CES2016 was an interesting experience. And to experience it with an interest in eLearning made it even more interesting. It's much bigger than the eLearning events I'm used too, and even though it's not about elearning, it's filled with just as much technology based learning innovation. I've already posted my initial thoughts about the event in these posts: CES2016 Trends That Will Influence Your eLearning Development CES2016 Update Part 2: eLearning Mega-Trend! The Future of Learning Experiences is Here Today The following video is a closer look at my personal CES2016 experience, and some of my thoughts about the future of eLearning and the L&D industry. Enjoy! The post VIDEO: An eLearning View of CES2016 appeared first on Litmos.

 What does it mean to be normal? How can we tell if new and innovative tasks and pedagogies are truly authentic - or just considered authentic because it fits into our privileged views of what normal is? Innovation. New Pedagogies. Digital literacies. 21st Century Learning Skills. How do we make sure we are not just […]

One year on 12 months ago today I posted my very first article on my new company’s website after choosing to leave Jisc. The article began: I have been very fortunate to have spent more than a decade dishing out advice, supporting and occasionally nagging, learning providers about the fantastic and often simple technology available to them. But here […]

Living with a Seal I don’t recommend books to often. The reason is there are not a lot of good ones out there. Also, people in business tend to suggest books about business. Some of these are worth a quick browse through the table of contents to see if anything stands out. Most are not worth the time. They can be verbose and repetitive. A friend of mine told me to check out "Living with a Seal" Read More The post Get off your butt with this motivating book appeared first on renshicon.com.

This weekend I was going to go cross country skiing. When I woke up the temperature was -24c. Yikes! My wife and I were planning to go to Shark Mountain. A beautiful place with wonderful mountain views about 30 minutes south of Canmore Alberta. Now -24 is pretty cold but it would be at least 10 degrees colder there. -34 was a no go in my book. So we decided to stick around home, get some errands completed and do some reading. Read More The post Smoking, Fumes, Pitch Dust and Dirt! appeared first on renshicon.com.

In the Speexx Exchange 2015-16 Survey, we spoke to 220+ HR and L&D professionals who told us what’s happening in their organisations right now with regard to e-learning, business communication, mobile learning, talent management systems, and Big Data. Things are clearly moving ahead, with more and more managers reaching their goals, yet a number of barriers still need to be overcome for them to really thrive. E-learning and E-enablement  An impressive 81 per cent of survey respondents have now introduced some form of e-learning, with over half of them having established or embedded e-learning across their entire organisation and made it part of their corporate culture. Yet at the same time, the large part of HR and L&D managers (43 per cent) plan to invest just 10-29 per cent of their training budget in e-enabled or blended learning programmes this year. This finding was slightly alarming to me. Despite e-learning being more cost effective on the long run, a realistic proportion of the budget still needs to be invested to get started and find out what works best. Just 8 per cent plan to invest more than half of their L&D budget in e-learning. We were also curious about the benefits of e-learning - does it really deliver what it promises? The top benefit registered is ‘Flexibility and accessibility’ (as it was in the past two years), cited by an overwhelming 46 per cent. Clearly, we shouldn’t underestimate the opportunities e-learning offers in terms of engaging learners in remote locations, delivering globally standardised content and supporting students who travel frequently. A further 20 per cent believe that e-learning increases "Student motivation and retention." This strongly resonates with point 5 of Bersin’s Key Predictions for talent management in 2016: Bersin believes that "engagement, retention and culture" in general will persist as top priorities in HR and L&D this year. Big Data  Moving on, Big Data was all the rage in the past 12 months. While it helps to follow and predict consumer trends across numerous industries, Big Data has been slow to gain a foothold in HR and L&D. Just 17 per cent of the Speexx Exchange Survey respondents currently use Big Data for talent management purposes, while an encouraging 39 per cent want to start using it in the next three years. Yet the benefits of Big Data in this sector cannot be ignored: The Towards Maturity Benchmark Survey showed that the top performing organisations are three times more likely than the rest to use benchmarking data to improve performance. Almost a quarter of respondents of the Speexx Exchange 2015-16 Survey said they would like to use Big Data for tracking learner progress and results, while a further 21 per cent were not sure how to use it at all. If Big Data is to work, HR and L&D Managers need to start gaining a thorough understanding of its opportunities and risks, and stay informed about current trends. When asked what they thought was the main barrier to applying Big Data for HR and L&D purposes, organisations cited, "Lack of management support" (30 per cent) as the top issue, followed by (unsurprisingly)"Lack of know-how in collecting and using data" (25 per cent). This shows that both HR and management need to act swiftly and find out what Big Data can actually do for them and what is realistic in their case. Looking ahead  The role of HR and L&D is becoming more complex as HR increasingly aligns into delivering more tangible outcomes to meet business objectives.  There are perhaps four key threads driving HR initiatives forward. First, the on-going challenge of finding and retaining the best talent (28 per cent), aligning training and development with business needs (26 per cent), second, using big data for HR and people analytics (16 per cent), and finally developing great leaders (12 per cent). While not all goals can be reached at once, knowing what lies ahead, being realistic about what’s right for the business and staying up to date with trends and changes will keep organisations on the right track. Read the full post via Training Journal.

