programming skills necessary, tailoring it to your devices for the optimum user experience. To see gomo in action, join MD Mike Alcock for a live webinar of gomo 2.1 to find out more about our responsive, adaptive multi-device authoring tool. The post Designing e-learning for mobile appeared first on gomo Learning.

The main objective of an eLearning course is to make a strong impact on the learner. It should communicate the key concepts and engage him effectively. This can be done easily by focusing on visual elements. Visuals can be in the form of diagrams, charts, graphs, graphics, illustrations, drawings, or photographs. According to Fred R. Barnard, "People often say ‘A picture is worth a thousand words.’ I believe the original quote was actually ‘A picture is worth ten thousand words’." Good visuals contribute greatly to enhance the learner’s understanding than text. Let’s have a look at the 4 core visual elements that need attention. Graphical User Interface (GUI) The purpose of having a Graphical User Interface (GUI) in an eLearning course is to help learners to navigate through the course, tell them how much of the course they had completed and so on. It is designed to interact with learners using elements such as icons, menus, controls etc. Generally, it is designed to suit the corporate branding. But, it is a good idea to customize it based on the content type. In a new employee orientation course, which we developed for a company operating off-shore rigs, we used a theme of water and sea. Colors Colors impact the learners’ mood and reinforce learning. The colors we use will definitely impact the presentation aspects of our courses and facilitate better retention. It is advisable NOT to use too many colors in one course (it’s better to follow a theme and stay consistent throughout the course). For example: If you are dealing with an ‘Agriculture Course’ or environment-related courses, you can use the color of nature i.e. Green. Fonts Choosing the right font does matter a lot in any kind of eLearning course. Fonts like ‘Verdana, ‘Times New Roman’ etc. are the most preferable fonts. It is advisable to use three precise fonts - each for the heading, one for the sub-headings and the other for the text body and stick to them throughout the course. However, we can also use various styles such as italics, bold, underlines etc. to emphasize on a particular text/content. For example: Graphics/Visuals Use graphics to enrich the course, and make sure that they are relevant to the content. Graphics, including photographs or images can be used to make the learning very effective and interesting. For example: These are some of the visual elements that help create an effective and engaged eLearning course. Please share your thoughts! Related Posts5 Visual Elements in E-learning4 Questions to Ask Yourself Before Using Visual Elements in E-learning6 E-learning Design Elements - An Infographic

6 Tips To Create Memorable Online Training Courses You are spending a significant amount of money, as well as countless hours, to carefully develop your online training courses. Thus, it is important for you that employees will take the most out of it. But how can you ensure that they will remember everything they learn? Confucius has been offering us the answer since the fourth century B.C: "I hear and I forget. I see and I remember. I do and I understand". In order to use these wise thoughts in empowering your online training strategy, read this article for 6 top tips that will help you create memorable online training courses and offer employees an immersive online training experience that they will not forget any time soon! Know your audience.  The first thing you need to do in order to create a memorable online training course is know who your audience is; meaning know their knowledge, skills and expertise levels. After all, if you don’t have a clear idea of what they already know, what skills they currently possess and what they need to advance, it will be difficult to develop an online training course/event that will offer them real value. You don’t want to waste time and money designing an online training strategy by making assumptions and probably by misjudging where employees are in their professional learning. In order to understand how to present the subject matter so that it will help expand your audience’s professional knowledge base, you need to carefully assess your audience. Evaluating employees’ skills and expertise is the crucial first step you need to take in order to develop an effective, engaging, and unforgettable online training experience. Grab employees’ attention. As a first step to grab employees attention, consider creating an eye-caching online training course title and introduction. Next, consider using humor as an attention grabber. You don’t need to overuse it, of course, after all we are talking about a serious corporate environment, but using small doses of humor is proven to be an invaluable tool for boosting memory, since for some reason, our brains prefer to remember unusual pieces of information. In addition, even if employees are enthusiastic about the online training experience and are willing to fully commit to it, which is not often the case, they may fail to stay focused and absorb the most important details of your online training course. It may be challenging for them to immediately identify and remember the critical ideas of each section. Therefore, you need to provide them with a clear framework that directs their attention to key concepts and propositions. To help them easily recognize and then memorize these key concepts, be sure that you repeat them multiple times throughout your online training and that you highlight them properly by using bold fonts, different colors or by placing them in boxes. This way you will offer employees the opportunity to focus on what is really important from the very beginning. Create a powerful online training course structure. After you have ensured that employees’ attention is yours, think about what it is that you most want them to learn. Have realistic expectations of your online training course and do not suffocate them with content; it is impossible to absorb too much information in a limited period of time, anyway. So, design a "brain friendly" course structure in which large volumes of information are divided into key sections. The more "step by step" is the nature of your approach, the easier it will be for employees to create an effective memorable pattern. Repeat key information in order to be successfully absorbed and try different ways to present it every time. Switch text with images and video with audio. In this manner, employees will have a variety of ways to accommodate their individual learning needs. Finally, consider to create "cause and effect" cases as often as possible throughout your online training course. When employees can logically link or associate two different pieces of information, they are able to process and retain them more effectively. In other words, the more clearly and logically structured your online training course is, the easier it will be for employees to remember it. Address employees’ emotions. As we already know, emotions amplify memory. In fact, it has been proven that without the emotional element, it is difficult for long term memory to be effectively formatted. Thus, if you are interested in creating an online training course that produces long term memory formation, you need to design it in a way that your content elicits emotional responses in employees. If the information you want employees to absorb fails to elicit emotional responses in them, they will not perceive it as meaningful and they will therefore be more likely to kick the information right out from their long term memory banks. In other words, if you want to facilitate your audience’s memory, you need to follow an emotionally-driven approach. A great way to create content that offers employees emotional value is storytelling and scenarios, which have a tremendous value in enhancing memory by helping your audience focus on your online training content and remember it for a long time. Make your online training course interactive and convenient. In order to offer employees an unforgettable online training experience, your content should be pointed out in the most interesting way possible. stimulate your audience’s interest and engagement levels by adding games, multimedia, and other interactive elements into your online training design. Forget info screens and focus on creating a series of activities that entertain employees and allow them to practice useful operating procedures. The more engaging your online training process is, the easier it will be for your audience to remember what they are learning. Furthermore, always make sure that your online training course is really easy to access and participate in. You need to keep in mind that employees are in fact busy adult learners and they may find difficult to fit their online training into their schedules. Consider the implementing mobile learning, so that your audience can access your online training course anywhere, anytime. Show employees the real world benefits of their online training. This last tip is of utmost importance: to create a memorable online training experience, you need to put the information you want employees to absorb in the real world. Information becomes solidified in our long term memories only if we are given the opportunity to reflect on it. Allow employees to see themselves in scenarios that offer real world benefits and give them the chance to take action and make choices. Speaking of choices, also consider allowing your employees to make mistakes. A mistake-driven learning approach significantly enhances memory, as it allows your audience to fail in a risk-free environment and then remember the consequences when dealing with the actual problem in real life; this way, it will be more likely for them to succeed. Application of knowledge by integrating real world simulations in your online training course takes full advantage of Confucius’ wise words discussed above. If you encourage employees to use the information they are receiving in a real world framework, and thus see how their specific skills can be applied to real world problems, they will surely not forget what they have learned. Finally, consider integrating social learning techniques into your online training course and encourage employees’ participation in online discussions. This will not only offer them the opportunity to prolong their memory by discussing and further exploring the key concepts of the subject matter for days or even weeks, but also it will offer you a valuable feedback on your online training deliverable’s effectiveness. Now that you know all the ways to create a memorable online training course, you may be interested in learning some more online training motivational triggers. Read the article 6 Tips To Motivate Your Employees in Online Training and discover all the tips and techniques you can use to fully engage and motivate employees in their online training, regardless of the subject matter. This post was first published on eLearning Industry.

