This is a guest post by Steve Penfold, Customer Success Director at Elucidat. If your organization relies on delivering eLearning content to a paying audience, the authoring tool you choose can dramatically impact both the learner experience and your bottom line. Here are 10 things that you should consider when choosing an eLearning authoring tool for your organization.   1. Ease of use The authoring tool you select should be simple to use. If your subject matter experts (SMEs) can produce content without help from tech-savvy developers, the time required to create training content will be shorter, the number of courses created can increase, and the return on investment for your authoring tool will be higher.   2. Design flexibility and control Your brand is important to you, so you’ll want a lot of control over where your logo appears and the color palettes and fonts that are used in your courses. A high level of control is good, but if you have several people developing courses, you don’t want them to apply your standards in non-standard ways. Modern eLearning authoring tools like Elucidat address this issue by allowing you to create themes or templates that position and lock-in certain on-screen elements, including logos, background colors, and formatted text blocks. That leaves the course author free to focus on manipulating dynamic elements, for example, text content, images, and drag and drop components.   3. Scalability One advantage of cloud-based authoring tools is that your workforce can flex and upscale according to your current development needs. If you suddenly need to create additional eLearning content for a major project, a scalable authoring tool allows you to leverage the skills of team members or experts in multiple locations. SMEs can access your cloud-based authoring tool from anywhere in the world and use your branded templates to contribute to the project.   4. Streamlined comment and feedback system To ensure quality, your course authors need to collaborate quickly and accurately with stakeholders, reviewers, and testers. Consider using an eLearning authoring tool that offers a streamlined online system. The feature allows reviewers to make comments or recommendations right on the page they’re reviewing. That means no more crossed or missed email recommendations and no more duplicate or conflicting change requests. In addition to reducing frustrations, this efficiency delivers higher-quality content in less time. Also see: Why online collaboration is the solution to your team’s efficiency problem   5. Mobile learning-ready Content that can be written once and deployed simultaneously to a desktop, tablet, and mobile device is a huge advantage. It increases your potential audience by making it convenient for them to access your content in multiple ways. This case study shows how Utility Warehouse was able to reach 46,000 learners by using Elucidat’s responsive write-once-publish-anywhere design feature that allows learners to access content on their tablet and mobile devices. Also see: Why mobile learning is important (4 reasons)   6. Fast publishing and maintenance (in the cloud) It’s inevitable that you’ll need to make changes to courses that you’ve published, either because the material changes, or because you find an error that must be fixed. When that happens, cloud-based authoring tools are usually more efficient and convenient than their desktop equivalents. That’s because the source files for your courses and the eLearning authoring tool itself are held centrally and are accessible to all of your authors, wherever they are. So, for example, if a course requires an urgent fix, and the primary author is on the road, another author can quickly make changes, or the primary author can make the changes from his or her hotel room or home. All that’s needed is a web browser and Internet connection. To further streamline the process, Elucidat has a rapid release feature that, with a button click, can save and publish course changes directly to an LMS like LearnUpon.   7. Easy localization At some point, it may be necessary to translate your courses into multiple languages. You might want to access foreign markets, for example. In that case, it’s a good idea to use an authoring tool that has a built-in translation workflow. A common standard that allows translation from one language to another is XLIFF (XML Localization Interchange File Format) and is supported by Elucidat. An XLIFF file is a structured file that contains all the text to be translated and corresponding spaces for a human translator to enter alternative language versions of that same text.   8. Prebuilt page types and interactions The best eLearning authoring tools shield you from the complexities of what they’re doing under the hood, yet they enable you to incorporate powerful, engaging interactive elements into your courses. For example, an Elucidat theme can contain dozens of page types, like drag and drop, hotspots, text and graphics, and multiple choice questions. Where appropriate, these page types give you a simple mechanism to customize them (e.g., to position hotspots or add an answer option to a multiple choice question page), but the high-tech programming that makes them function will be hidden. These simple-to-use prebuilt page types become the building blocks that you use to create your highly interactive learning masterpiece in the quickest possible time.   9. Integrations/Easy export to LMS Most eLearning authoring tools will publish a SCORM or Tin Can (xAPI) package suitable for importing into a compliant LMS like LearnUpon. The main purpose of SCORM and xAPI standards is to allow content and tools from different vendors to launch and track learner progress using a common set of protocols. It’s important that your authoring tool of choice supports at the very least the SCORM standard and that you can easily export to HTML5 formats, if not to both Flash and HTML5 formats.   10. Analytics Data about who your learners are and how they access and use your courses is an important part of understanding your business. Without it, how do you know how effective your courses are? Good data can reveal a new potential market or indicate ways to better serve current customers. Some of this information will be available from an LMS like LearnUpon, but granular demographic data can also be captured by linking Google Analytics to your courseware. Related: Stay on top of the latest eLearning ideas, trends and technologies by subscribing to the Elucidat weekly newsletter.   In conclusion Your eLearning authoring tool is one of the most important pieces of software that you’ll rely on, so it pays to do your homework before you commit to one. Next steps? I recommend you read this review of five high-profile authoring tools. Most of these tools have generous free trials. Take advantage of the trials to test them out and see if one is a good fit for your organization.   Author Steve Penfold Steve Penfold is Customer Success Director at Elucidat. He helps large organizations and online training providers use Elucidat’s award-winning elearning authoring tool. The post How to choose an eLearning authoring tool appeared first on LearnUpon.

