This is it. This is the year you’re going to stick to that New Year’s resolution and keep it going throughout the entire year. This is the year you’re to become the new, improved, happier, healthier, and wiser you. Bring it on 2016! Sure, we say it every year. And every year, despite our best intentions, we let those resolutions fall by the wayside like discarded Christmas trees in mid-February. Who can really blame us? The habits we want are hard to keep and the habits we don’t want are the hardest to break. This year, we’re turning to 7 tried-and-true books to get us through the ups and downs of keeping our New Year’s resolutions. These books can tell us what we’re doing wrong, how we can improve our approach, and encourage us along the way. 1. The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg Why are humans susceptible to the some routines? Duhigg provides a fascinating exploration into the formation of habits, the science of habits and the business of habits. Replete with real-life examples, this book will help you understand where your current habits came from, and inform your efforts to make new ones. 2. The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up by Marie Kondo This world renown bestseller is authored by a Japanese cleaning consultant who divulges her incomparable method for decluttering and reorganizing your life. Kondo believes a clean, clutter-free, and happy home leads to a clean, clutter-free, and happy mind. If your 2016 New Year’s resolution is to have both, you’re in luck with book. 3. Stuffed by Hank Cardello There are lot of books out there about improving your diet and eat healthy. This book is not one of them, but it is just as powerful in its ability to inspire readers to make healthier decisions. This is a book that tells you how the food industry has toyed with consumers to improve profits at the cost of unhealthy waistlines. This is an insider’s look at why unhealthy food is so hard to resist, why it’s so hard to make nutritious choices, and how you’re being manipulated on a daily basis. Once you know, you’ll find you’re not so easily convinced anymore and you just might start choosing the healthier path for yourself. 4. Lists of Note by Shaun Usher This blog-turned-book contains a fascinating collection of other people’s lists throughout history - from that of Albert Einstein to Leonardo Da Vinci, from Marilyn Monroe’s lists to Charles Darwin’s. Thought it’s not how-to book or even a self-help book, it’s an incredibly motivating book that will inspire your own list-making efforts and a thorough reorganization of your own to-do’s. 5. Nudge by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein Resolutions are all about putting one foot in front of the other and making small decisions to stay on track each day. So wouldn’t it be helpful to know how, and why, we make the decisions we do? This book will enlighten, engage, and entertain you with insight into how people make choices, and how people can make better choices. 6. Essays of Ralph Waldo Emerson If you need a little inspiration to get back on the wagon after a setback, you need to read the works of the man behind these wise words: "Finish each day and be done with it. You have done what you could. Some blunders and absurdities no doubt crept in; forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day. You shall begin it serenely and with too high a spirit to be encumbered with your old nonsense." 7. The Little Engine That Could by Watty Piper, George Hauman, and Doris Hauman Not up to perusing Emerson? Here’s a quick read for those moments when you think, "I can’t." Just because it’s a book for young kids doesn’t mean that it can’t empower you to be optimistic about hitting your own goals. As Henry Ford said, "Whether you think you can or you think you can’t - you’re right." What books have helped you with past New Year’s resolutions?

