We use various techniques to deliver effective training online. In this post, we will look at some learning methods which are used extensively in eLearning - scenarios, role plays, practice tests, testimonials and job-aids. These techniques help engage the learner very effectively. Let us now look at each. Scenarios Scenarios play a vital role in eLearning, as they add fun, create interest in courses and help people understand the subject-matter better. They help improve the analytical skills of the learner as he can relate himself with the real life situations and apply his learning there Role Plays We don’t use role plays often in our eLearning courses, But, they are very effective instructional techniques and go a long way in improving the analytical capabilities of learners. Role plays are similar to scenarios and help the learner take a decision based on the situation. Practice Tests It is well-said that practice makes a person perfect. By including well-designed practice tests in your online course, you can ensure that the learner can evaluate his comprehension of the subject-matter and apply the learning effectively at the workplace. Testimonials:  A testimonial is a statement by a person indicating that he had used a product or service and is satisfied with it. Testimonials help your learners deepen their knowledge as they are exposed to various points of view. Job Aid: Job aids are very useful to facilitate effective transfer of knowledge to the job. You can use provide your staff members with handouts and reference documents which help them perform better. Hope you find this post useful. What techniques do you use to create good eLearning courses? We’d love to know. Related PostsThe E-learning Design Checklist - An InfographicTop 5 blogs of 2014 on Instructional Design3 Tips to Instructional Designers for Effective E-learning - An Infographic

7  Components of Compassion Training Program Scott Keller and Colin Price, in a new study entitled Beyond Performance, cite evidence that compassionate leaders outperform leaders who have a "what's in it for me" attitude and promote a culture of "each person for themselves". Furthermore, in 600 companies studied, companies who bring compassion to their method of operation actually log up twice the financial performance of those who do not. The topic is also at the center of a series of ongoing research projects, including work being done at Stanford University's Center for Compassion and Altruism Research (CCARE). Finally, there are already researchers who are extolling the value of compassion training. Here are seven components that need to be included if you are considering a compassion training program for your company: Employees will have to be introduced to the concept of lojong, which has its roots in Tibetan Buddhism. It reflects the practice of compassion training in the mind until the person being trained achieves spontaneous altruism. Lojong attempts to eradicate "what's in it for me" selfish attitudes that hurt both the person who thinks that way and those around them. Compassion training should be a strong component of mindfulness, which encourages employees to deal with their own stress by relinquishing concerns about the future or angst about the past and just live within the present moment. This brings with it the cultivation of mental stability, a foundation for compassion training. Programs should also include descriptions and examples of practices that show precisely what compassion is and how it can be blocked by certain negative behaviors in a workplace setting. Employees must focus on compassion for friends, their family, and themselves, as well as their co-workers and supervisors. They also need to consider compassion for strangers, difficult clients, and people they generally dislike. Specified steps for employees to create more connection and compassion with their clients and co-workers need to be laid out. Team members must learn methods for developing the ability to be empathetic and grateful for their team members, whether or not they like their team or consider them difficult to work with. Can you really expect that your highly individualistic employees will embrace compassion training? Frans de Waal, a Dutch pioneer in research about compassion training, believes that you can succeed, since human beings are compassionate by nature. He argues that people were originally wired for connectivity and caring about each other as a team, a motivation that is as powerful as our urge to care about ourselves. Using compassion training in the modern workplace, he suggests, is a key to encouraging creativity and an incredibly impressive team work. Do you believe compassion training will make a difference in your company's workplace productivity and creativity? Share with us your thoughts and experiences. This post was first published on eLearning Industry.