Earlier this week, we had the pleasure of hosting our first webinar of 2016 with special guests: Don Taylor (Long-time veteran of the learning space and currently the Chairman of the Learning and Performance Institute) and Carol Leaman (CEO of Axonify). The webinar focused on the results of a survey, which asked participants to identify the trends that are going to be ‘hot’ in workplace learning this year. Having moderated many of our webinars before, I can easily attest to the fact that this one was highly engaging. The chat window was very active. We had a total of 362 unique comments in a 60 minute session (which averaged out to a comment every 10 seconds!). Clearly, a lot of folks are excited for what 2016 will bring to the world of corporate learning. We are too! Here are three interesting takeaways from the webinar: 1. Personalization and Collaboration have consistently been important. For the last three years in a row, these two trends have consistently been in the top three results and don’t forget, this is a global survey. What we’re hoping to see this year is a better distinction of the difference between personalized and adaptive learning. If you’ve already started personalizing learning in your organization, you’re certainly on the right track; however, to make learning even more relevant therefore, engaging it has to also be adaptive. From a social/collaborative learning perspective, a real challenge that organizations will face this year (and in the coming years) is knowledge transfer from the baby boomers to the millennials. Does your organization have a way of identifying experts on certain topics? Have you also created a system that allows employees to have easy access to learn from these identified experts? 2. Microlearning is on its way up the hype curve. There was a lot of discussion on the webinar about the topic of Microlearning (In fact, we did a whole separate webinar on Microlearning in December of 2015). We anticipate that this year, Microlearning will begin to take center stage as a strategy to deal with knowledge decay and to help with increasing speed to competency. To really get the full value out of Microlearning, you need to combine it with elements of brain science, personalization and proven methods of engagement, like gamification. Toward the end of the webinar, Carol shared stories of organizations that have been successful at driving bottom-line results with this approach to learning. 3. The formula doesn’t need to be complicated. It needs to be focused. How to make 2016 a great year in L&D? share-play-find-try, or as Robert Mapstead put it in today’s @Axonify webinar: 分享游戏找到试试 — Donald H Taylor (@DonaldHTaylor) January 20, 2016 Toward the end of the webinar, an attendee asked a very good question: "How can we embrace, internalize and make happen some of these ‘hot trends’ in our organization - if we haven’t already started?" To this question, Don had a simple formula: Share, play, find and try. Firstly, share and learn from others, ask questions and network with others instead of spending hours researching something. Secondly, play around and try out what you’re going to do in order to get a feel for what it might be like in your environment. Thirdly, find a manager who gets it and is willing to try it out, no need to go big here, you’re just looking to build a case. Trying it out is actually the final step in the process. What we would add at the end here is to center your efforts around a business problem. This way when you’re building a case and presenting it to your stakeholders, you can demonstrate the potential impact on the business. Which trends are you most excited to see come to life in your organization this year? Which trends are you most afraid of? Tell us below and in case you missed the webinar, you can catch the on-demand version at any time. Written by Shum Attygalle The post New Survey Reveals Top 2016 Corporate Learning Trends appeared first on Axonify.

