One simple way to amplify and extend classroom training, or SME presentations, is to record the live event. Many will baulk at this suggestion for one of two reasons: We don't have the budget. We don't have anyone on the team that knows how to do it. There is nothing I can do about excuse #1. However, I can help you with DIY solutions that require little or no budget. Many of you in management positions will consider this work as being beneath you. You can delegate this work, or better yet, why not roll up your sleeves and show your team that you're willing get work done? I'll save that rant for another day, but think about it. DIY Recordings as Part of Your Design/Development Process There are basically two options: Use a video camera and capture both audio and video. Use an audio field recorder to capture audio only. Audio Only is a Great Place to Start Audio only is the perfect DIY solution to get started with because it's less distracting for your SME, and you will not look like the high school A/V guy standing behind a video camera. Because I know that's what you're thinking. There are many technical solutions for recording your presenter. If you have NO budget at all, you can simply use the built in mic on the presenter's laptop. Open up a free audio recording app and click record. You could even record directly into Powerpoint. It won't be very good quality, but it will capture the event in a format better than any notes you might be taking. So don't use quality as an excuse not to capture the event. Even a bad audio file can be used to review the event and make improved design decisions. If you have a little budget to spend you can get a very good recording with a recording device and a clip-on mic. You can use your own mobile device as the recording device, or you can purchase a dedicated small audio field recorder like the ZoomH1 or TASCAM DR05. Both can usually be found on Amazon for at or under $100. They each have built in microphones allowing you to just set it and forget it. However, they both also have a mic/line input for plugging in other microphones. In this case I would recommend the Audio-Technica ATR-3350 Lavalier Omnidirectional clip-on mic. Have your SME clip on the mic and put the recorder in his/her pocket. If they don't have pockets then you'll need to get creative. Remember you can always ditch the clip-on mic and just set the recorder on the podium. Successful Recording... Now What? After recording the audio you now have a wonderful audio file. You can simply use the recording device to listen to the audio and review the session. Or you can download the file to your computer and get even more value. One of the first things you can do is transcribe the audio file into text. There are several services online that will do this at a reasonable rate. Rev.com will do it for $1/minute. An hour long presentation transcribed for only $60 is pretty good. You might wonder why this might be important. You can use the text version to begin highlighting the high points and notating the sections you think should be deleted in later releases. You should also combine the audio file with the powerpoint slides and export as a video. You should absolutely publish the entire video. But you should also begin reviewing the video and defining how to cut it down into multiple shorter videos. Since you have released the entire video you can review comments and viewing data to help you make decisions around what is important to your audience. These are technical solutions that have business value. All content is valuable when it is accessible and needed. Is it perfect? No. But making it available NOW, is better than only waiting until it is perfect. Some will wait until you "clean it up", others will be grateful to have the raw content in it's entirety. Your audience is not filled with robots. They are individuals with differing needs at differing times. Making multiple versions of learning content available as soon as you have them will be valuable to someone.  You should be willing to put your ego aside and make that happen. Your subject matter experts are a limited resource. They can only do a limited number of training sessions. Before you attempt to apply instructional design to the content, it is more valuable to the business if you utilize technology to scale up the presentations given by the SMEs. This makes the content available to more people more quickly. It's quick and easy to create, and those that need/want the content will appreciate it. Once you have published the transcript as text, and released the audio only as a podcast, and the audio with slides as a video, then you can begin to look more closely at optimizing the design and adding your instructional design magic. The post The Easiest and Fastest Method for Creating Learning Content appeared first on Litmos.

