A portfolio of training programs represents a significant investment in company resources, including the annual training budgets of years past and the time and effort of training personnel, subject matter experts, and training vendors. View our Infographic for a visual journey tracking a single dollar invested in a Global 1000 training portfolio TRAINING IS AN INVESTMENT Companies have an average training expenditure of about $1,200 per employee per year,1 and over the years, the time and budget spent on curricular design and the creation of learning assets represents a significant investment in company resources. The average Global 1000 company has over 1,000 hours of learning content within its training portfolio. The development of this portfolio requires an average investment of $18 million, including: $2.7 million and 18,000 hours of labor from subject matter experts Subject Matter Experts are a borrowed company resource that are oftentimes highly paid, senior resources that are at the top of their respective divisions within a company. Although they have other job responsibilities and normally consult with the training department, their time is valuable and results in a large organizational investment into training. $8.1 million and 100,000 hours of labor from instructional designers Instructional designers design and develop corporate training programs. Internal IDs have knowledge of your company and its internal workings, and are able to go to business units, elicit training needs, and design programs to address these needs. $2.7 million and 67,000 hours of labor from instructors Trainers are called upon to deliver training programs within companies. They are a payroll investment and a vital part of the training function since they interface directly with employees $4.5 million and 34,000 hours of labor from managers This is a payroll investment into keeping Training, Learning, and Talent Development Managers on staff to oversee your company’s training function. Managers give direction to projects, take responsibility for deliverables, and lead their respective teams of trainers and instructional designers. The Association for Talent Development. (2014). "The Association for Talent Development State of the Industry Report 2013." 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 The Total Cost of Your Training Portfolio appeared first on .

Online learning involves creating online presentations in various formats. Most instructional designers take the safer route - PowerPoint or a tool that produces the "PowerPoint effect". Learners get tired, and so do instructional designers, by looking at the same monotonous slideshow. In this article, we divulge some fresh tips on giving life to your online presentations - all tried and tested! Presenting online content in an engaging manner is critical to the success of the eLearning course. This process requires a great deal of creativity in terms of planning as well as visual design. In order to create an unforgettable eLearning experience, you need to think outside the "PowerPoint - box". Engage through Interactivity The more interactive your online presentation is, the more effective it will be. The question is, how do we integrate interactivity? How much is enough and what factors create the "too much" effect? To be honest, if you stick to the learning goals when creating interactive content, you can never have the "too much" effect. Plan out storylines using scenarios, eLearning games, and drag and drop interactions. Create navigation systems that are easy to use and have alternative methods to reach a certain point of your course. The more your learners interact with your content the more they will get engaged and achieve their learning goals. Do you know what top instructional designers are doing to hold the attention of their learners? Add a thought-provoking question towards the end of the presentation. This encourages your learners to reply back as soon as possible, engaging their peers in the process. Metaphor Mania What’s the quickest route of transferring knowledge from the working memory to the long-term memory? Simple - use metaphors. Metaphors create a visual image of a relatively abstract concept, making it easier to understand. When learners compare a new concept to something they are familiar with, they develop interest in it. Their curiosity is piqued and they want to investigate the concept further. This is a natural "hunt and seek" knowledge gathering behavior in humans, triggered by a good metaphor. Bring your online presentations to life by using stock images that are unusual and attention-grabbing. Stories and Fables The power of stories and hypothetical situations continues to captivate us since we first believed in a good Christmas story! Turn boring material into an interesting novella where characters claim their solutions through the decisions made by the learner. Research the background of your subject matter, build a storyline around it, develop your characters, and let them narrate the facts. A good story is the one which is believable, which your learners can relate with and something that connects