This week’s Fierce resource was originally published on Harvard Business Review and provides a simple learning strategy that enables leaders to successfully meet the challenges ahead.Wherever you look, we are living in an age of constant change. As we move into 2016, organizations need to ensure they have the right leadership development strategy in place to navigate the ever-evolving business landscape.According to a recent Deloitte study, more companies than ever report they are unprepared to meet this challenge. How do we start closing the capabilities gap? It starts by building an organizational culture centered on learning. The article The Best Leaders Are Constant Learners offers a simple method for transforming yourself, your team, or even your organization into a learning organism.Is your organization prepared to offer scalable learning?"Sustainable competitive advantage depends on having people that know how to build relationships, seek information, make sense of observations and share ideas through an intelligent use of new technologies."Read the article.The post Fierce Resource: The Best Leaders Are Constant Learners appeared first on Fierce, Inc..

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For all that our adjunct faculty community experiences in online and onsite learning environments, it is heartily appropriate to extend a video gift of our appreciation. Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to you who...Continue Reading »

Do you need to streamline and scale your elearning production? The specification phase is an important step that helps you focus on creating learning experiences that are tailored to your specific learner. In this article we’ll look at how consistency, functionality and team identification can help you in the specification phase. The specification phase defines what the solution will look like and lists the quality assurance acceptance criteria against which the elearning will later be tested. This can help when you come to evaluate a project. 1. Focus on consistency The specification phase is particularly useful when you’re working with a team and needing to scale elearning production. Why? Because the specifications work as a set of guidelines to ensure everyone is working on the same page. Consistency starts with creating a set of principles that your team is going to abide by. You don’t want to lock it down so much that you eliminate creativity, but you do need to provide support structures that enable team members to understand what it is you’re trying to achieve. Tools: Everyone needs to know what tools are being used to produce the elearning. You don’t want people heading off in different directions and using their own choice of tools. This would result in elearning that looked inconsistent and was hard to maintain. Style: You may find it helpful to develop a style guide: a set of principles around which your elearning is built. This can include your choice of font, graphics style, tone of voice and grammatical and lexical standards (e.g., UK or US spelling conventions). Branding: This covers logos and the use of branding, presenting any brand guidelines for using graphics in your course. 2. Determine the functionality At this stage, you need to lock down exactly how your course will function. Here are seven key areas to consider: Platform and browser You need to decide what devices your end users will be using to access the elearning so you can ensure that the content works on these devices, browsers and platforms. A word of caution here: there are new platforms and devices coming onto the market all the time, so focus on your audience. What devices/browsers do they use? You need to understand them as much as possible. To do this, look at Google Analytics data to see how users are accessing content. This can help you build your specifications around your particular users. Reporting Determine whether your elearning needs to run in an LMS; if it does, find out what its requirements are: Completion: How will the course report completion? Tracking: SCORM 1.2 or xAPI? Metadata: Project title, identifier for LMS implementation, descriptors and keywords for search functions Assessment: How should questions behave - will they be randomized? Also, what should the pass mark be? Media Specify any particulars regarding graphics, audio, and video. For example, if particular file types need to be used, or if there are bandwidth restrictions, you will need to take this into account for video streaming/downloading. Navigation Specify how learners will navigate the elearning. For example, will they use menus, forward and back buttons, home button, bookmarking? Accessibility Determine what standards your elearning will adhere to. At the very least, you will want to consider the following: ‘Safe’ colors and contrasting Keystrokes for desktop use (Tab, arrow keys, space bar and Enter key) Alternative text to describe images and graphical elements Captions or transcripts for video and audio. User interface/creative direction Decide on the elements of the user interface for your elearning, including interactive elements such as buttons. Some authoring tools, such as Elucidat, allow you to develop a ‘theme’ which covers all these elements. This saves you spending time and money developing the same elements every time you create a new course. Acceptance criteria Set out the criteria against which your elearning can be tested and validated. This is generally a simply list of ‘must have/do’ features and functions. You can fine tune these and reuse them when you create future courses. 3. Identify the team The final step in the specification phase is to identify who’s going to be accountable for the different steps in the production process. Decide who will analyze the source content, build, proofread, manage the project, do the art direction, sign off deliverables, test, and integrate with the LMS. Allocate roles to the team if you are working on a larger project. It might be that, in smaller projects, one person does all these tasks, if so, it’s important to select someone who can wear multiple hats! Stay on top of the latest elearning ideas, trends and technologies by subscribing to the Elucidat weekly newsletter. Summary The specification phase of the elearning development process is where you bottom out exactly what the solution will be and who will deliver it. The key steps are designed to ensure consistency of approach and output, quality criteria, and roles and responsibilities. When you have completed this phase, you will have a set of guiding principles that everyone can work to. This will make it easy to scale your processes and bring new people into the team. Related: Analysis and scope: How to approach the 1st stage in the elearning development process Design: How to approach the 2nd phase of the elearning development process The post Specification: How to approach the 3rd phase in the elearning production process appeared first on Elucidat Blog.