Successful radical innovations are rare - and most attempts at them fail. High uncertainty and the risk of failure lead many senior managers to stay in their comfort zone: they resist radical innovation and instead focus on incremental improvements to existing offerings.

The Problem Facing L&D Companies have extensive investments in Training Programs and that content is depreciating at a staggering rate. Training programs become unusable, irrelevant, or outdated if they are not properly managed and maintained. Companies that constantly maintain and reuse their learning assets enjoy a much better return on investment for training expenditure.1 The value of outdated workplace training programs can be maximized by reducing the amount of extraneous content, reusing instructionally sound content, and recycling content with an eye towards improving and modernizing its design. Reducing the amount of extraneous training content improves the impact of training and increases learner engagement. A common issue with older training programs is that they are overly long, contain too much information for employees to remember on the job,2 and rehash some of the same concepts multiple times throughout the program. After auditing older training programs, learning professionals can strategically prune away extraneous training content to ensure that whatever content remains is more succinct and impactful.5 As long as the content is instructionally sound and contains useful information, it can be leveraged for the development of new training programs in the future as well. Perform an Audit Auditing your training portfolio and identifying extraneous content that can be condensed or removed requires a critical eye. Here are four questions to keep in mind when performing a training portfolio audit: Are the programs too time consuming? Training workshops that pull employees away from their jobs days at a time and hour long e-learning courses are good candidates for consolidation. Think 70/20/10 Will learners suffer from information overload? Learners can only retain so much information at a time from formal training programs. Content that is too information-rich and relies on workers to memorize lots of information becomes unwieldy and should be condensed. Are there learning assets that have gotten negative feedback from workers? Unpopular training content should be removed from your company’s training portfolio. However, if some of the base content is still useful, it should be partitioned away from the program as a whole instead of deleting it. Are there learning objects that are no longer accessible due to technological limitations? For e-learning content in particular, older content published in legacy formats can become inaccessible on modern Internet browsers, learning management systems, and mobile devices. After Reducing Now What? Reducing extraneous content is only the first step to maximize training ROI. Read more, download the Modernize eBook from InfoPro Learning. Download the Modernize EBook Ebbinghaus, H. (1885). "Memory: A Contribution to Experimental Psychology." Translated by Ruger, H., & Bussenius, C. (1913). New York: Teachers College, Columbia University. Barker, E., James, H., Knight, G., et. al. (2004). "Long-Term Retention and Reuse of E- Learning Objects and Materials." Report commissioned by the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC). About the author: Kyle Miller is an enterprise learning consultant with InfoPro Learning based out of Princeton, NJ. Prior to joining InfoPro, Kyle served as a research associate on subjects including e-learning, online education, game-based learning, and social media usage in higher education at St. John’s University in New York. The post How To Audit Training Programs: Reduce for a Greater ROI appeared first on .

Welcome to week one of the post-acquisition Rustici Software world. I just thought I’d take a moment here to discuss one of the reasons we agreed to sell Rustici Software to LTG, because it’s not all about the money. Mike and I were seeking investment funding for Watershed, but we really weren’t on the lookout for anything related to Rustici Software. It was a profitable business, I know very well how to run it, and we have several sets of work that give us cause for optimism. LTG, however, saw the value in both Watershed from an investment point of view and Rustici Software from a market and profitability point of view. After LTG’s first visit, Mike and I asked ourselves two questions. Did we believe that we would be able to maintain our strange and highly-valued culture through an acquisition? Having a place we want to come to work has always been a fundamental requirement for us. Did we believe that we would be able to serve our customers in the way we always had?   Throughout the negotiations, due diligence, and these two long days as an LTG company we’ve consistently believed that we could do both of those things and still do. LTG is not an LMS provider like some of our prior suitors have been. We always used to worry that an acquisition of that sort might include aggressive interactions with our customers. With LTG, we’re going to continue to be agnostic, supportive of the standards, and generally the same company we always have been. We’re excited about it, and excited about continuing to support our customers and the industry in general in exactly the same way. The post More of the same appeared first on Rustici Software.

Why transitioning to a middle manager feels a lot like starting middle school.

To close the #LearningPerforming gap, we are re-imagining how we think about fusing technology with our L&D practices, and in doing so, a new role has emerged.

