Cross-Training Employees: Why It Makes Sense When you use the words "cross-training" many business executives and staff immediately think of sports. We have visions of the triathlete who is simultaneously honing their swimming, cycling, and archery skills, so they can compete in some extraordinary challenging event at the world level. In fact, it is a word that is coming out of North American boardrooms more and more these days, as corporations find themselves having to deal with the new realities of rapidly changing markets and increasing production and service challenges. In business terms today, cross-training is used to describe the process of training employees so that they can do several jobs within an organization. On a production line, for example, a person is able to move from their original position to another completely different skill. In a food operation, a front-line order taker must also be able to handle short order cooking skills, clean tables, and order supplies. What it means for the Human Resources professional is crafting job descriptions much more loosely to allow for such an eventuality and finding ways to motivate whole generations of employees who believe they can refuse a task on grounds of "it's not my job". If you run a restaurant, for example, and you have a wedding booked, but five out of fifteen of your staff suddenly find themselves stricken with flu, you may have to call on your bookkeeper, your maintenance person, and one of your line cooks to come forward and help wait on the guests. If they have no training, your inability to deliver the service will be obvious; but if the bookkeeper has also been trained as a bartender, the glitch will go completely unnoticed. The trend has spread around the world as well. The Japanese car manufacturer Toyota insists that each employee is able to work competently on a variety of car models on one assembly line. The "Jack or Jill of all trades", a relic of the past in an age of specialists, is now the most coveted of employees again. From a Human Resources perspective, there are a number of advantages that can be discussed in the process of overcoming employee resistance. For example, when one employee knows how to do another's job, they immediately have more empathy for what is involved. The process builds a deep understanding of the various components of the company. Secondly, cross-trained employees appear less apt to suffer burnout and stress related illness, because they are often energized by the process of changing what they do regularly. They no longer suffer from the "same-old, same-old" mindset when discussing their day. Do you believe that cross-training employees will become the norm in modern day organizations or will specialized employees still be the most sought after? Share with us your thoughts and opinions.  This post was first published on eLearning Industry.

Adobe Captivate 8 Tutorial: Drag & Drop Interaction in Adobe Captivate 8 This Adobe Captivate 8 tutorial presents how to create a drag and drop interaction in Adobe Captivate 8. The post Adobe Captivate 8 Tutorial: Drag & Drop Interaction in Adobe Captivate 8 appeared first on VivaeLearning: The Best Free Video Tutorials Online.

In this age of distraction, where literally every second counts, how do you grab your online learner’s attention? Believe it or not, first impressions count, and when it comes to an eLearning course, you have only 30 seconds to impress your learners! So, here’s how you can captivate your learners in 30 seconds. The First Ten Seconds The very first page makes or breaks your course. And, the first thing your learner sees on the launch page is the course description. This is where you need to be as creative as possible; a monotonous course description will kill your learner’s mood. For instance ‘This module provides insights into the management of invoices and payments to a vendor’ is boring. However, if the same is written as "This module will help you get insights into the management of invoices and payments to a vendor.So, close other windows and dedicate your attention. It’s pretty interesting, and you will learn quite a bit."Colloquial language will have a great impact on your learner in the first ten seconds. The Second Ten Seconds  Now that you have won your learner over with a fun description, it’s time to attract your learner visually. Your course needs to look professional as well as different at the same time. Colors and graphics add ‘that additional factor’ to attract and impress your learners. Visuals are what your learner is attracted to the most; however, it is also important to ensure consistency throughout your eLearning course, and for this, you can use of design templates that make your job easier. The Third and Final Ten Seconds  All said and done, the most important slide of your course is the learning objectives slide. Time and again, learning objectives are shown as mere bullets and icons. Remember, this is your main takeaway and your learner’s motivator. So kill the bullets and present your learning objectives creatively. Time’s up, and you have impressed your learner; make sure you retain the same level of interest throughout the course, and you’d have the perfect online course. Related PostsHow to Create a Customized E-Learning Course? Step 2 - Instructional Design Process3 Things to Get The Ball Rolling for E-learning - An Infographic3 E-learning Design Tips to Keep Your Creativity Flowing