For all of the buzzwords that surround the e-learning and training industries, there are some terms which are useful, here to stay and have much more purpose than simply providing bloggers and vendors with some new fodder. While not a new concept, blended learning has become super important and significant over the last five or so years, gaining real acceptance within the learning field and being put into practice left, right and centre by leading organizations the world round. What is blended learning? Where an organization may have historically favoured face-to-face or e-learning to train staff, blended learning is the idea that bringing a range training interventions together gives the best bits of both the offline and online learning together to benefit the overall experience. It aligns flexibility, variety and independence while increasing engagement, motivating staff to learn and making learning a lot more interesting. Why blended learning today? Advances in mobile technologies today allow us to work far more flexibly than we have been able to in the past. Mobile learning, mobile working and using the cloud to support work while on the move are all very real and common possibilities today, something the workplace is still fully adjusting to. This gives us loads more options for blended learning and learning in general, as we have far more opportunities to reach students and learners than ever before. Increased connectivity means we can stream videos, play games and share our informal learning experiences via internal and external social channels at the drop of a hat. In the past e-learning has been confined to the speeds of dial up internet and clunky desktop computers, so it’s no wonder that the idea of blended learning is only becoming a reality during recent times. Informal learning (and learning in your own time) is pushed forward by the rise of mobile devices in the workplace. Whether a Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) policy is in place or not, it’s fair to say that offices today are filled with smartphones and tablets, offering plenty of learning opportunities in their own right. Advances in multi-device authoring tools and tracking standards, namely Experience API, mean that all aspects of the learning experience can be tracked in great detail. The former not only allows multi-device content to be built cheaply, but Experience API tracking tells you exactly what devices are being used for learning, what informal learning activities are taking place and so much more, allowing you to paint a picture of how your people like to learn, informing future blended learning interventions. Making blended learning a reality (today) Blended learning, with it’s relative position to strategy, learning infrastructure, e-learning content creation and more, is often seen as something that is not only expensive, but needs the input of an e-learning vendor. While blended learning at scale does often involve stakeholders and alignment with overall company or L&D vision, there’s no reason why you can’t begin to create your own blended learning aspects to support face-to-face or e-learning interventions. HTML5 authoring tools today allow content to work across all devices, allowing users to pick your courses up when it suits them on their mobile, tablet or desktop. This begins to support the idea of blended learning, but there’s no reason why you can’t continue to encourage informal learning and performance support via the multi-device output of an authoring tool without explicitly making a full e-learning course. Making small, digital resources to sit alongside an e-learning course or face-to-face training session could be the first, simple steps you can take towards adding blended elements to your learning. It’s important to remember that this isn’t going to be a full blend, but taking aspects out of a course and making them small tasks and resources in their own right could transform how learners in your organization approach courses, taking in video’s, PDFs, quizzes and more in bitesize chunks as and when it suits. To blend or not to blend Because we’re looking at things at such a granular level, there’s no need to carry out the lengthy analysis that is typically required when creating blended learning, although there are still a number of factors to consider. Things like… The nature of the training requirement The needs and requirement of the target audience being trained The technology available and delivery (platform, authoring tool) Timescales It’s nice to have blended on the brain, but for certain topics and needs of your audience, it’s just not going to be something that you need to do. HTML5 authoring tools today allow you to create content to service all devices at once, or even to deliver to individual devices, allowing you to follow up an e-learning course with a mobile-ready one page resource or quiz. Blended learning is really big picture stuff, but with the millions of devices in the workplace being used for informal and formal learning more and more, it’s time you began to think of your authoring tool as something that creates more than just standard e-learning. Think of your authoring tool as a vehicle to create multi-device (or mobile) resources, helpbooks, refreshers, quizzes and much, much more - it’s a great way of varying your output while drip-feeding the learning support available to your workforce. Not all authoring tools are capable of such flexible tasks, more so HTML5 authoring tools with multi-device output, like gomo. I’m not going to bang on about how great it is, you can see so yourself by creating resources and courses via a 21 day free trial today… It’s credit card-detail free and there’s (obviously) no obligation. Fancy building flexible multi-device learning? Start right away. The post Blended learning and how you can do it yourself appeared first on gomo Learning.