Every second Friday I review what I’ve noted on social media and post a wrap-up of what caught my eye. I do this as a reflective thinking process and to put what I’ve learned on a platform I control: this blog. Here are what I consider the best of Friday’s Finds for 2015. Quotes "All things are subject to interpretation. Whichever interpretation prevails at a given time is a function of power and not truth." - Friedrich Nietzsche - via @surreallyno @ericgarland - "Humility is often painful, but arrogance is always fatal." @willrich45 - Engagement: "Not a metric for learning. A prerequisite." "I think it’s a discovery all artists make: the most interesting and bravest work is likely the hardest to make a living from." - @berkun "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it"  — Upton Sinclair - via @jerrymichalski Work Healthcare with fewer managers  with @josdeblok "Jos de Blok is a nurse.  He owns a company that employs 9,000 community nurses in Holland.  The company has only 45 administrators, about a 10th of the average for a company that size. The company, Buurtzorg, is the highest rated care organisation in Holland, as rated by patients.  It is the highest rated employer in the country for 3 out of the last 4 years. Its overheads are 8% vs the average of 25%.  Imagine how much extra money you have we would have for patient care if we could copy this.  Its employee sickness rate is about half that of similar organisations. The company is 7 years old and now has 60% of the community nurses and community patients in the country.  Nurses are leaving their old companies in droves. Instead of managers, hierarchy and bureaucracy the nurses manage themselves in teams of about 12 nurses.  They employ their own staff, order their own supplies, solve their own problems. And they love it!" How the future of work leads to the future of organisations - by @rossdawson "Work. There are two critical drivers of change in work: connectivity and machine capabilities. As we are connected almost any work can be done anywhere in the world, with richer interfaces enabling greater comfort with remote work and the ability to perform physical labour. Increased capabilities of robots and computers are matching and moving beyond those of humans in many cases, destroying jobs. There is the potential for these forces to reduce employment and polarise work opportunities. However we can also envisage and create a future of work in which job creation exceeds job destruction, and we make work increasingly human, tapping our expertise, creativity, and aptitude for relationships to create a more prosperous world." @nytdavidbrooks: What human skills will be more valuable in the future, because machines can’t do them? via @marciamarcia "In the 1950s, the bureaucracy was the computer. People were organized into technocratic systems in order to perform routinized information processing. But now the computer is the computer. The role of the human is not to be dispassionate, depersonalized or neutral. It is precisely the emotive traits that are rewarded: the voracious lust for understanding, the enthusiasm for work, the ability to grasp the gist, the empathetic sensitivity to what will attract attention and linger in the mind." Learning @rogerschank - Reading is no way to learn "When you have someone to ask, you ask. Reading is what you do when you have no one to ask." @mathemagenic - Holding the space "I help to negotiate rules and exceptions from those, to prevent or resolve conflicts, to make appointments and to get to people and places. I do all kinds of things "meta" -  keep eyes on meta-learning, observe, document, reflect and get others in the loop. Most of the work kids do themselves. It’s their learning and I’m holding the space for them." @DonaldClark - Deficit model in education: a dangerous conceit? "The conceit of education is that the answer to bad schooling is always more schooling … When education is seen as a cure and cognitive deficiency a disease, we need to worry." Peter Senge on learning - via @nickknoco All learning occurs in a social context. In any learning process you can be 100% sure that you will fail Learning is a process of disciplined mistake-making An environment of safety is crucial to learning "If people knew how hard I had to work to gain my mastery, it would not seem so wonderful at all." - Michelangelo - via @AmyBurvall Mastery by Amy Burvall Humanity Dee Hock, Founder and CEO Emeritus of VISA, on capitalism and spirituality - via @janhoglund "So, if you really think deeply about such things, you come to realize that every organization is nothing but a mental construct, an idea around which people and resources are assembled theoretically in pursuit of common purpose and in accordance with a belief system of some sort. So I became convinced that it is really the ultimate design problem. If an organization is really nothing but a mental construct, then anything you can conceivably imagine in putting together the relevant materials, which include people and their relationships, is possible. And this construct will either bring out the best in people or the worst in them. In the long run, the command and control model rewards and brings out the worst in people instead of their best." As Systems Collapse, Citizens Rise - @Otto Scharmer "To summarize, the refugee crisis is a microcosm of the future that we all face over the next 10-20 years. The social grammar of that crisis looks like this: • As rules and regulations (that always reflect the past) are increasingly out of sync with the actual reality on the ground, we see • Systems starting to fail, break down and collapse, which leads to… • People, journalists/media rising to the occasion or not-and