I've written a White Paper, available here, on spaced-practice that includes the theoretical basis, along with informal, formal and technological solutions. Lots of detail, with full citations but here's some simple techniques for implementing spaced-practice without too much effort. Spaced-practice, despite being well known since Ebbinghaus first suggested it as a solution to his forgetting curve, in 1885, remains a rarely practiced technique in learning. The reasons are obvious enough. Most education and training delivers isolated doses of learning, lectures, presentations, classroom courses and the learners walk out of the door at the end, job supposedly done. Teachers had no real way of getting to them after the event had finished. Spaced-practice needs to be habitual. John Locke and William James both emphasised the key role that ‘habit’ plays in learning, lessons we’ve ignored. Good learners, in my experience have developed good learning habits. They always have something to read in their pocket or bag. They tend to be obsessive note takers, often with a long series of filled notebooks. They habitually elaborate what they hear and actively try to remember. They replay and recall in their own minds, through dialogue and re-reading their notes. They also tend to kick start new learning habits, such as blogging, using Evernote and so on. So how can we make spaced-practice habitual? Top and tail As a teacher, if you deliver a series of lectures, classes, modules, whatever, the simple practice of summarising what was taught in the last lecture, period, class or event and doing the same at the end of the lecture/class/event, gives two reinforcement events for the price of one. There’s a double dividend in that you take advantage of primacy and recency (also discovered by Ebbinhaus), the fact that learners tend to remember the first and last things more than what comes in between. Note taking As a learner, get into the habit, not only of taking notes, but rereading and rewriting those notes. Wittrick and Alesandrini (1990) found that written summaries increased learning by 30% through summaries and 22% using written analogies, compared to the control group. If you take notes AND review them, you do better on assessments (Kiewra 1989, 1991). Interestingly, Peper and Mayer (1978) found that note taking increased skills transfer and problem solving in computer programming and science (1986). Shrager and Mayer (1989) found similar effects in college students, learning about cameras. It would seem that note taking allows learners to relate knowledge to experience. Places Planes, trains and automobiles, as well as airports and any other place where you find yourself hanging around - opportuntiy for a bit of recall. There are other things in life you do regularly, like eat, go to the toilet, leave the house and so on. Email If all of your learners use email then this is an easy and efficient way to deliver spaced-practice events. Group emails, set up and timed for release, can get whatever reinforcement event you wish to design straight to your audience. A simple text email, infographic, question, video, even piece of e-learning; anything that makes them rethink, will help fix the learning in long-term memory. Blog Bloggers regularly report the learning value of writing and crystalising their thoughts in blog posts. This, in itself, involved deep processing, therefore better encoding, retention and recall. Blogging is, in this sense, a massively effective way to reinforce learning. It’s one of those things that, when it becomes habitual, is massively effective as an aide memoire. Twitter and Facebook Given the fact that 1.5 billion people are on Facebook there’s a good chance that your learners are easier to reach on Facebook than they are in your institution, library or any other physical space. The notifications system on Facebook is superbly efficient and that little red circle with a number in it is a strong stimulus for attention. Simply message your students with a series of cues from the lecture or course. Sleep One of the most effective methods of habitually delivering spaced-practice is to encourage learners to get into the habit of a little practice and recall just before they go to sleep. This takes discipline but studies show that it is very effective as the brain appears to consolidate memory during sleep. Exercise If you exercise regularly, that is the chance to recall and reinforce whatever you want to retain. A podcast through your headphones in the gym? Simply record your own lists, notes, reinforcement events and replay on demand. Get into the habit and you’ll get both physical and psychological gains Mobile Systems, like ENCORE, deliver reinforcement events, spaced between any two times to your learners’ mobiles. You can choose what to deliver when using a variety of media. This system gets to that powerful, personal, portable device in the pocket of every learner. Adaptive spaced-practice Systems are emerging with personalised spaced-practice that is delivered according to your needs, paying attention to your preferred channels, interleaving known and less well known items for practice, avoiding cognitive overload when you miss some and so on. Conclusion Spaced-practice is arguably the most powerful, yet most overlooked benefit in learning. Implemented properly and it is possible to have huge gains in productivity, namely the retention and recall of whatever has been learnt. I’d go further and say that if you don’t have a spaced-practice strategy, you don’t have a properly designed course. This post was first published on eLearning Industry.