their learning to their work-context. Music You cannot go wrong with music. Create the desired tone for your scenario with the right music track. Get your learners emotionally involved in the scenario. Use the music in accordance with copyright laws. A word of advice here: provide a mute button for those who can do without the music! Add a Video Very few eLearning courses and online presentations can be successful without integrating videos. Compare a good video with a static presentation. Optimize the effectiveness of your online presentation by adding relevant videos. Bear in mind, too many videos will drown your content. Make sure the videos you include are brief. Reserve the longer videos for extra resources. Another great way to enhance online presentations is to include a video of the instructor. Develop your own eLearning videos, in which you teach some of the content, instead of your eLearners reading it. Instructor videos have proven to improve course retention rates. Banish Bullets Bulleted lists "kill" attention spans! Replace those horrendous dots with meaningful images or icons that represent the content. This enables you to create a visual appeal for your content. Beware of low resolution and cheesy images! Animate Animations can be very disruptive if used incorrectly. Use tasteful animations at intervals to demonstrate main ideas or complex topics in an easier way. Animations can create the "entertainment factor" in your online presentations that lead to improved learner engagement. Be careful, don’t over-use animations, as they can easily overwhelm your learners. Be Humorous Use humor that inspires and motivates. Avoid humor that targets certain groups, behaviors or habits. Adding humor is a risk - you never know what may offend your learner. Try adding small doses of humor to entertain as well as help the learner connect with the material. With more and more software freely available to create online presentations, eLearning program development has become challenging. This is becausee learners now prefer dramatic multimedia in their learning environments. With the aid of these tips, you should be able to improve your online presentations and create satisfying eLearning programs. The post 8 Online Presentation Ideas for Instruction Designers appeared first on TalentLMS Blog.

The key to success in eLearning, as in any other business for that matter, is to never rest on your laurels. That doesn’t mean that you have to strive for the ultimate perfection — just that you should never get too complacent with the quality of your eLearning offering. And, lest you think we’re taking theoretically, in this post we’ll detail 10 concrete pieces of advice which you can use to improve your course material and your learners’ experience. 1. Adding things in Whatever your course’s content is, we can pretty much guarantee that it is lacking in several areas. Perhaps your writer didn’t do the required research for some chapter. Or maybe he cut some corners in order to deliver it before the deadline. Or perhaps it was just fine for when it was written, but now, a few years down the line, things have changed regarding the topic it describes (e.g. 4G internet wasn’t available in 2010 — now it is). In any case, there will be places in your course’s content where you’re not giving your learners the full picture. Your job is to identify those cases and to make sure that they’re updated to cover all that they need to. 2. Taking things out This is the other side of the advice given in our first tip. Nearly every book, and by extension every eLearning material, has chapters that are long, and more detailed or wordy than they need to be. Perhaps the writer couldn’t stop himself. Perhaps he didn’t have time to take things out and rewrite the material to be more succinct (something that, surprisingly, takes more time than mindlessly piling up paragraph upon paragraph). Your job, in this case, is to find those cases of superfluous content and take it out. Your lessons will be all the better for it. 3. Typography Typography — the use of fonts and grids in the presentation of text, is an important part of making your courses accessible and easy to read. Even if your users can’t always articulate it, bad typography will hurt their learning experience, and might even drive some of them to abandon your eLearning courses altogether. If you can afford it, bring in a properly trained graphic designer to design your courses’ typography. Your nephew that "knows Photoshop well" and designs party flyers won’t really do. If you can’t afford a graphic designer, don’t despair (and don’t call that nephew of yours either). There are lots of free tutorials on the web where you can learn the basics of proper web typography. At least try to apply those principles to your course. 