accordingly… • The logic of collective action arising from either the past (muddling through or regression) or from the present moment (co-sensing by tuning into what the emerging future calls us to do). If the latter happens, we begin to see that the crisis and breakdown of our larger systems are actually a phenomenal opportunity to renew and update our old bodies of rules and regulations to be more fluid and in sync with the actual situation on the ground. If the former happens we will see an enormous magnification of human suffering and amplification of the system breakdowns on an unprecedented level of global scale." The Trains to Hope, by @mintzberg141 & @wolfgangmuel11 "At first, we in the city administration were very surprised. But then we realized that this was not uncoordinated. It was a highly professional, high speed performance. That is when it dawned on us that here was the self-organizing plural sector in action. So we in the city administration decided to give The Train of Hope all the technical support it might need, including background support on call. We then invited The Train of Hope to join the city’s crisis management network, an offer that was accepted. I am delighted to report that this cooperation has continued to perform consistently well, with no end date yet clear." - Wolfgang Müller, Chief of Operations, City of Vienna Cooperation is what makes us human - via @RogerFrancis1 "Ultimately, Tomasello’s research on human nature arrives at a paradox: our minds are the product of competitive intelligence and cooperative wisdom, our behavior a blend of brotherly love and hostility toward out-groups. Confronted by this paradox, the ugly side—the fact that humans compete, fight, and kill each other in wars—dismays most people, Tomasello says. And he agrees that our tendency to distrust outsiders—lending itself to prejudice, violence, and hate—should not be discounted or underestimated. But he says he is optimistic. In the end, what stands out more is our exceptional capacity for generosity and mutual trust, those moments in which we act like no species that has ever come before us." Sensemaking by Igor Kopelnitsky via @sebpaquet Image by Igor Kopelnitsky

One of the reasons why e-learning took a little bit of time to be accepted as a genuine training solution is because it introduced new and novel technologies that had never been seen before in teaching environments. Some employers were rather sceptical as to whether it would work, while members of staff had to get used to the learning techniques on offer. But before long, e-learning was the training solution of choice for countless organisations. Even so, it would be wrong to compare the integration of e-learning with the future potential of m-learning or mobile learning. This is because we are already familiar and au fait with mobile technology, as it dominates and dictates modern society. Therefore, when it comes to adopting mobile learning as a training technique, you shouldn’t be looking for ways to get content onto smartphones and tablets. Instead, you must think of how to marry up learning and development with the digital lives of your employees.   Modern day mobile learning Most people in today’s digitally connected society will probably say that their smartphone or tablet is extremely personal to them. Along with functionality to help the user go about their daily routine, mobile devices also feature applications that deliver the latest news stories, social media trends, and information about every subject imaginable. But it is important to make the distinction between learning and finding things out. Therefore, a mobile learning strategy must abide by the consumption habits of mobile users and not force training upon them. Mobile learning should also provide users with content they actually want to receive. This should involve the "micro-moments" that employees are experiencing on their mobile devices. Google defines these micro-moments as "I-want-to-go, I-want-to-do, I-want-to-buy, or I-want-to-know moments when people are turning to devices to find answers, discover new things, or make decisions." Although these micro-moments will differ depending on the learner’s position, from new hires to senior executives, it is fair to say that each and every staff member experiences them. For this reason, you can’t expect just one person or even a small team of employees to create relevant content for everyone. Instead, the content creation process should be contextual, which changes to the wants and needs of the workforce over time. Inspiration for this approach can be taken from YouTube and its "CCC content framework." This can help you to create, collaborate on, and curate content to produce appropriate learning materials and be there for employees in their various micro-moments of need.   Create The first aspect of the CCC framework is to create your own content. Think carefully about the I-want-to-do and I-want-to-know micro-moments your employers are experiencing and how to address them. Try to create content that captures the brand’s voice and embraces its core values. Although your focus will be on educating employees, you should also try to make this content entertaining and inspiring. For example, a short video that addresses significant moments can get the audience’s attention and keep their interest levels high for the duration. Several businesses are adopting this approach for induction days, performance management, selling tips, and other types of internal training.   