If you have ever purchased a software system whether it be a CRM, LMS or training management system you will be sure to have heard the phrase ‘this product will save you time and money’. Perfect! Just what we are all looking for. But can it be true? Can we really reduce administration by introducing automation into our business?

Operations executives are finding that an eLearning program has a valuable place in training their employees on a wide variety of topics. But the term eLearning can be confusing and misunderstood and since it is relatively new in the operations world, it is helpful to clarify what it means and what an eLearning program might look like in a plant, warehouse or distribution environment. We tend to think of eLearning as online courses offered by a university. These are courses that students take over three or more months and substitute for traditional classroom learning. Students log on daily for up to 12 weeks and advance through chapters of the course, respond to daily posts from the instructor, complete papers, and tests online and often interact with other students online. That description is typical for the academic world, however, an eLearning program in the operations world is quite different. Similar to the academic version, eLearning students (employees) take courses on a computer but that’s pretty much where the similarity ends. Instead of a course taking 12 weeks it typically takes 10-15 minutes and instead of taking a test online employees will take brief quizzes to confirm they understood the most important points. There are neither papers to write nor interaction with the instructor, however, there are hands-on interactions where employees must demonstrate how to do a task or confirm their understanding of the material. An eLearning "program" is made up of many individual courses that are organized into chapters or topics for easy navigation. Here is an example of how a typical program could be organized. Welcome  Introduction to Smith & Co - 10 min  Overview of Your Benefits - 12 min Work Rules in the Operations Group - 8 min Safety New Employee Safety Orientation 10 min Lift Truck Certifications Walkie Rider 10 min Order Picker 20 min Proper Harness fitting 5 min Reach Truck 20 min Sit down dock truck 20 min 3 Year Lift Truck Recertification 10 min Conveyor Safety 8 min Proper Lifting and Bending 12 min Safe Loading of Outbound Trailers Quality Why Quality Matters - 10 min Understanding Our Item Numbers - 5 min Damage Free Pallet Building - 12 min What is the Cost of an Error - 8 min Productivity Efficient Trailer Unloading - 12 min Case Picking Procedures - 15 min Broken Case Picking - 15 min Replenishment - 10 min There are many chapters that can be included in a well-developed eLearning program. Chapters such as… Inventory Control Delivery Driver Training Quality Control and Auditing Lead and Supervisor Training Each course is accessed by simply clicking on the name which opens the course and registers the employee. Once started, the course is easily navigated with simple controls for forward, reverse and stop. At several points in each course, there is a knowledge check or hands-on activity that gives employees a chance to practice what they have just learned. At the completion of each course, a short quiz of 8-12 questions ensures they understand the most critical points and a minimum passing score can be set. If they are unable to pass the quiz an email can be sent to a supervisor alerting them that additional training may be required. This is particularly important for safety courses where comprehension is critical. An eLearning program is an efficient way to train new employees or update current employees on new practices and company guidelines. The simple organization of a well-designed program quickly connects with employees, allows them to self-navigate and guides them step-by-step through each course. It is simple to start an eLearning program with a few basic courses and then add more over time.   The post What Does an eLearning Program in the Warehouse and Distribution Environment Look Like? appeared first on KMI Learning.

Skills are one of the most valuable assets in the modern workplace. They cannot only make an organization more profitable and productive, but also lead to greater advancement opportunities for employees. In this article, I’ll share what eLearning professionals need to know about upskilling in corporate eLearning. Upskilling In Corporate eLearning: What eLearning Professionals Need […] The post 6 Strategies To Promote Upskilling In Corporate eLearning appeared first on PulseLearning.