4. Humor Humor might not be the best medicine (no doctor would prescribe Ben Stiller to cure your flu), but it’s a great way to get your students’ attention. Instead of some long, boring, course content, how about trying to turn it into an overly long, funny, course content? Humor makes lessons more memorable (and obviously, more pleasurable), and helps attract the students’ attention for what comes next. It doesn’t have to be LOL funny, mind you. A few light touches, the occasional funny aside, or some puns will do. Of course this works best when you (or your writer) already have a good sense of the comedic, which won’t always be the case. 5. Media galore Text alone won’t cut it nowadays. Even when you already have the best Harvard or MIT-quality course content, you can still make it 10 times more interesting and richer looking to your users by adding some multimedia. The term is broad enough to encompass anything, from photos, clip art, audio recordings and video to a full blown 3D VR experience. Your multimedia doesn’t even have to do that much with your course’s content — as long as it is vaguely related (e.g. showing a picture of a forest when you talk about the environment), it will do. Of course if it helps illustrate a point in your lesson, then that’s even better. Take advantage of TalentLMS‘ extended multimedia import options (powered by our proprietary EncodeMagic engine), to include all kinds of media assets in your lessons, from pictures and songs, to PowerPoint presentations. 6. Story Another way to make your courses more interesting is to tie them into a larger narrative. In others words, to try to tell a story with your content. It’s no accident that storytelling techniques are often employed in children’s learning books and online courses. As research has shown, humans are wired to pay special attention to storytelling and can retain things that they heard in story form much better than other information. So, whether you’re targeting children or enterprise employees, adding a few narrative touches to your lessons will make them sit and pay attention to what comes next. A perfect excuse to set your inner Hemingway on the loose. 7. Gamification If there’s a thing humans of all ages like more than listening to stories, that would be playing. Gamification allows you to tap into this gaming instinct, and use it to increase engagement and start up a little friendly competition among your learners. TalentLMS in particular offers a plethora of gamification options, with badges, leaderboards, levels and other such standard industry tools that are very easy to deploy and very effective in making your courses more engaging. 8. Speed Actual or perceived loading speed are among the things that can easily make or break a website. In test after test, users have been show to leave pages never to come back if they take more than a few seconds to load. TalentLMS is plenty fast by itself, of course, and optimized by our expert team of Cloud administrators. But what about your course’s content? Very large blocks of text, custom fonts, slow to load custom or third party scripts, or maybe that 2MB PNG image where a 200KB JPEG would do, may be killing your performance. Even if it works fine for you when checking from your 50Mbps VDSL office line, have you tried to access it over 3G? Check your eLearning portal with a tool like YSlow or with Chrome’s excellent Developer Tools, and make the necessary adjustments towards a more lightweight and faster loading webpage. 9. Difficulty Another thing that might be giving your learners a hard time might be that your content is actually too hard for them to grasp. Just because the person who wrote it is an established expert on the field, it doesn’t mean that they can safely assume that your learners will be too. Actually, judging from the very fact that they take online lessons on the subject, they probably are not. So give them something appropriate for their level. Of course what’s appropriate really depends on your audience. One would rightly except a whole different level of learning performance and study pace from university students compared to smaller children or working adults. Use TalentLMS’ reporting tools to check grades and test results, determine your audience’s pain points, and prune (or explain better if needed) anything in your content that’s hard for them to grasp or goes above their heads. 10. Gratuitous nudity Hey, it works wonders for Hollywood, right? OK, OK, we’re kidding (see tip #4). But how about rewarding them for their efforts, though? We’ve already mentioned gamification, but possible reward and "loyalty" systems go beyond that. For example you could have small token prizes for the learners that do exceptionally well. Or you could reward users that bought multiple courses by letting them buy more at a discount rate. TalentLMS offers both discounts and coupon codes to help you build your own rewards system for your heavy users. Conclusion So, we talked about 10 quick tips for improving your courses and enhancing the eLearning experience of your users. There are, of course many many more, and we’ll come back at some point with another list of totally different, but equally proven suggestions. In the meantime, do you have any favorite tips on your own? Share them with us and your fellow TalentLMS users in the comment section below. Until next week, happy eTeaching! The post 10 ways to enhance the LMS experience for your users appeared first on TalentLMS Blog.