Collaborate The second aspect of the CCC framework is collaborating on your content with others. Along with broadening the relevance and reach of your mobile learning footprint, it also opens up the possibility of leveraging the experience and expertise of other creators. These additional architects might be more obvious than you think too. For example, speak to your finance department to discover what content is needed to satisfy their micro-moments. This could involve processing payments, future forecasts or allocating budgets. Across the business, approach employees from different departments and in different positions to discover what their most critical micro-moments are and how to solve them. They may even be willing to provide the content for your mobile strategy, as a recent study by Towards Maturity revealed that 84 per cent of respondents were willing to use technology to share what they know with their peers, which could include webinars or podcasts.   Curate The third and final aspect of the CCC framework is to curate content that already exists. This can be anything from previous training materials, information on your company website, employee onboarding handbooks, or any other content that is easy to locate and curate. The Internet is arguably the most important and extensive resource at your disposal. Use tools to find and filter relevant resources or give others the opportunity to point you towards valuable resources online. After all, 87 per cent of people feel they should be able to communicate, share opinions, and interact with brands in real time. Although the same can be said for your organisation’s employees, any recommended content should still be referenced against an organisational context.   Piecing together a great content strategy for mobile In contrast to e-learning, which required employers and employees to adapt to a new way of training, the prospect of mobile learning seems much easier to introduce and implement. However, it still presents a number of challenges, as organisations can’t get away with simply migrating existing training materials over to mobile devices. Modern-day learners are using their smartphones and tablets to actively seek out the information they want to consume based on micro-moments of need. Therefore, training materials need to be available on mobile devices but also capitalise on the habits of their users. But thanks to technology, this is a distinct possibility. In addition to creating content, which can include interactive infographics and entertaining videos, businesses have the ability to collaborate with others to identify what is required and transform existing materials to meet these needs. Make sure you are there for your employees’ micro-moments of need, enabling them to quickly and easily find contextually relevant content. Share this post with your own audience

As 2015 comes to a close, I’m excited to review some of my most popular educational technology posts with you! How to Add Backgrounds in Google Docs: A Workaround Most people can appreciate how awesome the world of Google Drive actually is. However, the main complaint that I get about especially[Read more] The post Educational Technology in 2015: My Most Popular Posts appeared first on Teaching with Technology.

Congratulations for arriving - it is the last week of the year. You are in this exact place as a result of all of your conversations in 2015. Yes all of them. The successful and the failed ones. The clean and the messy ones. The ones with tears and the ones with laughs. The ones you had to redo.Each conversation brought you one step closer to this very moment, these exact results. So I ask: When you look back, are you happy with the results this past year? What relationships are the most fulfilling? What achievements are you most proud of? What do you wish you would have approached differently? Who deserved more of your time?When we take it seriously that we are navigating our lives one conversation at a time, it makes it less daunting to take on change because we know our job is to just show up, present and awake, for the conversations that need and want to take place.This week’s tip is to make a conversations resolution for 2016. Think about the conversations you want and need to have for the coming year and write them down. Think about how you want to show up in those conversations.To get your mind jogging:Who neds an apology?Who deserves your praise?Who do you need to talk with to discuss what and where you want to go in 2016?What relationships need your attention?How will you show up in the conversations?  Write your resolution down, and put it in a place you often look. Or add it as a reminder on your phone, so that you get a daily reinforcement at the same time every day.What is your conversations resolution?The post Fierce Tip of the Week: Make Your Conversations Resolution appeared first on Fierce, Inc..

It’s snowing at Goat Leap, my tree house on Orcas Island. That’s where I am now, as I write to you. My dogs Dobby, Tallulah, and Hamish - two labradoodles and a Cairn terrier - and I are cozy. The fire is toasty, I’ve enjoyed my coffee with whipped cream and there’s a roast in the oven. It smells heavenly. I read somewhere, "I’m not anti-social.  