Top 5 Learning Technology Trends for 2016 https://t.co/QwZApxylfu

  If you, a friend, or a loved one wants to learn something but isn’t inclined to take a formal class, or even if they are in a class and want to add to their classroom efforts, help can be just a mouse click away. In fact, not only is world class help available in the form of many different types of education softwares but in many cases, the educational software that’s available is free of charge.   What Would You Like to Learn Today?   Whether a student just wants to pick up a new skill or supplement a subject that they are already learning, education softwares are there to do the job, and very well too. From anatomy to zoology, educational software can be purchased or downloaded from a practically endless number of sources. And not only are these programs excellent, having been created by some of the most distinguished experts in any field but thanks to modern computer graphics, in many cases, they’re fun to use, not only for kids but adults as well.   Making a Game of It   Everybody knows that when you want to learn a normally staid subject, try making it into a game. That’s exactly the premise of many education softwares packages that make a normally dry subject such as anatomy into a computer game that is fun. A good example of this is Bodyworks Voyager-Mission into Anatomy, which takes students on a tour of the human body via a fighter ship that is shrunken and inserted into the human body. The object of the game is for the user to destroy certain types of microbes and save the life of the patient. Things get a lot of complicated when users discover that there are two types of microbes, one that tries to kill the patient, and the other that tries to kill the fighter ship. Need more ammo? Periodic questions about what the user has experienced must be answered in order to restore their weapons.   Fun and Learning for Everyone   As ubiquitous as computers have become in recent years, it should come as little surprise that education softwares are available that are not only excellent teaching tools but are also fun to use for virtually any age user. Children as young as four can use educational software tool such as The Clue Finders to learn such subjects as math and geography using the tools of fantasy and science fiction. Children can even learn such concepts as business by using Lemonade Stand, which teaches simple math via the real world of a child’s lemonade stand.   Even more mature students will enjoy and benefit from education softwares that teach such diverse subjects as math, languages, and even music in a fun and interactive ways. Role playing takes on a new meaning when students can become part of solving real world problems via the topics they learn in dealing with issues such as pollution, literacy, and much more. In fact, several educational software packages are available that will teach a student programming, which might lead to creating their own education softwares. When it comes to education softwares, the sky is the limit.   The post Education Softwares: Learning Anytime, Anywhere appeared first on Fedena Blog.

  We are hearing so much about collaboration. We hear about all of the benefits, why we should do it, how it improves our practice and student achievement.  I have had wonderful success with amazing collaborations through inquiries, projects, conferences, leadership opportunities, and with students, parents an amazing colleagues! In this way, it has solved […]