The 2016 LMS market is not what you think. We have spent the last two years interviewing hundreds of global learning technology professionals on both the vendor and practitioner sides of the fence.  We ask them all about business drivers, trends, market opportunities, use cases, demand, competition and measurable successes.  We incorporate what we learn from each conversation into our analysis and understanding of the learning technology market.  It’s not what we thought - it’s much better. Here are our top ten 2016 trends, observations and predictions for the LMS and broader learning technology market.    #10 Culture Shift Driving Epic Innovation in the LMS Market Culture shifts happen slowly and then instantly.  The cloud, mobile devices, social media, ecommerce, Google and bandwidth have changed everything especially the way we all learn.  Simultaneously, there has been a shift from having a career at one organization to having a career comprised of numerous strategic roles at many organizations. Now individuals and not organizations are responsible for lifelong learning and continuing education. Today’s learners, of any age, want to consume just-in-time resources and to leverage the collective knowledge to get to best content instantly, inexpensively and reliably.  To address the culture shift, hundreds [...] The post 2016 LMS Market Trends, Observations and Predictions appeared first on Talented Learning.

When we come decisions, we most often employ a process for making those decisions. We may weigh the pros and cons, we may jump immediately to a ‘correct’ solution, or we may choose the wrong solution and have to go back to the drawing board. However you make decisions, there’s more going on inside your brain than you might realize. Convergent Thinking Convergent thinking is a process where you tend to choose the ‘correct’ response, given very little mental output. Think of multiple choice exams as an example (now, I know this isn’t the case for all multiple choice exams, but how many times have you ever guessed a response?). With this method of making decisions, the individual is often focused on patterns, responding in a way that is most probable based on previous experiences. It is a method that tends to be entrenched in logic and familiarity and is often the quickest route to making a decisions. Divergent Thinking Divergent thinking is a decision making process that emphasizes the consideration of many ‘correct’ or potentially correct solutions to a problem, which tends to require increased mental output. This method may not be as fast as convergent thinking, but it tends to generate many options and is often viewed as spontaneous, emphasizing principles of free association, brainstorming, and critical-thinking. Using this method, individuals provide an initial spew of ideas, and then use logic to critical connect various concepts related to the problem in an effort to reach the most appropriate solution.

Online work groups seems like a technical term, but it really is a collaboration teaching strategy in the eLearning environment. It gets tricky if certain dimensions are not handled with care. In this article, we illuminate those dimensions. It’s worth the effort as online work groups are the closest you can take your learners to the performance context of any industry. There are a hundred reasons why online work groups created for an eLearning groups go awry. The ill-design and implementation of these work groups is the main culprit. Designing assessments that are linked to your eLearning course learning objectives is one of the main features of a course. Creating challenging assessments is important to raise the bar for learning. It is even more important to know the difference between individual and group assessments. If collaboration will make learners participate productively and also learn from each other, then create unique tasks for all involved. To understand this process, let’s identify the three features of online work group activities: There is no one correct answer. Discussions are based on individual research, perspectives and experiences. Group tasks can deal with culture comparisons, analysis of a case or innovating a solution. There are several elements to investigate in a group activity. For this reason, a JIGSAW puzzle model approach is best suited to create unique tasks for each student. Use your learning management system to create online work groups with well-defined task list. All tasks and activities should be transparent to all groups. Progress should also be noted and updated in a timely manner. In order to fulfill such requirement, integrate the online work group rules into the grading rubric of the project. Scores and grades are great motivators for maintaining discipline in the online environment. Here’s an online work group preparation criteria by Jean Mandernach, PhD, associate professor of psychology at Grand Canyon University: Preparation Learners should appreciate the value of both the product and process of the assignment. Learners should have experience and knowledge of working in an online learning environment. Restrict group members to maximum of 5 to ensure everyone gets to participate and submit equally. Before the group assignment begins, learners should have ample community building experiences and opportunities. Assignment Assignment should be authentic: it should emulate the performance context and it should be measurable. The assignment should rely on collaborative work. Learners should get the performance criteria in the form of rubric before they begin the group project. The assignment should create an environment of interdependence and team spirit, in which learners believe that their individual success depends on the team’s success. The assignment should allow sufficient amount of preparation time. Assignment enables individual members a degree of control on their project. Technology Learners are provided with tools and instructions to facilitate online communication. Each group has a collaborative workspace within the online course. Learners have the desired technology skills to work in an online learning environment. Work-spaces provide back-up opportunities in case of technology failure. Evaluation Grading and evaluation hold weight for the process and the product of the project. The interaction process and quality of discussions are mentored and monitored. Self and peer evaluations are included in the process to monitor individual involvement and accountability. An eLearning course is seldom complete without a group activity. With these features for preparing online work groups, we are confident that you can turn your next eLearning course into a satisfying experience. The post How to Create Online Work Groups appeared first on eFront Blog.