I’m pro-solitude." Amen to that! I’m in my favorite place for solitude.Each December, I think about what to share with you. I wrote in Fierce Conversations: "Life is curly. Don’t try to straighten it out." 2015 has been a decidedly curly year and is in no danger of straightening out in 2016. So let’s talk about curls and how to navigate them. Those we welcome and those we don’t.Curls can be wonderful. An unexpected romance, a financial windfall, a promotion. For me, stepping back into the company as CEO was a welcome curl. Meeting with clients, giving talks, writing articles, hanging out with our team and planning for the future is pure pleasure, and if you’ve ever been in our Seattle offices, you know what a warm, welcoming culture we have.Our mission is to transform the conversations central to our clients’ success. Our vision is to change the world - one conversation at a time. I had wondered now and then if the notion of fierce conversations, those conversations in which we come out from behind ourselves, into our conversations and make them real, would remain relevant in the years since Fierce was founded. Turns out, they are increasingly relevant for individuals, companies, this world we share.Our world is struggling. Weather related tragedies like the tornadoes in Texas must be navigated after they occur. No one is to blame. But others are entirely man-made. Shootings, Paris, corporations that have broken the trust of their customers and the public, the current political debate in the U.S.Words matter. What we set in motion. "I shot him because I believed my life was in danger." "We can cheat the emissions tests." "Those who don’t believe as I do deserve to die." "They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists."And at home. "What’s wrong?" "Nothing!" Followed by a weekend of stony silence.We all do or say things we regret from time to time, but shouldn’t we be solving problems together, rather than being the problem ourselves?When I returned to Fierce, my leadership team and I identified a few things we wanted to transform.  We began by modeling what we espouse to our clients: radical transparency and human connectivity, which includes the four objectives of a fierce conversation:Interrogate realityProvoke learningTackle tough challengesEnrich relationships Radical transparency:  Telling the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, at all times, no matter what, even if it makes you look bad. Also uncovering and addresses mokitas, the Papua New Guinea word for that which everyone knows but no one talks about.The "truth" is complicated. There are multiple, competing truths existing simultaneously on just about every topic under the sun. Leaders can’t see everything that’s going on and be aware firsthand of every broken or limping segment of an organization.  What don’t you know?  Who does know?  Are you sure you’ve got the whole picture?What realities might you need to interrogate at work or at home? What mokitas are in your way? What about this world we share? If a problem exists, it exists whether we talk about it or not, so we might as well talk about it. And as Carl Jung said, "What we do not make conscious emerges later as fate."At Fierce, we believe that a leader’s job is to get it right, not be right, which requires heaping handfuls of humility, modesty, and recognizing that, while we may object to reality, we cannot successfully argue with it.When I returned to Fierce, we had frequent, all-company meetings during which we gained the perspective of everyone in the company, including our remote employees, which helped ensure that we made the best possible decisions for the company going forward.Human connectivity:  If you are a leader, your most valuable currency is not money, intelligence, charisma, self sufficiency, industry experience, or the ability to analyze a case study and read a profit and loss statement.Your most valuable currency is relationship. It is emotional capital. To realize the next wave of growth for yourself, your family, and your organization, you must introduce a new element to your existing skill set - relevant and appropriate warmth and human connectivity.Consider leaders you know or know of, who conduct business as usual. Many lead with their intelligence, experience, title.  Others lead with a spectacular ability to spin a story in order to motivate employees to work 24/7 or to hype a stock. Such leadership is temporary.Notice the difference between those individuals and leaders to whom people willingly commit at a deep level. Big difference.Human connectivity is the next frontier for exponential growth, for individuals and for companies, and the only sustainable competitive edge. In fact, if you want to be a great leader, you must gain the capacity to connect with your employees and your clients - at a deep level - or lower your aim.So connect I did. I began by having one-to-one meetings with everyone at Fierce, which took a full month. I learned a great deal and the staff, particularly those who had come on board when I was no longer running the company, had an opportunity to size me up. The leadership team conducted insight interviews with our clients. They told us what they liked, what they wanted more of. They are savvy and smart, measuring the results of training in all things "fierce." We love them. Literally, love them.There is a clear, compelling line between leadership and fierce leadership. It’s okay to cross the line. In fact, it’s essential. The progress of the world depends on our progress as individuals now. It’s not up to someone else. It’s up to you. And me.I leave you with an image and a quote from T. S. Eliot.The image: Imagine yourself in a canoe.  If you put your paddle in the water at the right angle for just one or two seconds, the canoe will change direction.  A conversation can be like this.  A few words that connect us.  A question.  Truth.The quote is from T.S. Eliot:""For last year’s words belong to last year’s language And next year’s words await another voice."Yes, please. Another voice would be helpful, for all of us, for our families, our companies, this world we share. Your voice, sharing what is true for you and inviting it from others.We navigate the curliness of life one conversation at a time. Make them fierce.With fierce affection,Susan ScottThe post 2015 Year End: Life is curly appeared first on Fierce, Inc..