As we celebrate the end of another record-breaking year at LearnUpon, we wish you and your loved ones a happy and peaceful Christmas. 2015 was a special year for us, as we hope it was for you. The LearnUpon team more than doubled in size. We acquired hundreds of customers and expanded into new territories. We launched dozens of improvements and added twenty features to our LMS. We’d like to thank all of our customers and friends, old and now, for the invaluable contribution you’ve made to driving our mutual growth. Here’s a look back at some of the features, friends, customers and conferences we made this year. We can’t wait to do more and travel even further in 2016!   Customers We welcomed over 250 new customers in 2015, including: Citrix Skibo Technologies Greenline Conversations Azalea Health EpiSAFE Benestream General Cable Deliveroo Adeva Training & Consulting LearnUpon now serves over 450 customers, more than double the 200 announced in September 2014. Growth has kept the team busy. Over 400,000 users and 1.3 million course enrollments were created in our LMS in 2015. $2.1 million in course sales were sold through our eCommerce platform. LearnUpon’s Customer Success team made 300 calls and the Marketing team published 60 blog posts. Thanks for being a part of it! Countries We continued our global expansion in 2015. We opened our first office in Australia and welcomed our first customer in Latin America. Our LMS currently has more than 2 million active users in 15 countries. You can now use LearnUpon in Brazilian Portuguese, in addition to the existing English, Dutch, French, German, and Spanish versions. We already have some exciting travel plans scheduled for 2016, with the opening of a US office, and the expansion of our presences in Australia and Belgrade. Team LearnUpon added 15 new team members this year, across Customer Support, Customer Success, UX/UI, Engineering, and Marketing. The team is split between our offices in Dublin, Belgrade, and Sydney. And the team continues to grow, with 4 new hires ready to start in January 2016. If you’d like to work for LearnUpon, send us a copy of your CV and a brief description of your interest. We’ll be on the lookout for even more Customer Support, Business Development, Engineering and Customer Success team members in early 2016.   Features This year, we focused on our goals of delivering the best customer support in the industry and releasing features that make users go "Wow!" We worked with real customer feedback and our vision of a better LMS to release some of our most-loved features to date, including: Salesforce integration iOS app Tin Can support Association-specific features ILT calendars Webhooks We’re already hard at work on the next round of releases. Stay tuned, there’s lots more coming soon!   Awards 2015 proved to be another award-winning year at LearnUpon. We kicked off the year in style, when Craig Weiss named us the best SMB LMS in the world. In April, we scooped three Blacknight SME Awards for Customer Focus, B2B Export, and the overall Grand Prix award. In September, our LMS was named in TrainingIndustry.com’s Learning Portals Watch List. And we ended the year on a winning note, with a Silver Award in the Best Advance in Learning Management Technology from Brandon Hall.   Conferences Our globe-trotting continued, as we somehow found time to exhibit at 6 eLearning conferences. Highlights included our first Associations conference with ASAE 2015 and our first exhibition at DevLearn, the world of eLearning’s biggest event. You can catch us in person at our first conference of 2016 - Learning Technologies in London next February.   That’s it from us for 2015! We look forward to sharing the next round of releases and updates with you very soon.   Want to read more? Sign up to get our latest posts! The post Merry Christmas from the team at LearnUpon appeared first on LearnUpon.