We're headed back to DreamForce, and we want to see you there!  The Litmos team will have a strong presence with many opportunities to interact and learn more about the powerful Litmos LMS with SalesForce integration. Drop by our booth at W138 in Moscone West and enter to win a trip to New York, Hawaii, or Paris! If you have a busy schedule while attending DreamForce then I suggest scheduling a meeting with us ahead of time. Fill out this short form to guarantee time with the Litmos team. You will learn first hand how Litmos with Salesforce integration can take your training to new heights. While you're at the booth be sure to take a selfie with Lenny. Use the hashtags #LoveYourLMS and #DF15 to be eligible to win the dream prize. We are also giving away a pair of tickets for VIP Box seating at a Warriors game. And let's not forget the epic parties! Litmos will be throwing some great parties at Dreamforce and we'd love to see you there as well. Please RSVP and join us for a Pre-Gala Happy Hour Thursday night at the W Hotel from 5:30pm to 7:30pm. Stop by booth W138 and say hi!   The post Litmos will be at DreamForce 2015 - Meet Lenny and Win the Dream Prize! appeared first on Litmos.

Putting sales training into the context of sales work is your golden ticket to success. With your Litmos LMS integrated with Salesforce your sales team can work and learn within one platform while reducing expenses and positively impacting the bottom line. 56% reduction in travel costs when using eLearning to present materials. - Litmos Stats Your sales team values their time to sell more than they value your training. This means sales enablement, and training teams, need to make every minute count. Sales teams are motivated to learn, but don't appreciate having their time wasted with long traditional training sessions, or jumping around from one application to the next. There's a better way. It's about putting dynamic, digital, self-paced, learning content into the context of their workflow. The Litmos with Salesforce integration gives you the capability to get it done. 85% of sales reps employ skills learned in a dynamic training environment. - CSO Insights Sales Effectiveness Series Not only is training integrated with workflow the best solution for learners, but training administrators appreciate the workflow integration as well. Litmos and Salesforce have combined their innovative strengths to provide you with a true learn-as-you-work training process for all levels of the organization. Litmos is the only agile learning and training software application featured on the Salesforce Appexchange. Some Litmos LMS benefits include: Native learning tabs allowing instant access to all courses Assign training to contacts, partners, and communities Create reports and dashboards that integrate sales performance and training completions Track course completions and certification in one place Flag users and contacts for user creation and assignment of courses in Litmos Create rules that govern the assignment of training to employees based on Salesforce roles Climate Corp. Case Study After looking at several LMS options, the team chose to go with Litmos because of its attractive UI and the ability to integrate with Salesforce so the sales team can easily assign and manage trainings for the Climate Corporation’s network of over 1600 dealers. Since Climate Pro is an advanced product, it’s crucial that dealers have training materials at their fingertips and available when it’s most needed. Litmos was also able to help customize the LMS integration with Salesforce so contact records of all Salesforce contacts were correctly synced up within Litmos. This enables data for transfer to and from both applications. Read more about Climate Corp's use of Litmos with Salesforce integration. The post Litmos with SalesForce Integration Puts Training Into Context appeared first on Litmos.

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Elearning courses are becoming more popular every day. They are a great, cost effective way to deliver messages to an internal or external audience; improving their skills and aligning them to core brand ideas. However, there is one question that is often on the lips of many who are looking to develop elearning courses - should I include a voice-over / narration of the material or not? (For more info on what else to think about before recruiting an elearning designer click here). There are several arguments for and against this and it truly depends on your brand’s strategic positioning, the intended audience and objectives of the course as to whether you want to include audio. So what are the important considerations and how can you determine what is best for your courses? Learner Engagement Not everyone has the same learning style (and some even question the importance of learning styles at all). But some of your learners will respond better to visual cues while others will respond better to audio. By having narration as well as visual points implanted within your courses you can satisfy both learning styles and improve their basic acceptance. At the same time, even if your learners aren’t audio centric, adding narration onto your courses can help to reinforce certain key points and improve recall rates. Research has found that when mixing audio and visual information there is a 50% increase in information recall. This is important if you have specific key messages that you want the audience to remember. Brand Image Another important consideration is that your business’ brand image can be improved by using voice within your elearning material. It adds personality and authenticity, which can gain you significant connection with your target audience and instil a sense of what your brand is about. This will lower resistance to your key messages and learning material and increase recall. File Size One of the negatives of voice-overs in elearning material is the size of the files. Audio information is rather data rich and therefore takes up a lot of memory. This can significantly increase the time it takes for the audience to load the course in their browsers. This is also not consistent for every user; it all depends on their bandwidth and what other processes they have running concurrently. This can cause problems if your audience becomes impatient while your course loads because they have a slow internet connection or it holds too much data for them. Customers expect your website and everything on there to be loaded quickly. Therefore, you must