User experience  (UX) is the interaction between a person and a product, service or, in the case of gomo, e-learning. In the past, the interaction between a user and e-learning existed solely through a desktop computer, so courses were built and designed with a static mode of delivery in mind. Desktop is still a very popular mode of delivery, but the expectation to access the same content across devices is growing rapidly. User Experience is about how graphics, technology and the user interact to let the user take control of their experience without feeling lost or out of control. If the path through a course is kept simple, users are likely to understand what they are seeing and what is required of them. Take a website for example - terms like ‘home’, ‘about us’ and ‘portfolio’ more often than not appear in a site’s navigation to help us find what we want. We understand where the icon of a house will take us, regardless of whether we see it on our smartphone or desktop computer. We have an expectation as to where it will take us and what we will see when we click it. With gomo, you can ensure you keep users in control of their journey with user intuitive features such as help, menu and glossary buttons, which can be added at the click of a button. They will translate across devices to ensure a clean user experience, however the content is accessed. Sometimes, your audience will be accessing your course on a single device, so it doesn’t matter how the user experience will translate onto different screen sizes. Building a course for a smartphone or tablet has its own considerations, such as the use of swipe gestures, how graphics will look and how many words will fit on a screen. gomo 2.1’s display conditions feature allows you to build content specific to an individual device. This means that while you can build an app purely for mobile or tablet output, you can also apply display conditions to individual assets of a multi-device course. This means you can build a course which has less text, shorter videos and simplified graphics on one device and more on another in order to give users the best experience, without having to build two separate courses. To find out more about gomo, why not take a look at our feature tour or register for our upcoming webinar ‘introducing gomo 2.1 - our brand new gomo release’. The post Give your learners the best user experience appeared first on gomo Learning.

Now-a-days, organizations are looking to develop eLearning curriculum at one go rather than individual modules. Developing curriculum can save their precious training dollars. But, it takes a long time to develop it. How to reduce the development time? Is there a cost-effective way to develop a complete eLearning curriculum in a short span of time? Well, here is an infographic that lists the steps to develop an eLearning curriculum in just 3 weeks. Hope you find this post interesting. How do you develop eLearning curriculums? We’d love to know. Related PostsCreative Ways to Present Click on Tab Interactivity in E-learning Courses - An Infographic3 Handy Tips for Training Manager to Make Employee Training a Success - An InfographicBenefits of Blended Solutions - A Mix of eLearning and Classroom Training