eLearning scenarios help your employees not only develop useful skill sets and improve their weak points, but also apply training knowledge to their work environment. In this article, I will further explain why designing effective eLearning scenarios is important, what are the elements you should focus on while developing them, and 7 tips on how to create fully engaging and immersive scenarios for eLearning. Your organization’s goal is to increase productivity of both your employees and your company, and most of the training methods you implement have this exact goal: To help your workforce develop their skills and apply new knowledge. Scenario based learning is a great training means to achieve this, as it is ideal for: Identifying issues. Stimulating action. Improving analytical thinking skills. Encouraging problem-solving. Formulating strategies. Generating sensitivity to change. Improving soft skills such as selling and communication. Practicing newly acquired skills in a safe context. Creating a good eLearning scenario is not an easy task. For this learning tool to be truly effective, you need to ensure that: It is relevant to your audience. It has clear learning goals and objectives. It presents a realistic situation. Its characters are modeled after real people. It is well constructed, accurate, logical, focused, sequenced and so on. But there is a lot more to building an effective scenario learning strategy. In this article, I’ll share 7 valuable tips that will help you create great eLearning scenarios and make absolutely sure that your employees not only acquire and retain the knowledge you are offering, but also know exactly how to apply it in their real work environments to increase your company’s productivity. 1) Identify your audience’s needs. Analyzing your audience is a great starting point for developing your eLearning scenario. Who are they? What are their educational and professional backgrounds? What motivates them to do their work? What problems do they face on a daily basis in their work environment? What skills do they need to develop? What are their learning preferences? The more you know about your corporate learners, the easier it will be to create an eLearning scenario that engages them and relates to them. 2) Make use of your learning goals. Building around your learning objectives is essential for every online training method, but there is a key reason for using them in your eLearning scenario: To create the situation around these learning objectives, that is to create your eLearning scenario’s storyline. Identifying what you want your online learners to achieve will help you identify the challenging situation or event and build around it and towards the learning outcome. For instance, if you want to develop your employees’ communication skills, a scene portraying the negative consequences of miscommunication mishaps in a humorous context can be a great idea. 3) Keep it real. Simply put, an unrealistic eLearning scenario is completely useless. It might be entertaining, sure, but it wouldn’t help your employees learn. An eLearning scenario tied to real world situations will fully engage your employees, as they will be able to relate it to the real issues they face in their work environment. Irrelevant situations will just distract them, whereas eLearning scenario events that resemble reality will help them focus on learning how to overcome their problems and explore alternative solutions. Furthermore, a realistic situation makes the training process less formal; therefore it becomes easier for your employees to emotionally connect with the eLearning content, which, of course, enhances the whole eLearning experience. 4) Create appropriate characters. In addition to the previous tip, for your eLearning scenarios to be as realistic as possible you need to include relatable characters. Your employees will lose interest if the "heroes" of the story look nothing like their real colleagues, managers, and bosses. So make sure that your eLearning scenario characters, whether professional actors or avatars, resemble people who could actually work in your company. Extra tip: Pay special attention to your characters’ facial expressions, as appropriate facial expressions can enhance a realistic effect. Consider even changing the facial expressions of you character everytime your employees make a decision! 5) Focus on interactivity. As you already know, interactivity increases your audience’s engagement levels, as it is the exact opposite of a passive learning experience. Most importantly, it helps turn theory into action; interactions allow your learners to choose alternative paths, make decisions, and see the impact of those decisions. Consider creating a series of questions the answers of which lead the eLearning scenario characters to different choices; this way, you will create a dialogue between your audience and the situation and the eLearning experience will become more engaging and immersive. 6) Challenge your audience. Challenging your learners is not as easy as it sounds; you need to find the balance between making the eLearning experience neither too easy as to insult the intelligence of your audience and nor as complicated as to frustrate them. As long as you know for whom you are creating the eLearning scenario, you will be able to determine whether the situations you have created are too boring or too complex. Consider presenting the situation and not giving the solution right away; instead, provide useful clues that will trigger your employees’ interest and inspire them to work to solve the problem. Furthermore, create a challenging context in which every action your audience makes will have different consequences; this way, they will be able to learn from their mistakes in a safe environment while developing their critical thinking skills. 7) Offer feedback. Finally, as in every learning method you follow, you should never forget to give feedback. A great way to do this is by integrating a game into your eLearning scenario and using a rewards system as a discrete but effective feedback mechanism. Having scores and levels of achievement have been proven effective techniques to increase both motivation and engagement. Keep in mind that your learners need to know why they failed so that they won’t repeat the same mistakes in the future; so perhaps you will need to gather all failing points of the eLearning scenario as an interesting material for an online discussion later on. Now that you know how to create effective eLearning scenario experiences, you may be interested in learning more about a specific kind of eLearning scenarios: Branching scenarios. Read the article Effective Branching Scenarios In eLearning: 5 Tips For eLearning Professionals and find 5 tips for eLearning branching scenarios that you can use to provide your learners with the critical thinking and problem solving skills they need to achieve their goals in their personal and professional lives. The post How To Design Effective eLearning Scenarios appeared first on TalentLMS Blog.