ensure that data is as streamlined as possible. Cost And Time For Delivery The biggest consideration for using narration in your elearning courses is that it does add on significant cost and time to the elearning development. This is because there are several steps required in order to develop a courses audio element: Step One: A script will need to be written by the elearning designer or by someone internal to the organisation. This can be the trickiest stage and takes time to complete. Step Two: An appropriate voice artist must be found either internally or externally. Getting the right voice is hugely important as it can determine how your audience will react. Without a good voice artist onboard, the audience can be left confused or disillusioned by the message you are trying to convey. Step Three: The audio needs to be synced to the visual aspects of the elearning course. Usually the audio is recorded first and then the visual elements are matched, but this isn’t always the case. Other Considerations The style of voice-over makes a huge difference. Do you want to have an in-depth narration with the text being a summary of what you are saying? You could have it the other way around; with more in-depth text on the page than that spoken by the voice-over. Another option could be to have just a voice with no text on screen. The transcription can then be made available to the audience as a downloadable PDF. One more point I should mention here - please don’t force your learners to read the text on screen with the same audio playing in the background? It looks terrible and will frustrate the learner! Consider the cost of a voice-over and if you have adequate financial resources. Will it provide you with a real return compared with producing the course in another way? Another consideration is whether or not the learning environment is suitable for audio - in a busy office will the background noise be so distracting that the audio will effectively be mute? This can be offset by the use of headphones but not all offices allow their use. Conclusion There is a trade-off when it comes to building an elearning course with voiceover in it. It will take more time and money to build but the benefits in audience reception and information recall can be more than enough of a reason to add it. While we highly recommend building an elearning course with narration, the choice should be based on your current circumstances. Consider the pros and cons before deciding if audio will be a useful addition to your otherwise quality course. What are your opinions about voiceovers? Are they important for the elearning experience? Let us know in the comments below. You can also see some examples of elearning with and without audio by checking out our previous work - which do you prefer? The British Land and Unreal Ltd examples show elearning with narration, but the IsatPhone and Medical demos have no narration. If you enjoyed this blog post, please subscribe to hear more useful like this! The post To Narrate or Not To Narrate - eLearning Question 101! appeared first on Litmos.

Video, Video Everywhere Video is popping up everywhere. Everyone that carries a smartphone carries a good quality video camera. And like all technologies video cameras keep getting smaller and cheaper. And with increasing bandwidth and more powerful cloud technologies, the uses become endless. We are only seeing the beginning of the age of video. Size matters! Video cameras are small enough to wear and small enough to connect to remote control flying drones. We use them in our cars to see what’s behind us, and we use them in our homes for security or to monitor babies, and pets. The rise of the citizen journalist is all part of this wave of uses of small, low cost, simple to produce video tech. User-generated Video Content User-generated content is nothing new. In my view the late ‘90s and the rise of blogging was the beginning. It was only a matter of time before producing a video became as simple as writing text. And that time is now. What has slowed the growth has been extended experience with the tools. But even that’s changing. Kids in elementary school today are learning to produce videos the way I was learning to produce hand crafted reports in the ‘70s and ‘80s. Even high school, and college, kids are unafraid of hitting the record button and publishing raw or highly edited videos. The technology is no longer a barrier to video production, and opening up an entirely new world of user-generated video content. Producing Training Videos There are many trends currently pointing to the rise of video content. I have no doubt in my mind that the future of training is video. You know all the big stories showcasing video online. I don’t need to recap them all for you, but think about Khan Academy, Lynda.com, and any of the thousands of YouTubers vlogging their way to successful media careers. As you watch the entire landscape of modern media change, you’ll begin to see why I so firmly embrace video. What’s the Big Deal? Yea, but Brent, people said that about education in the early days of television and VCRs. Sure they did. And quite frankly they were all right even back then. The part they got wrong was thinking that television would completely replace schools. I’ve seen enough new tech in my career to know that one innovation does not immediately displace the other. How many of you have gone 100% paperless in your daily life? The big deal is seeing the trend and starting to prepare yourself and your team for what is coming. Most video production work has been, and still is, outsourced for training projects. Just like television and schools, that is unlikely to change. What’s new is the addition of non-broadcast quality, user-generated video content. This doesn’t completely replace a highly polished and well produced video, but it does offer a fast and easy knowledge sharing and THAT’s a big deal! Our purpose within our companies is to provide value to the business. We do that by ensuring employees have the knowledge and skills they need to get the job done. And seeing video differently can help you get there. Yes, some video will require costly budgets for outsourcing, but if you can learn to put aside the quality of a video and embrace it’s content as a vehicle for learning you will begin to see the amazing value of non-broadcast quality video as part of the training content within your learning management system. The post Rethinking Video in Your Training Strategy appeared first on Litmos.