Camtasia Studio 8 Tutorial: Audio Basics This Camtasia Studio 8 Tutorial covers the following topics: 0:20 - Interpreting a waveform 0:45 - Changing the waveform display 1:20 - Previewing audio 1:45 - Raising the volume 2:35 - Removing white noise The post Camtasia Studio 8 Tutorial: Audio Basics appeared first on VivaeLearning: The Best Free Video Tutorials Online.

What is blended learning? Why do we choose blended learning solutions? Blended learning is a "mix" of two different training delivery methods. Here, the traditional and online learning formats are combined together to create a comprehensive learning experience. As we know, the two learning media have their own distinctive advantages and disadvantages. Now, we blend ILT with eLearning for the best results. By integrating ILT with eLearning, you can mix several learning strategies, methods, and media to ensure that your learning objectives are met successfully. Here, I would like to share a few best practices of blended learning. Do NOT pre-select the delivery format without performing a thorough content analysis and knowing the requirements of your target audience. It is advisable to use eLearning to deliver fundamental concepts and for pre-training preparation/induction. Then, get your learners together into a classroom for advanced concepts, practices and hands-on exercises. ILT programs could be used to train learners on complex concepts, whereas eLearning courses could be used to complement and reinforce the learning. As we know, long courses are very difficult to handle and increase the cognitive load on learners. So, it is better to keep them short and precise. Short courses are easy to handle and digest. Be realistic in your expectations from various groups. For example, you don’t expect your sales engineers to spend several hours taking your eLearning courses before they attend a classroom training session. Make sure you know their choices/ requirements before providing them with the courses. Now, I would like to conclude that the original ILT was 80% of lectures using PPTs in the classroom and 20% of hands-on training. In a blended solution, 60% of training is conducted online, 20% of hands-on training and remaining 20% for clarifying doubts or dealing with complex concepts with instructors in the classroom. These are some of the best practices of blended learning. Do share your thoughts! Related PostsInstructional Designers Keep it Simple! 3 Awesome Ways to Simplify E-learning Design4 E-learning Elements to Leave Your Learners Spellbound - An Infographic3 Tips to Instructional Designers for Effective E-learning - An Infographic