Nobody working in the world of eLearning can get far without getting involved in some form of compliance training. On the one hand, it’s the bread and butter for many eLearning designers (according to Charles Jennings, 80% of all eLearning in Australia has to do with compliance), and there seem to be a never ending stream of legislation that employers are required to make sure their employees are aware of. And once created, compliance courses have to be amended, updated and adapted, providing a useful ongoing revenue stream. On the other hand, too much compliance training is what gives eLearning a bad name, as it often reflects the worst of it - mind-numbingly dull page turning, next-clicking and quiz-questioning. Often, the tests are so badly written that the answers are either blindingly obvious or impossibly elusive. In one UK bank, hundreds of frustrated employees failed an otherwise easy desktop IT safety course by not knowing the regulation distance between the top of their knees and the bottom of the desktop (two inches, since you ask). Clive Shepherd sums it up as - employees hate doing compliance training, and as a result, trainers hate offering it. The answer, then, is to use eLearning instead with the result that now learners hate eLearning. It is not even particularly effective. According to a recent survey in 2013, whereas nearly all organizations use technology-enabled compliance training, only 20% think it is raising awareness and understanding of complex regulations - but then again, only 20% provide managers with resources to encourage application back in the workplace. Not that firms are setting very high standards in the first place. A survey in 2014 found that the largest proportion of employers thought their eLearning was "Ok, but needs improvement" - however their aspiration was simply to raise it to the level of "meets standards", rather than above average or very effective. It’s hardly surprising then, that according to an LRN study in 2013, 60% of employees identified "online learning fatigue" as their top challenge. The simple point is that most employees don’t really embrace compliance training with open arms. Most are overwhelmed with the amount of information being thrown at them, in the form of emails to be read and responded to, appraisals to prepare for, quality standards to be met, endless internal and external forms to be filled in and deadlines to be adhered to. Finding time to complete mandatory compliance training, on topics that are vital but often perceived to be marginal is just another headache. As Iain McLeod of SAI Global Compliance says, "Universally, lack of employee engagement emerged as the biggest barrier to effectiveness - and it’s linked strongly to the poor reputation of compliance eLearning . Ask yourself what efforts you are currently making to really engage your audience and make it relevant to them. If you are subjecting your employees to ‘death by PowerPoint’, rolling out the same content year after year to everyone regardless of their job role or risk profile, blinding the learner with irrelevant detail about what the law says rather than what it means to them or failing to engage your line managers in the process, then chances are that you are potentially turning off the very people whose buy-in you need to effectively mitigate your compliance risks." Many businesses compound the problem by presenting compliance training as simply a hurdle for one to go through, a box-ticking exercise to avoid comeback, rather than any kind of meaningful learning. Every employer has heard horror stories of companies being sued by their employees over some safety or discrimination scandal, and paying out huge sums of money in addition to suffering a bruised reputation and other forms of long term damage. In some industries, employers may also have to answer to regulators, or appear before Parliamentary Committees. The most common reasons employees sue their employers are if they feel they were discriminated against , unfairly disciplined or dismissed, harassed or bullied, or that medical or mental problems weren’t taken seriously. All these are issues that need to be covered by compliance training. But, it’s not easy to create a respectful workplace where policies are well-known and consistently implemented, where issues are carefully documented, and where supervisors are accountable for and vigilant in managing situations before they get out of hand. How can compliance training, and the part eLearning plays in it, be changed? Before devising yet another piece of boring compliance training, think about the following five questions. What do we want employees to do that they may not be doing now? What do employees need to know if they are to do these things? What principles do they need to understand and buy into in order to do these things? What skills do they need to acquire and practice in order to do these things? What else needs to be in place in the work environment if performance is going to change? By starting with behavior change, as Carmen Simon suggested in her interview last month, there’s a much better chance of success. In the next post, we’ll look at some examples. The post Rethinking Compliance Training in eLearning: Part 1 appeared first on eFront Blog.