  One of the great failures of today’s L&D is a fundamental lack of meaningful measurement. The data reported too often is about efficiencies, and too seldom does it report on effectiveness. And often the claim is that it’s too hard.   But measurement is not, and should not be, too difficult. Further and most importantly, measuring is a key element of playing a strategic role in the organization. In theory, our learning interventions are supposed to have an impact. If we run sales training, sales outputs should improve; time to close should go down, or closure rates should go up. If we run customer service training, customer satisfaction should go up or complaints go down. If we do internal compliance training, the incidents of things like sexual harassment and workplace bullying should go down. Ok, I live in the real world too, and we know that by and large compliance training is CYA, but it could actually be impactful if we cared. And we definitely should care about whether our training is worth the dollars invested. Learning and Development Framework The basic framework is simple: there is some metric that is below what we expect or need it to be. Critically, we should be addressing some core business metrics. If someone comes to us saying "we need a course on X", we should be sure we’ll know how we’ve successfully addressed it. If the requester can’t answer that question, you both need to do some work. Ultimately, you should have a real metric that the business unit tracks. And I realize this is challenging, because it means you need to start talking business with them. They own the metric, and you’ll have to work with them on this. This is as it should be! Doing training in a vacuum is not a viable business approach. The notion that ‘if we build it, it is good’ is not a sound basis for expenditures. Once you know what the problem is, it’s time to figure out what might lead to a fix. What should people be doing differently that would lead to an improvement? On principle, you should be doing performance consulting (topic of a previous post in this series); matching the problem to a suite of known causes, and applying the appropriate approach. So, if it’s a knowledge problem, create a resource; if it’s a skill problem, create training, and so on. Determine what will lead to that changed behavior.   And is the cost of the change going to lead to a greater savings or revenue increase than that cost? There are several ways to track this. You can ask the supervisors and fellow workers whether it’s being exhibited by survey tools. If you host the resource on a website, you can use web tracking tools. Similarly, mobile access should be trackable. If the resources are hosted in your LMS, you can use the internal reporting to see if they are being accessed. Or you can use the emerging Experience API (xAPI) standard and aggregate the data. Finally, we develop the intervention that will lead to that changed behavior. Whether it’s a job aid or a course, we need to introduce the solution and prepare people to adopt it, including helping employees understand the rationale for the introduction and the appropriate ways to incorporate the change into their repertoire. And we evaluate the learning with post-course assessments, whether it’s about decisions to be made or how to use the resource. The essential element here is to ascertain the necessary change and then evaluate the impact. If you develop a solution, is it being adopted, and is it having sufficient impact? If not, you need to tweak and tune. Ultimately, of course, you’re going to want to validate that the cost of your efforts are worth the benefit. This is how business should work. The approach detailed is, in fact, the core of the Kirkpatrick method (Levels 2-4, but note you start at level 4 and work backwards, as identified here). Others complain that the Kirkpatrick doesn’t directly evaluate the learning (correct), or is too linear or implying a causal relationship (depends on how you implement it). There are other methods that use more qualitative data to determine the impact. I’m relatively ecumenical on the methods you use, but not about the importance of documenting the impact you are having. Frankly, too much of what is done under the banner of Learning & Development is being done on inappropriate metrics. We’ll see measures of cost per hour of seat time, without knowing whether that time is leading to any change. Or we’ll find out how many people are being trained relative to the number of training staff, without knowing whether that training is having an impact. And people will benchmark these against industry averages. These data aren’t important! These numbers only become important once you document that the seat time or the training is actually improving business outcomes. Then, and only then, can you worry about how efficient you