Online Presentations: 10 Creative Ideas For eLearning Professionals How you present your eLearning content to your audience is critical. Engaging your learners requires a creative approach to visual design and, more often than not, effective online presentations are creative presentations. Luckily, there are several tools you can use to build your own presentation, such as Prezi, Aurasma, and Powtoon; all you need to do is bring in your fresh ideas. In this article, I´ll share 10 creative ideas for online presentations eLearning professionals may use in order to create an inspiring eLearning product and an unforgettable eLearning experience for their audience. Engage your audience. An online presentation should never be a static activity. On the contrary; the more your audience participates, the more effective it is. Integrate as much interactivity as possible into your online presentation by including scenarios, eLearning games, and drag and drop interactions, always making sure that your navigation system is easy enough to use. Once your learners interact with your eLearning content, their levels of engagement automatically raise. Furthermore, consider leaving a thought-provoking question for the end of your online presentation; if you leave your learners with an interesting question they cannot answer right away, and you make them think about it hours after your online presentation is over, you have done a great job. Make sure, however, that this question will be answered later on in the eLearning course. Take advantage of metaphors. A good metaphor brings an online presentation to life by simplifying a concept and further engaging your learners, as it helps them not only to get your idea instantly, but also leaves a lasting impression in their minds. In other words, by comparing a topic to a situation that your learners already know, you make it relevant, which facilitates the process this information gets transferred into their long-term memory. To incorporate metaphors into your online presentation, think of the point you want to make and use stock images that showcase the comparison. It may take you some time to find the appropriate metaphor, but keep in mind that the more unusual the metaphors you use are, the better they will stand out in the minds of your audience. Tell a story. By integrating stories into your online presentation you can bring your learners to your world. No matter how many facts and figures you need to use for making your point, you can instantly turn boring material into something exciting by sharing a story behind it. Research the background of your subject matter, build a storyline around it, develop your characters, and let them narrate the facts. People love stories; storytelling is one of the best online presentation ideas in order for eLearning professionals to truly capture and engage their audiences, as are all by default more attracted to stories than to abstract ideas. Add music. Adding a soundtrack to your online presentation will truly take it to another level. Music creates emotional responses, as it tells things words cannot express, communicates a feel-good vibe, and instantly connects people. Furthermore, strong melodic hooks become easily memorable, as they grab the attention of your audience and slip the parts of your eLearning content that are surrounded by music into their long-term memory. Just remember to give copyright credit to the composer and obey licensing laws. Add videos. A good video can bring into your online presentation the life that static slides lack. eLearning videos can optimize the effectiveness of your online presentation, as long as you don’t use them too often; a maximum of three short video clips is more than enough. A good idea is to use well known movie clips, as when your learners recognize the material it is easier for them to make connections with the eLearning content presented. Furthermore, you can create and produce your own eLearning videos, so that you can be more focused on your eLearning content and directly communicate your eLearning objectives. Replace bullet points with powerful images. While the adage "a picture is worth a thousand words" is pretty much as cliché as it gets, it is 100% true. Picture superiority effect is not a myth; images communicate concepts faster and more effectively, as they are more likely to be remembered than words, even if these words are only a few and presented as bullet points. But be careful; whether you use stock images or you create your own pictures, you always need to remember that for your visuals to be effective, they must be of high quality and relevant to your eLearning content. Low resolution, cheesy, unrealistic, and irrelevant to your topic images, will not only fail to get your point across, but they will also decrease the effectiveness of you eLearning content, as they can be distracting and confusing. All in all, don’t hesitate to be very selective and take the extra time to find or create aesthetically pleasing images that are directly related to your message. Use animations. Animations don’t just eliminate language barriers; when used properly, they can turn your online presentation into an almost cinematic experience. However, as it happens with images, they simply don’t work if they are distracting. They can easily get irritating, so choose them carefully and don’t overwhelm your online presentation with lots of bells and whistles. Use tasteful animated characters to demonstrate key points and communicate your more complicated topics, and consider implementing a friendly narration to accompany them, in order to increase your learners’ engagement levels. Include a small dose of humor. Using humor in eLearning can be tricky, either because there is a risk for your audience to get carried away as it may overshadow the subject matter, or your audience’s different humor levels may lead to misunderstandings. To make sure that you neither overdo it nor potentially offend any of your learners, add only small doses of humor and keep them inspirational and positive. If you have the slightest doubt that your witty joke could offend someone, leave it out. It may sound complicated to keep balance, but it is definitely worth giving it a try; humor is not only entertaining, but also capable to help your audience instantly relate to your eLearning content. Include podcasts. Adding a podcast can be a very creative idea with respect to online presentations for eLearning. There is a variety of free podcast tools for creating your own cost-effective, approachable, and high quality podcasts. You can use them to incorporate stories, interviews, or even well-crafted open-ended questions. Podcasting, when done right, is a great way to engage your audience, especially its auditory members. Keep the surprises coming. Finally, consider not relying only on tried-and-tested recipes. To use your online presentation for creating a memorable eLearning experience you need to intrigue your audience by keeping the surprises coming. Enrich your message with eLearning tools and ways that your learners are not expecting and you can be certain that your online presentation will stay in your audience’s minds for a long, long, time. Now that you can take advantage of these creative ideas for online presentations for eLearning, you may be looking for additional ways to bring a creative spark in your eLearning course. Read the article 7 Tips To Use Learners' Creativity In eLearning and explore how you can transform the most tedious subject matter into a unique and memorable eLearning experience. This post was first published on eLearning Industry.

According to the Horizon Report, 2011, by 2015, about 80% of people will be accessing the Internet using mobile devices only, for educational purposes. The phenomenal growth in the number of users of the "mobile Internet" is compelling companies to develop and deliver online courses which can be accessed on mobile devices. A Chinese proverb says, "One picture is worth ten thousand words. This is true for our mLearning courses as well. Effective usage of visuals not only enhances the efficacy of your mLearning courses, but also keeps the learner engaged throughout the course. However, there are some visual design strategies that are to be kept in mind while developing courses for the mobile. Here is an info graphic which lists 5 visual design tips to develop mLearning courses. Hope you liked this post. Do share your thoughts. Related PostsBest Practices for Developing M-learning Courses - An InfographicAssessment Strategy for M-learning5 Tips to Get the Visual Design of Your M-learning Course Right- An Infographic

Adobe Captivate 8 Tutorial: Creating Quizzes with Adobe Captivate 8 This Adobe Captivate 8 tutorial presents how to create a quiz in Adobe Captivate 8. The post Adobe Captivate 8 Tutorial: Creating Quizzes with Adobe Captivate 8 appeared first on VivaeLearning: The Best Free Video Tutorials Online.