  It’s a lot of fun working with both hosted and locally installed platforms. Yes, technically the deployments vary a lot (and I’m thankful for our super talented developers who manage both worlds), but it gives us the chance to work with many types of companies and products. Some folks gravitate towards the flexibility of SCORM Cloud as a hosted solution that scales with them as their business grows. Other folks require a more controlled, locally installed solution and need our Engine player for those very reasons. Recently we’ve noticed another benefit of offering both deployment options— migrating from one deployment method to the other as business models change. Case in point? Atomic Learning. Check out their story: Atomic Learning was a SCORM Cloud customer from the early days. They leveraged the SCORM Cloud API to integrate SCORM functionality into their K-12 Assessment platform. The flexibility of SCORM Cloud licensing worked great with their initial business model where usage spiked dramatically in May and September, coinciding with the start and end of the school year. Atomic Learning could simply scale their account size up and down to align with that usage pattern. Last year, Atomic Learning shifted their content strategy—going from two assessments per user annually to delivering smaller bites of learning more frequently. It quickly became apparent that the registration-based licensing would not be feasible with this new business model. The SCORM Engine Web Services option provided a way for Atomic Learning to move to an annual user based licensing model that better supported the fact that users who previously only took 2 courses per year could now generate as many as 20-30 registrations. And, because they had built an integration against the SCORM Cloud API, the transition to the locally installed version was fairly seamless. Once they had the server configuration set up on their end, they simply redirected the Cloud API calls to local calls and they were off and running. Need help figuring out which deployment method is right for you? This chart should help- and you can always ask us. The post What happens when your business model changes? appeared first on SCORM - .

Well, not really, but it’s the closest thing that the e-learning industry has to offer in the area of "prestigious awards for doing awesome things". The Brandon Hall Group Excellence Awards Program is the most prestigious awards program in the e-learning industry, and was the first awards program put in place in the e-learning industry (back in 1994). So what cool things have we been doing and what did we win? ADL released the official 1.0 version of the Tin Can API in April of 2013, and the e-learning world was then able to do amazing new things that weren’t possible with SCORM alone. SCORM serves its purpose, but the really exciting things happen when you start using the Tin Can API. LifeWay Christian Resources wanted to deliver and track video content in a way that would produce metrics that SCORM alone couldn’t produce, so we outfitted their systems with the Tin Can API, and tracked all the metrics they wanted to track with the Learning Record Store that’s built into SCORM Engine. What did that get us? A Brandon Hall Group Excellence Award! You can read a lot of the details here. AT&T wanted to do things with their training program that they couldn’t do in a traditional SCORM environment, so we set them up with the Watershed LRS and they began learning what motivated their employees to learn and how various types of learning affected employees’ real-world performance. And yep, another Brandon Hall Group Excellence Award! While we’re talking about awards, we’d like to acknowledge our friends and customers that also won Brandon Hall Group Excellence Awards: Accenture American Red Cross BizLibrary CA Technologies, Inc. Convergys Corporation CypherWorx KFC-US (Yum! Brands, Inc.) Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory NogginLabs, Inc. PANDORA A/S Tata Consultancy Services Ltd Tribridge Triple Creek Workplace Answers We’re happy to see so much innovation happening in the e-learning industry, and proud to know that Tin Can is at the heart of revolutionizing a fair bit of it. Click here to see a full list of this year’s winners. If you have any questions or would like to talk to us about how you can use the Tin Can API in your organization, please get in touch. We love talking about this stuff! The post We won two Grammys! appeared first on SCORM - .

Working in the Cloud is supposed to make things easier. Well, if you’re working with the SCORM Cloud API, we’ve made it even easier. SCORM Cloud is built to be integrated into other applications. To let SCORM Cloud communicate with these applications, we use identifiers called "app IDs" for each of them. THEN: Lots of applications = lots of manual work. Previously, adding a new app ID required API users to log in and use the Cloud interface. Many of our API users segment their usage across their customers, so this manual step created some serious extra work for them. NOW: NO MORE MANUAL WORK! You can now use the API to create a new app ID for each new customer you bring on board. We’ve added this functionality into the API. API users, take a moment to rejoice! To ensure that managing your service is easy and safe, we’ve added a security precaution. API users will have a dedicated set of credentials (app ID and secret) for adding new app IDs. This "Master" App ID is reserved for managing your service while other app IDs are used for managing your customers. You asked, we listened. This is in response to a customer request we get quite often. And when enough people are asking for a feature, it’s important for us to deliver! The new App Management feature for the SCORM Cloud API is available today. To read more about how it works and where to get it, go here. The post Easier App Management with SCORM Cloud API appeared first on SCORM - .

With over 28 improvements and enhancements, this is the most robust upgrade for SCORM Engine since, well, ever. We’ve been working hard over the past few months to prepare for seamless installs and upgrades. We’re excited to announce that we’re ready for you, so come and get it! Here are my favorite improvements: It’s SCORM and Tin Can conformant! The new Tin Can (xAPI) Conformance Test Suite from ADL includes hundreds of tests to assess LRS conformance. Rest assured, SCORM Engine 2014 passes them all. Engine supports Recipes! It automatically indexes incoming Tin Can API statements using these Recipes’ specifications, making Tin Can even simpler. It’s even faster than before. We’ve made database improvements for increased speed and robustness. How/when can you get it? New installs and upgrades are available now! Contact us to secure your spot in line. Where can you find more information? For more top-level technical details on the new release, visit the Documentation page or contact us. The post SCORM Engine 2014.1 is Now Available! appeared first on SCORM - .