As 2016 quickly approaches we all look into our crystal balls and pontificate about the coming year. Whether we do it in a blog, or during New Years parties, or just thinking to ourselves, it’s an exercise in hoping for a better tomorrow. The L&D world can participate in this annual custom, but it can rarely act on it. As the lagging indicator of the tech world, the future of education and L&D often looks like the old tech rather than new tech. But that doesn’t mean we can’t enjoy the excitement of newly revealed tech gadgetry. It simply means that when the tech world is thinking about the new year of new tech, the greater L&D community will be viewing the same tech through a 5-10 year lens. With that being said, it’s still fun to get an early look at what the training experience of tomorrow will look like today. Wearable Sports Training One of the hottest trends in the internet of things (IoT) is wearable tech. It’s a trend that is already available, but remains a little clumsy and mostly priced outside the budget of the average consumer. The Fitbit, Apple Watch, and other activity tracking devices have been the most successful wearable tech. And while they are really good at collecting data, their intended purpose is to change behavior. Hey, isn’t that what we strive for? Sure it is. We should be thinking about wearable tech as a viable training technology. Wearable technology at this point is nothing more than a bulky attachment to our bodies or clothing. Tomorrow’s wearable technology will be embedded in the clothing and unobtrusive. We won’t even know it’s there. And it will gather data well beyond heart rate, and number of steps. The natural market for the growth of wearable tech has been in sports and fitness. The same holds true for clothing with embedded tech. However, companies are beginning to experiment with other markets like ergonomics and personal development/improvement. Imagine a manufacturing employee in wearable tech that tracks precise movements, posture, and environmental conditions. Many jobs still require repetitive movements throughout a given work shift. Even white collar jobs are subject to repetitive stress injuries. Today we do our best to "require" ergonomics training for all employees in an effort to reduce "days away from the job due to injury or illness". But why not let technology monitor this as well, and cue us to change our behavior? Lumobodytech.com is working on this problem with their innovative Lumo Lift product. A heading on their website reads, "Solving back pain through elegant sensing and custom coaching." The small device works attached to your shirt and mildly vibrating as you slouch or otherwise relax into poor posture. The vibration is your cue, or trigger, to adjust into a healthier posture. Their clothing line specifically for running will launch first as shorts for men and capris for women with the tech embedded in the clothing. The data gathered from their clothing is well beyond what you would get from a wrist band device. Check it out at their website, and then imagine the training opportunities. Wearable Virtual Reality Suit Most virtual reality to date is an experience of immersive interactive 3D. The real virtual reality of the future involves so much more. Instead of viewing an environment on a screen and imagining being there, virtual reality puts you into a simulated environment that you can see and feel. Advances in haptic suits are making the future of VR a reality. If you’ve read the books Ready Player One, or the older Snowcrash, you know exactly what I’m talking about. The virtual reality imagined in those books is becoming our reality with products like TeslaSuit. Brian Daly is a UK Department of Education Consultant who has experienced the Teslasuit and gives his feedback in this 30 second video. The range of educational possibilities is limitless. We won’t see haptic suits in corporate training any time soon. But we can watch and learn from those industries on the bleeding edge of haptic suit commercialization like gaming, military training, sports, and healthcare. The technology is not what holds back the L&D community. It’s the culture of technology usage that lags behind the technology. The good news is that this lag gives us time to look more deeply into the learning applications of new tech. The rapid growth of computer-based training in the ‘90s taught us a valuable lesson in the importance of people over technology in our process of training. If the people we are charged with training are not familiar with a technology and currently using it in their daily lives, it often complicates the learning process. The extensive focus required to teach the technology before applying the technology to learning can be an expensive endeavor. In some cases the expense and time is worth the effort. As in the case of military training simulations, or surgical simulations. But in the case of corporate training, the return on investment is just not there…yet. Next week the annual pilgrimage to Las Vegas by the technology community known as CES (Computer Electronics Show) begins. I will be Periscoping, blogging, vlogging, tweeting, instragraming, from the event and hope you will join me virtually on any of these platforms. If there is something you're interested in hearing about, please feel free to reach out and let me know @Litmos. The post Future eLearning Tech 2016: Wearable Training Experiences appeared first on Litmos.