When deciding between an eLearning course and a job aid, industries need to know that job aids direct performance as the need-to-know arises. On the other hand, eLearning courses build performance capacity prior to the need-to-know. If your learners use the information infrequently, but find it harder to recall because the information is complex, create a job aid. In this article, we will demonstrate the significance of a job aid in the training industry. Most leading organizations are moving from the industrial age to the information age. This means that we no longer wish to work hard. We desire to work smarter and faster. While there are many job automation tools and devices, the procedure or protocol to operate them is critical to the employee’s success. Developing a job aid is the fastest way to achieve performance turnover. What is a job-aid anyway? A job aid is a repository of information, processes and perspectives gathered from expert employees or a manufacturer’s notes. It is external to the employee, that is, the employee does not rely on his or her memory to perform the task. They need to refer to the job aid to complete the task accurately. A job aid supports work activities. It directs, guides and enhances performance. It also boosts employee performance and motivation to carry out the tasks in a timely manner. Why do organizations need to develop job aids? Organizations need to understand the difference between information and education. eLearning comes to our rescue when we need to educate. Job aids directly support performance in a real-time manner. It’s a critical reference source for several job activities, especially where consequences for errors are high. It also serves as a precaution for performances depending on a large body of information. Job aids are created for information that changes frequently and also for a careful execution of delicate procedures. How can eLearning tools help create job aids? In the current information age, several organizations are opting for a paperless work environment. Instructional designers need to work closely with front line managers to create a particular job aid. Extra care is needed for tasks that require judgment. eLearning developers can enact tasks through scenarios in a brief manner to encourage the desirable judgement for a step requiring it. Also, eLearning tools can serve better when creating self-assessment procedures to double check if the performance is at the appropriate level. eLearning tools can easily be used to create several formats of job aids. These include steps, worksheets, arrays, decision tables, flowcharts, checklists, and combinations of any of the formats. The best part is that eLearning tools make the job aids completely interactive. They are also mobile friendly and can be viewed using a smartphone or any other portable device. This way, your employees can have a "coach" while on the job! Here are some questions to ask a team that requires some new job aids: · Do you have any questions? · Were you unsure at any time? · Were some steps harder to follow than others? · Was it difficult to use at your workstation? · Were the instructions clear? · Were the steps in the correct order? · Were there times you needed more information? · Were there times when there was too much information? · Did you see any typos? · Were there circumstances not covered? Remember, always involve the SME when creating the job aid. Good luck with your job aid development using eLearning tools. Do let us know how it goes. The post The What and the How of a Job Aid appeared first on eFront Blog.