Investment in training and employee capability development is higher than it has ever been. In 2014, spending on corporate training reached an estimated $70 billion in the U.S. alone. Considering how much money and resources companies are committing to training, shouldn’t they be doing everything they can to justify doing it? Why should we measure Corporate training? We all know that employees need training right? They need it in order to be able to do their jobs with confidence and efficiency. That’s common knowledge, so why would we need to measure anything? Without closely monitoring the performance of your employees, how can you really determine how well employees how much progress they make following their training and what level of impact their training has had on productivity, profitability and the success of the organization as a whole? What exactly should we be measuring? There are a whole range of metrics that can be generated by Learning and Development teams to determine the impact of training on an organization. Some of your key metrics should include: Increased sales Are there signs of an increase in sales since you deployed your training? Seek out ways that tie increasing sales directly to training such as monitoring employee workloads and productivity. Reduced costs One of the main metrics used to prove the value of training by many organizations is cost savings. You should be looking at how training affects the operational costs of the organization. Increased employee retention Increased retention rates are generally a good indication of employee satisfaction. If staff receive training, it gives them confidence and improved ability to do their jobs. This can often leads to a better employee retention rate. Measuring Corporate Training Performance: 4 Important Considerations  Determine what the business is already measuring If you haven’t already been tracking, analyzing and evaluating how training performs in your organization, now is the time to start. Begin by assessing what areas of the business are already being measured and determine how you can add to this through measuring training impact. Most likely, sales and ROI are the main focus of your organization in terms of evidence of success. Consider how the business is measuring these things and see if you can apply a similar model to training. It shouldn’t be too difficult to do this - cost savings, increased productivity and sales, as highlighted earlier, are some of the main KPIs you can get from training. Complete performance reviews and impact assessment At a basic level, this is one of the best ways to determine the impact that training has on a business. It may not tell you how it has affected ROI or sales directly, but monitoring the performance of individual employees and departments through performance reviews and assessing their skills and ability will tell you a lot. Doing this should help you answer a key question - how has their training affected the quality of their work? If you can tie performance improvement to training, there is a strong case to be made that training has resulted in more confident and capable employees. This leads to increased efficiency and productivity which in turn leads to higher sales and good ROI. Utilize control groups A control group is a group used as a standard of comparison in a controlled experiment. Using control groups is an excellent way of proving how valuable something can be. They can be particularly useful in piloting a training program, highlighting the value of training in terms of employee skills development, etc. For example, if training on a new production process is required by three production lines in a large manufacturing firm, training could be provided to just two of the three groups with the third group not receiving any training initially. The Learning and Development function would monitor the teams who received training for a 2-3 month period and compare their performance against the team that received no training. The results of this could be used to establish how much the work of the trained teams improved and thus determine the overall benefit of the training program by comparison with the investment made to develop it. Evaluate and improve existing Learning and Development processes Perhaps you already have a strategy for measuring training? Ask yourself, just how effective is it? Does it provide me with enough data I can use to justify our investment in training? Are there other ways to highlight the benefits of training to management which could result in them increasing the budget for training in the next financial year? Quite often, we implement strategies and processes to help us doing things more effectively. But once they are in place, we neglect them and forget that there are always new ways to improve them. Once you have a process of measuring training, each year you should review it carefully. Perform an Learning and Development needs analysis. Organizations grow, develop and change over time and the process you have for measuring training, like any other, should adapt to changes and growing needs within the business. Deploying training programs in your organization because you believe they are necessary is fine. But always be prepared to back up and support what you believe with results and KPIs. The saying "proof of the pudding is in the eating" truly applies here. Training staff is one thing. But actually proving the value that training adds in terms of employee skills development, cost savings, increased sales and ROI and performance improvement of teams across your organization should be your top priority. For further perspectives on this topic, read 3 Ways to Measure Training Effectiveness and learn more about how you can apply measurement techniques to your business. This post was first published on eLearning Industry.