As we know, the human brain has the capability to hold a limited amount of data at a time. Experimental psychologist George Miller found that "The Magic Number 7, plus or minus 2? Describes the number of ideas, facts, or issues that an average individual can hold in his working memory is 7 + 2. This is called the Rule of 7″. What is content chunking? Content chunking is presenting information by splitting it into small chunks or pieces. Why do we need to chunk the content of an online course?  Proper chunking of content: Enables better understanding and retention of information Facilitates effective learning Helps convey information efficiently What kind of content strategies should instructional designers follow to design effective courses? Depending on the eLearning course content, there are many strategies to split the content into chunks. To implement these strategies, you need to: Prioritize and classify the content Group the content Organize the content  1. Prioritize and classify the content  Being an instructional designer, you need to separate wheat from chaff by analyzing the content. A man asked an artist, "How do you make such a beautiful things from stone?" He replied, "Beauty is already hidden there; I just remove the extra stones…." In the same way, an instructional designer should be able to remove information which is unnecessary, meaningless, unimportant and useless without changing the meaning of the content. Don’t put unnecessary information into your leaner’s brain as its capacity to "assimilate" information is limited. 2. Group the content  Instructional designers need to maintain logical "flow" while grouping the content. We need to divide the eLearning course content into modules, lessons, and then topics. This process is known as course level chunking. It determines the content hierarchy of an eLearning course. It is advisable to explain only one ‘learning point or unit’ in each slide (lesson/topic). In other words, each slide must have only one chunk of related information that can’t be broken any further. This is called screen level chunking. The main objective of grouping the content is to facilitate effective comprehension and retention of large, complex data. Here are a few examples : 3. Organize the content This plays an important role as it has a bearing on the look and feel of a course. Here, content can be chunked on the basis of various factors such as audio, content types and visuals. Audio: It is better to show short, ‘stand-alone’ sentences on the screen and provide a detailed description using audio. Content types: Certain types of content such as processes and procedures can be taught very effectively, using interactivities (such as click on tab, click on images, click on number, slide show, hotspot, flip card etc.). And, audio can be used to describe a process in detail. Visuals: If the course needs more visuals, then more content can be chunked because visuals speak more than words. Show clear and crisp sentences on the screen. Improper chunking could lead to content redundancy. To conclude, instructional designers need to perform these three tasks to make meaningful and effective eLearning courses. Well-chunked content is understood easily by the learner, and chunking is useful when we are dealing with large pieces of information which are difficult to read and understand. Hope you find this post useful. Do share your views. Related PostsChunking Content: An Important Element in Creating Successful Online Training ProgramThree Steps to Content Chunking in eLearning - An INFOGRAPHIC3 Tips to Instructional Designers for Effective E-learning - An Infographic

It is a common knowledge that well-designed assessments go a long way in engaging learners in the online learning environment. They are used to reinforce learning as well as evaluate the learner’s comprehension of a course. In eLearning courses, assessments are provided either at the completion of each unit (formative assessments) or at the completion of the course (summative assessments). Formative assessments evaluate the learner’s understanding of the topic covered in a chapter of an online course and reinforce the learning. Whereas, summative assessments are used to evaluate the learner’s understanding after the completion of the course. There are various interactivities which can be used to make your formative assessments more engaging. One of these interactivities is drop down. In this, the learners need to choose the right answer from the options contained in a drop-down box. Here is an info-graphic that shares 5 tips to use the drop down interactivity in online course assessments. Hope you find this post interesting. Do share your views. Related Posts4 Effective Ways of Presenting Scenarios in E-learning Courses5 Tips to Engage Your Online Learners - An InfographicCreating Effective Assessments in E-learning: 5 Tips - An Infographic