are being. Until then, you’re merely showing that you are wasting no more money than the average company. That’s not a particularly good place to be. As a side note, one of the measures often used is user satisfaction (Level 1 in Kirkpatrick), e.g. did the trainees like the training, and do they think it’s valuable. This isn’t helpful. Empirically, there’s essentially zero correlation between what trainees think and the actual impact. Having only this data may be more misleading than having nothing at all! You could penalize some and reward others on a basis that has no impact on the outcomes! Good Example of Learning Measurement So how would this play out in a case study? For training, let’s say that we’ve determined that our performance isn’t up to snuff (whether customer satisfaction, sales, operations errors, whatever. So we should figure out how much change we need (e.g. a delta on a metric) and what behavior should lead to that delta. Let’s assume a new process will be used. Then we develop training for that process, and evaluate that after the learning experience, learners can indeed perform the task. Next we identify whether they are, indeed, performing as desired in the workplace. Finally we evaluate the metric, and compare it to a baseline, or do an A/B test (comparing a trained group against an untrained one) to see if we’ve achieved our goals. It’s fair to expect that we won’t get it the first time around. People and workplaces are complex. If we’re not achieving the desired impact, we need to determine why, and perhaps address workplace barriers, improve the training, or lower our expectations (doing the latter consciously is better than not evaluating at all). The point being we should be measuring and tuning to achieve our goals. This plays out for other interventions than training. So, for performance support, we could determine that using a particular resource would reduce errors or increase success (see the earlier post on performance support). We can again determine a delta, figure out how people should use support, and make sure that they’re aware of the resource and when and how to use it, and then see if they are actually using it. This likely involves both some training and resource design. Even social media, the building of community may be measured this way. As a previous post discussed, we should be looking at social resources too. Many people argue that just having activity in a social network is good, and that’s possible. But if we put it in a particular business unit, such as operations or even our own L&D, we should expect some improvements, and we should be able to identify the metrics we’re being evaluated on and look for the desired improvements, and tune if we aren’t achieving it. Are people not sharing, or are they even not using the system? If so, why? Measurement is a tool to use both formatively and summatively. If we are having an impact, we should be able to document it and take credit. And to do that successfully, we need to create a pilot, test it, and use data to improve it. The sad state of affairs is that L&D too often is taking orders for courses and building them, with an implicit assumption that if you follow instructional design processes it will yield success. This is a faulty assumption. We know that most learning experiences will yield a successful pass of a summative test, but not persist into ongoing behavior. Yet this seems to be the predominant learning approach. There are many things wrong with the instructional design we see, and we can easily fall prey to approaches that will not have the necessary persistence in change. We won’t know, however, unless we measure. Please, measure. The post How Meaningful Measurement Leads to L&D Success appeared first on Litmos.

This week San Francisco is buzzing about Boxworks. The fabulous Litmos team is at the annual Box event ready to answer all of your questions and demo the exciting the new features and benefits of the best cloud-based Litmos learning management system (LMS). There are many reasons to choose Litmos for your training needs. Among them is the integration with Box.  Box integration enables Litmos users to easily share, access, and manage files within Litmos.  They can also take advantage of BOX’s Filepicker technology to quickly upload content directly into their Litmos account. Litmos customers also take advantage of other integrations like Saleforce, Shopify, TribeHR, and others in the Litmos Marketplace. Earlier this year Box recognized Litmos as an Elite Partner at their BoxDev event. Stop by our booth at Boxworks and learn how Box integration can improve and enhance your eLearning development. It's possible to #LoveYourLMS! Let us show you how. Start a FREE Trial or Schedule a DEMO today!   The post Boxworks 2015 - Litmos Exhibits Integration with Box appeared first on Litmos.