If training departments are going to be successful in the 21st century business environment, they must show business value. Part of providing value means spending as little money as possible to achieve the greatest result in the shortest amount of time. Expensive and time consuming one-and-done training course development is no longer a viable strategy. In order to succeed you must shift to produce-publish-repeat. The "repeat" means learning from data and feedback so you can re-produce and re-publish.  You continue the process until there is no more improvement required or the need no longer exists. This "good enough" strategy is not something traditional training designers/developers are often open too. To be fare, in some cases they are right. You will have instances where more in-depth analysis and content development is required. But those cases are rare. Most self-motivated adult professionals opt for training when no other choice exists. Accessing content and learning on their own is often the preferred choice. Even if that choice is watching an hour long course lecture video. They would rather have the option of watching the video now, rather than waiting for the next available course offering. Step #1: Always make content available as soon as possible in any format.  Part of this "lean training design" strategy is leveraging your existing instructor-led training. Instead of deriding the ILT, as our industry does so freely, you should be grateful for it and view it as an opportunity. It's an opportunity to provide real business value in the form digital content that was inexpensive and quick to produce and publish. 5 Reasons Why Recording ILT is Worth Your Time Inexpensive - In a world of seemly constant expense reductions, inexpensive solutions have become more and more valuable. When your audience wants the information now, don't make them wait because you want the training to be perfect. Do what you can with what you have and you will be surprised at your success. Scales Up - The logistics around physical spaces are limiting. Once you've held an event, if it is not recorded, that experience is lost forever only to remain in the minds of those who attended. And after a while, according to research, only 10% of that content will remain. Recording classroom presentations allows you to publish the recording making it available to a larger audience any where, at any time, almost immediately after the event. Fast - When you and your training team are short on time, you need fast solutions. These solutions are not perfect but they are better than nothing. And they provide business value. Be fast first! Then make improvements. Anyone can do it - Recording presentations and other live events has become easier than ever. And when the training team ends up needing some help, this is an area where you can delegate outside of the training department.You may have an in-house AV team that can help. Or perhaps someone in IT, or other department is interesting in helping out. In some cases you may even have an instructor that can record their session themselves. Design Strategy - If you have SMEs already teaching regular courses as part of their job, then instead of wasting their time with meetings, recording their training events gives you key insight into what content is important. You can review the recording multiple times to further define your content re-design strategy. You can also use these events to gather attendee feedback on the SMEs content. This is all work you would normally do as part of content and audience analysis. However, instead of the hassles of scheduling multiple meetings, coordinating schedules, and a myriad of email exchanges, you can get most of what you need by simply attending and recording the training event. I know recording ILT as a design strategy is unorthodox and not part of traditional training design models. However, I know you have employees currently wanting information. They are looking for any bit of digital content they can find to help them do their jobs better. Their need and desire outweighs any instructional design value you could add. If they could get an hour of time with the SME instead of taking your class (sadly) I know they would. Give them the next best thing. And then make it better! Have you already done this? What was your experience? I'd love to hear about it. @Litmos The post Top 5 Reasons Recorded ILT Content is Valuable appeared first on Litmos.

Malcolm Gladwell, author of ‘Outliers’ says that to truly master something takes 10,000 hours of practice. That’s a long time. But while Gladwell is probably not too far off the mark, we’d add one small caveat: 10,000 hours of practicing the right way, with the right foundations. So we’ve put together the 10 commandments eLearning professionals must follow to see their courses be a success. Take these rules, incorporate them into your eLearning, and get busy mastering your craft.

Have you ever heard the saying, "It’s called work and not fun for a reason"? Doesn’t make you very excited for your future in the workforce, does it? Well have no fear; Ed4Online has created training programs to help you turn your hobby into a profitable career!  We offer training in a wide variety of fields - here are just a few careers you may not have considered: Photography Event Planning Wedding Consultant Fitness Instructor Cyber Security Travel Agent Think about it! If you love traveling and seeing the world then you would be great at helping others fulfill their vacation dreams as a travel agent. If you love partying, why not get paid and rock out some awesome parties? Open your mind, think of what you enjoy and turn it into a career!  Take a few classes that expand your knowledge in your area of interest and add in an entrepreneurial class to lock down the business side. There you have it! A formula for a business you can enjoy and have fun with. Utilizing online schooling can let you have the freedom to take these classes at your own pace as well as whatever location you like. Want your classroom to be poolside? Done! Here’s another great quote for you: "No one ever looked back and wished they spent more time at the office." Obviously whoever said that didn’t think to turn their hobby into a financial jackpot. With the right motivation and education, anything is possible. Sound cliché? Who cares! Sounds like a great place to start to us! Modified from: http://www.milcareered.com/blog/investing-your-hobbies#sthash.IWlqE6Pq.dpuf