In the first part of this post, we looked at some of the problems associated with a lot of compliance training. It can be tedious, uninspiring and not particularly effective - it may satisfy a requirement to perform the infamous "sheep dip" training session, but that doesn’t mean that their behavior will change. Faced with something like a fire, a major accident, a breach of security or a legal challenge, the fact that 99% of the employees had completed the statutory training designed to prevent such things from occurring is not an enormous comfort to anyone involved. So how can it be done differently? Good ideas include things like getting to the point quickly, without a lot of unnecessary policy or legal background, and using real life scenarios, incorporating an engaging visual element. Games and simulations can help, as can a slightly lighter approach, provided it’s not out of keeping with the subject matter. Above all, it’s important that the training is appropriate for the intended audience, which is why off-the-shelf courses rarely work. Each organization’s culture is different, and what works for an insurance company might not work for a furniture manufacturer. Three examples from very different areas. The UK broadcaster, Channel 4 needed to train all its staff in risk awareness. From the company’s point of view, the aim was to ensure that they didn’t face any more expensive legal challenges or public inquiries into programs based on things like faked images, unreliable evidence or other bad journalistic practices. Part of the problem however was that Channel 4 was, in its own words "born risky" - it had been deliberately created to be non-compliant, a kind of halfway house between the BBC and the fully commercial channels. From the 1980s onwards, it developed a reputation for fearless investigate journalism, challenging drama and alternative comedy. There was a feeling however that it had lost direction, and that many staff weren’t aware of what they should be doing. Acteon were commissioned to produce eLearning which would address this issue. The training was essentially about to how to take risks safely - to be "risky but not reckless". To engage learners from the start, it included short video clips of stunt performers and extreme sports fanatics, before showing the stringent safety checks and backup systems that were in place behind the scenes. This was based on a simple lesson from the cinema - an action sequence at the start of a film is a great way of capturing the audience’s attention. There was an emphasis on competence, not compliance - on what to do, not what to follow or accept. The questions staff were encouraged to ask before engaging in risky activities included: Does it feel right? What would colleagues think? What would viewers think? Does it comply with code of conduct? Is it legal? Examples used included large scale things like signing off a new program budget, but also more mundane activities like sending an important email, putting in a slightly inflated expenses claim or hiring a friend or relative. The training used peer contributed content from all levels of the organization, and recognizable voices such as continuity announcers. The scenarios were all video based, but followed a standard pattern of presenting a context, and offering the learner choices before exploring the consequences The eLearning was backed up by imaginative use of other media channels - things like messages of the day, screen savers, splash screens, wall posters, coffee mugs and coasters. As a result, the outcomes were achieved ahead of time, with 85% positive evaluation, and nearly 90% of staff reporting that they would be more likely to report conflicts of interest or other concerns. A second example from a completely different area is Connect with Haji Kamal, part of a program designed by Cathy Moore for Kinection to help US troops engage more sympathetically with people from different cultures. The course takes learners through simple conversations in a variety of situations using a comic strip format, showing how the right choice of words can often diffuse tensions and improve the chances of co-operation towards shared goals. Although they had initially planned to use video, budgetary and time constraints led to this novel solution, which was based on soldiers’ enthusiasm for war comics. The line drawings were based on photographs, and the scripts were taken from real life discussions in classroom courses. The game and its accompanying facilitator guide were tested by soldiers in focus groups before more widespread deployment. 70% of the players said that they were looking forward to discussing the game in class the next day, and instructors reported that the activity "prompted the majority of the discussion" , encouraging soldiers to share and critique their own experiences. Finally, UK retailer Mothercare needed to train all staff in a variety of health and safety issues including fire awareness, dealing with threats and hoaxes and accident prevention. Rather than adopt the usual legalistic, instruction led approach, they worked with eLearning developers at Sponge UK to produce a single 20 minute module, Staying Safe at Work. Based on a series of simple games and custom-made illustrations, the short course has proved to be an engaging learning experience for new starters, and an effective refresher for existing staff. As Carmen Simon suggested in her interview, to be effective, any learning program must include elements of reward, emotion and motivation. Unfortunately, a lot of compliance training ignores this. The examples outlined in this post point to some ways in which eLearning can be reshaped towards fulfilling its true potential. The post Rethinking Compliance Training in eLearning: Part 2 appeared first on eFront Blog.