6 Selection Criteria To Consider When Searching For The Best Instructional Design Master’s Degree Earning an Instructional Design Master’s degree gives you the opportunity to delve into the fields of educational psychology, eLearning technologies and instructional design theories and models that can help you create for your learners more immersive and effective online courses. It also opens up an entirely new realm of career prospects. In this article, I’ll share a number of tips that can help you find the ideal for you Instructional Design Master’s program. Ask about the orientation process. The most beneficial eLearning experiences are those that start off on the right foot. As such, when choosing the best Instructional Design Master’s program for you, ask about the new attendee orientation process. Even though you may be familiar with the overall process, thanks to the fact that you’ve already earned other Instructional Design degrees, orientation can give you the opportunity to ask any questions up front, learn more about the course structure and to acclimate yourself to the faculty, curriculum and layout. Ask your admissions coordinator about the orientation process and what, exactly, is involved. For example, will there be a new participant meet-up where you can all introduce yourself and meet your instructors? Does the program offer an overview of each class and what coursework is involved? Verify that the program’s focus is in-line with your goals. Given that you are already at the Master’s degree stage in your education, you probably already have an idea of what goals you hope to achieve by participating in the program. This applies to both career goals and learning goals. Therefore, you should ensure that the program you have in mind is going to focus on the key skills and information you need to succeed. While one Instructional Design program might concentrate on instructional tools and technologies for corporate training, another will center on K-12 curriculum design. By finding a program that is in-line with your objectives and goals, you have the opportunity to get the most out of the eLearning experience and earn a degree that allows you to pursue your desired instructional design career path. Analyze rankings and reviews. Researching the rankings and reviews of prospective universities not only enables you to find out if they offer the right program for your needs, but also whether future employers are going to place a high value on your degree. For example, if you attend an Instructional Design Master that is accredited and has a prestigious academic reputation, this lets employers know that the degree you earned is backed by a solid education and experience. You can learn a lot about academic institutions by looking for online reviews left by current program participants and those who have already earned their degrees. If a vast majority of the attendees state that they had a positive experience, then you may want to add the particular Instructional Design Master's program to your short list of candidates. Compare tuition costs and determine what is covered. Another important factor to consider has to do with tuition fees. Keep in mind that it’s also essential to determine what other expenses are involved. Support services and textbooks, for example, may or may not be included in the tuition fees, treated as supplemental expenses that you will have to cover separately. Ask the admissions coordinator about any additional fees that you are expected to pay and when you must pay them, as some academic institutions have specific deadlines for such additional fees. Also, consider comparing tuition costs for your top schools to determine which offers you the best value for your money. For example, if one may cost a bit more but is more in-line with your career goals, then you may want to move it up to the top of your list. Take online learning community and faculty into consideration. Both the faculty and the learning community, as a whole, have a direct impact upon your learning experience for the duration of the program. Do they have a strong sense of community? Do they place a strong emphasis upon eLearning technologies and tools to enrich the Instructional Design Master's program? You should also do some research on the faculty members to find out more about their background and experience level. Verify how long they have been teaching and search for student reviews to see whether they have offered the support and expertise you are looking for. Find out about support services. Student support services is a broad term that covers a great deal of things, from online libraries where you can supplement your online training to career counseling that can help you land a job that is ideally suited to your talents. Some Instructional Design Master’s degree programs include support services in their tuition costs, while others may charge an additional fee, so it may always be a good idea to check with the admissions coordinator in advance. Also, ask them about which particular services they offer and how you can access their help resources. Will you be able to email your tutors directly if there is a problem, or do they give you the opportunity to chat with them online if you need additional assistance? If there are tutoring services available, are they peer or instructor-based? Keep these tips on hand when searching for the ideal Instructional Design Master’s degree program, so that you can find the university that offers you the best value for your money and lives up to your expectations. If you’d like to learn more about how to choose the right Instructional Design Master’s program for your specific needs, read the article How To Choose The Right Instructional Design Master’s Program, which also highlights a number of universities that offer Instructional Design Master’s degrees. This post was first published on eLearning Industry.

For a long time, e-learning was rather two dimensional. Learning content was developed by teams knowing it would be pushed out to just one screen size. We could monitor some high level stuff like questions answered and time spent in the course, but that was about as far as it went. Today, however, with an unknown and increasing number of screen sizes to pacify, our e-learning, how we build it and how we track it must be much more advanced - we can’t predict what devices will be used, so we need to plan for all, with a means of understanding how learners interact with and across multi-device learning. Using multi-device learning to get the big picture More and more of today’s e-learning is created to be multi-device or at least mobile-ready… and if it’s not, it’s probably down to internal, technological restrictions (if this is you, check out our blog on multi-device learning, it can help you win over the decision makers in your business). Audiences and workplace ares becoming more flexible, meaning learners are turning to more devices to complete a single course. Multi-device learning tools (like gomo) allow learning to be built, tracked and analyzed from one place, giving you a full picture of the path learners take at any point of their journey through a course. If you use a multi-device learning tool to track learners, you get the full picture of every device used, not just desktop, which is really just a small aspect of the learning experience today. Collating multi-device learning data Some authoring tools are better at making e-learning mobile ready as opposed to multi-device, which will be reflected in the analytics available. With the right authoring tool, it’s easy to see the breakdown across devices and location, showing which learners did better (and which need a helping hand). It’s all well and good to be collecting data and dipping your toe into the analysis, but the more data you have, the more you understand your workforce, helping you recognise wider trends in performance and inconsistencies. The data should be fed into V2 of a course, used to make the business case for a small blended resource or worked into personalized courses, with the overall aim of generally improving the performance of a department, individual or workforce. Multi-device in the long term The more we understand what people are getting up to within a course, the more opportunity we have to improve their performance with a bid to align that with strategic goals. As the process continues, and we collect more and more data, it becomes easier to understand why people are performing better or worse, not just simply stating the fact that they are. Casting the learning analytics net across multi-device learning allows us to move to a much more curated and informed learning experience than having to make assumptions, guess and wonder why things are or aren’t happening. Multi-device learning presents us with so many opportunities, we just need to know how to get the most back from it to succeed. The changing standard of tracking e-learning, Experience API, allows us to see the formal, informal and multi-device learning experience. We’ve added this into gomo, which allows you to track everything we’ve just talked about above… you can learn more from Mike, our Managing Director at an upcoming webinar. The post Using multi-device learning to get the big picture appeared first on gomo Learning.