It's that time of year again! It's the fall event season and DevLearn is one of the best. The fabulous Litmos team will be there ready to answer all of your questions and demo the exciting the new features and benefits of the cloud-based Litmos learning management system. Stop by our booth at DevLearn and get all your questions answered. It's possible to #LoveYourLMS! Let us show you how. You may already know Litmos as the leading cloud-based LMS. But did you know we also offer professional services, and a growing library of content? Litmos Healthcare Litmos Healthcare is the newest addition to the growing family of Litmos products. If you're in the massive healthcare industry then you know how important it is to support your most valuable asset...and largest budget line item...your employees. They help improve processes and patient care, maintain confidentiality, and keep your finances in order. Litmos Healthcare gives you everything you need to: take standard courses as-is customize standard courses upload your SCORM courses build courses from scratch track, report, and monitor with robust dashboards The robust course catalogue will get you up and running quickly, and user-friendly Litmos LMS gives you the flexibility to expand the library further to support your growing needs. Litmos Features Watch the following video for a brief introduction to the most user-friendly LMS you are certain to LOVE! The post Litmos at DevLearn 2015 - Learn to Love Your LMS! appeared first on Litmos.

As I work with training professionals, I often hear of the difficulty in taking various training assets used in a classroom setting (presentations, technical documents, scripts, etc…) and converting them into a comprehensive e-learning course. This process can prove especially tricky when the individual doing the converting is the in-house expert on the subject. Every organization has their "go-to" person for the product, process, or technology. Since they are the expert, it seems natural to have that individual create the training. However, having the expert create the training can bring its own set of issues. Here are three challenges typically faced by subject matter experts (SMEs): "I’m not familiar with proven, effective learning theories and models" Although an SME knows their material forward and back, they don’t necessarily have a clear idea of how to properly present it. A typical SME has presented the material in a classroom or meeting environment dozens of times but is often unclear on how best to capture the effectiveness of that experience. A common fallback is to just use the PowerPoint presentation from the meeting but this generally yields poor results. I recommend taking some time to storyboard the course to determine the flow of the training and to cover all of the items from the live session. Many resources are also available online that give basic information on learning models like ADDIE. Learning online is different from being in a classroom so it’s important to know what type of exercise is effective when the learner is sitting at a computer or using a tablet.   "I’m too close to the material/audience" By definition, an SME is immersed in their content. That level of immersion sometimes makes it difficult to prioritize the most important items to teach the learner. What is important to an expert may not be as important for an entry-level or mid-level employee to know. This creates a situation where the training may go over the heads of the intended audience or the SME may over-correct and "dumb down" the course. Either way, if the training doesn’t hit the mark, the desired outcomes won’t be achieved. A good approach is for the SME to simply step back and try to put themselves in the position of the intended audience. A fresh set of eyes is also extremely helpful in this situation. Someone from outside the department or even the organization is in a better position to quickly identify deficiencies and spot lessons that don’t match the learner.   "I don’t have clear learning objectives" Knowing only that your audience needs to be trained on a subject is never enough. Although it seems intuitive, there are some specific questions that need to be asked. These include: What specifically does the learner need to know and at what level? Why do they need to know it? And, what are they actually supposed to do with this knowledge? It’s always important to document your objectives for the course first, and then build the training around them. It seems like a no-brainer but it’s surprising how easily it is to forget this basic rule when you are in the midst of putting a course together. Also, the objectives should come from someone other than the SME. Make sure all stake-holders document and submit their desired outcomes for the training so the course can be tailored to meet those objectives. These 3 challenges are common but all of them can be overcome with some planning and outside input. A final recommendation is to consult a qualified instructional designer. Whether the ID is an in-house resource or a contractor, someone trained to create quality instructional experiences can be invaluable in the process. Even a few hours spent consulting with an ID can help insure that the considerable time dedicated to development will result in an effective course that meets training objectives. The post 3 Challenges Faced by Subject Matter Experts creating e-Learning appeared first on Litmos.