There’s a great deal of talk these days about how eLearning is moving off the desktop computer and onto a variety of mobile devices. The release of the iPhone in 2007, followed by the iPad three years later and a whole variety of other devices since then, has led to a rapid rethink of the ways in which content should be presented online - clearly, models designed for a standard desktop computer aren’t always going to work on devices with a much smaller screen. Inevitably, the term mLearning was coined to cover this area, although many people still prefer to see it as simply a variant of eLearning, or of learning more generally. Either way, few can deny that it’s becoming more important, and that it also has a long way to go, albeit with neither the direction of travel nor the ultimate destination particularly clear. In this post, we’ll start by looking at the critical distinction between two terms - adaptive and responsive. We’ll then go on to consider the changes needed to eLearning design, and also some of the ways in which end users are responding. Some people use the two terms interchangeably, while others debate the differences with varying degrees of rancor. There’s probably no point in being obsessive about it, but there are some important distinctions. The terms originated in the world of web design, although they probably have more far-reaching implications for learning than they do for some other areas. Responsive web design was first proposed by Ethan Marcotte in 2010. Essentially, its basis is fluidity - that what the viewer sees on the screen should gracefully and gradually adapt as the screen size changes. In technical terms, this is mainly done by using percentages. If you have a page that displays two columns of text, for example, you can specify, using CSS that the first column should always take up 60% of the screen and the second column 40%. On a computer, as you resize the browser window, the text in the two columns will re-flow to fit, and consequently the columns will get shorter or longer. If you bring other elements into the equation - photographs, for example - those too can be set to resize on a percentage basis. It gets more complicated with a grid arrangement where there are several boxes on the screen each displaying a different story - a newspaper front page, for example - so here, other considerations come into play. You can specify breakpoints - if the screen width falls below, say, 800 pixels, then only show two boxes side by side rather than three. Some elements always need to keep together, or can’t be resized - companies tend to be very precious about their logos, for example - and these might be put into nested boxes that will always stay together, and should never shrink. There are also more technical considerations about the types of font to use, and whether to go for vector or bitmapped graphics. All these things are swings and roundabouts - some of them are not really relevant to an eLearning designer, but nonetheless, it’s important to understand them. The nine principles of responsive web design by Sandijs Ruluks illustrates this very well with a series of animated GIFs. The notion of adaptive web design on the other hand - the term was coined by Aaron Gustafson in 2011 - involves adjusting the appearance on the screen only at specific break points, which means that the screen snaps from one view to another. The designer might specify, for example, one layout for computer or laptop screens (over 800 pixels wide), one design for tablets (between 400 and 800 pixels) and a third design for smart phones below 400 pixels. If you view an adaptive website on a computer, and adjust the size of your browser window the screen appearance may therefore suddenly change as the screen width gets smaller. The disadvantage of this is that it can appear a bit more clunky to the end user - the advantage is that there are only three possible design permutations to consider rather than an infinite number. Another way of making the distinction is to say that responsive web design is device agnostic - its starting point is simply to adapt to whatever size or shape of screen it is presented with. An adaptive website on the other hand would probably use media queries in the webpage header to determine what kind of device it was being viewed on and present itself accordingly - which is why it wouldn’t necessarily change when viewed on a computer screen, even with a small browser window. The question is really in the starting point - should a designer aim for progressive enhancement or graceful degradation? When the vast majority of websites were only ever going to be viewed on a computer screen, graceful degradation was probably acceptable, aiming simply to present the occasional mobile viewer with something that was more or less acceptable. Nowadays however, where for some types of activity (which may include learning) mobile devices are very much in the ascendancy, it makes more sense to aim for progressive enhancement. This involves creating an acceptable experience on the smallest possible screen, and gradually increasing or improving it for larger devices. In the next post, we’ll look in more detail at the implications of these issues for eLearning designers. The post Adaptive and Responsive Design for eLearning: Part 1 appeared first on eFront Blog.