Our sister company LEO recently won an International E-Learning Award with NEMA for their Emergency Management Assistance Compact (EMAC) Essentials course, and we’re really excited about it because it was built in gomo! The course was created to equip disaster workers with vital information and resources they need during emergencies. It enables workers to mitigate, prepare for, respond to and assist in the recovery of disaster-affected areas. The first success of the course, for us at gomo, was its acceptance into both the Apple and Android app stores earlier this year. We always knew gomo had the capability for mobile ready and device-specific apps, but it’s great to have our first living, breathing example on a public-facing app store app… and we look forward to having many more! To have the app noticed as a best-in-class by an international award is even better, and a great  testament to the work and learning design expertise of the LEO team. The gomo team worked alongside LEO and NEMA to get the course ready for app store deployment - you can download it today from the Apple or Android app stores to check out how gomo performs as a native app. If you’re interested in authoring e-learning with native app or app store deployment in mind check out this blog post, which looks at the differences between web and native apps and how to make the decision between the two. Alternatively, you can learn more about the NEMA award on the LEO website. The post gomo assists LEO and NEMA towards award success appeared first on gomo Learning.

Free Live Webinar: Unleashing The Power Of E-learning To Impart First-rate Training What does it take to impart top-notch training to your people? How can you see that your staff members are equipped with the needed knowledge and skills to take on the challenges posed by the dynamic world of business? How can you make sure that you get the best value for your training dollar? Well, you need to use eLearning. According to IBM, for every $1 that a company spends on e-Learning tools and strategies, it can receive $30 worth of productivity. Join the webinar Unleashing the Power of E-learning to Impart First-rate Training to find out everything you need to know to harness the full potential of this very useful learning format. Veterans of online training, who have been in the business of providing eLearning solutions for the last 15 years, will answer the following questions and more. How to get started with eLearning? How can eLearning be used to meet your training needs very efficiently? What are the challenges in implementing eLearning solutions, and how can you overcome them? What are the training programs that can be delivered effectively online? So, register for the webinar now:  http://bit.ly/1GZWeOK This post was first published on eLearning Industry.

Have you ever tried to create your own radio buttons with different objects in Articulate Storyline? Or, have you at least tried to convert the objects you have on the slide to buttons or radio buttons? It’s very simple. The Button Set feature of Articulate Storyline makes it possible. The one feature of Articulate Storyline that has not hogged the limelight is the Button Set. But, this is as helpful as the other features this incredible rapid authoring tool. Today, in this blog, we will see how the Button Set feature helps us in creating radio buttons for our eLearning course. Button Set helps us make any object on the slide to behave like a button, or to be more precise like a radio button, so that the learner can select only one object at a time from a given set of objects. If he selects any other object in that set, then the selected object would be deselected automatically. It works on all objects in your slide.For example, you can button set shapes, pictures, characters, screenshots, markers,captions, and even Storyline’s ready-to-use buttons; and, that’s how this feature helps us create interactivities, in only a few clicks, with what you already have on your slide. Let us now see how to create your own radio buttons. Step01: Create different shapes on a slide. (Add a question or instruction for the learner to make him perform the desired task.) Step02: Select all the objects which you would like to convert into a button set. (I have selected all the objects on the screen, excluding the instruction textbox. The instruction specifies that the learner needs to select any one of the whole set.) Step03: Right click on any one of the selected object and choose Button Set option from the menu. Step04: Select Button set 1 which is the default name for the first button set on any slide. Or, to create your own set, you can select New set and name it. Click Add once you have entered the desired name. Note: If you have already inserted some of the Storyline’s ready-to-use radio buttons, by default, they would be a part of Button set 1. So, if you want the objects to be in a separate set, it would be better to select the option New set, so that you can have as many button sets as you like on a single slide. This is how the sates of an object look after you button set it. You can even customize them as per your requirements. That’s it! This is how we can make objects behave like radio buttons in Articulate Storyline. Hope this blog is helpful. Please share your thoughts. For more such useful tips on eLearning design and development, stay tuned to my blogs. Related PostsRapid E-learning through Storyline Tool: 5 Infographics Sharing Key FeaturesHow to Combine Your Adobe Captivate Projects Into Single Course?4 Tips for Developing E-learning Course Using Rapid Authoring Tools