Multiple choice quizzes - often the norm for eLearning course assessments, right? Perhaps not in all cases, but I’m sure that most of you reading this will acknowledge that quizzes are a widely adopted strategy when it comes to eLearning course creation. Now, on the surface it certainly makes sense to test your candidates’ knowledge of their new-found learning by directly quizzing them on the crucial themes and facts throughout. But, are quizzes the most appropriate form of assessment in understanding your employees’ learning and development? Are they the most effective method available, or could we learn more from adopting a different technique? That’s what I’ll explore in this post. So why are assessments so important in eLearning? According to Stephen Meyer - an authority in the field of online learning - eLearning assessments are assets when it comes to planning content, measuring individual performance and motivating your employees. In a nutshell, eLearning assessments are essential for your employees’ development. They facilitate simpler coordination of courses for employee ease of use, and they also have a positive influence on user motivation and commitment to their training which can only have a positive impact on learning outcomes. But what are the actual benefits of using assessments? Well, this is just one question that Terence Karran (University of Lincoln) explores in his review titled ‘On-Line Assessment for E-Learning: Options and Opportunities’. Building on the foundations of some stellar work already done by scholars at Oulu University in Finland, Karran outlines both the benefits and drawbacks of eLearning multiple choice quiz assessments. For the purpose of this article I have summarized the primary benefits and drawbacks of relevance to this article only below. Karran points outs the benefits of multiple choice quizzes as easy to apply to a broad range of subject areas and of great assistance in lessening the likelihood of plagiarism affecting results. And the drawbacks? Most interesting however is Karran’s findings on the negative connotations of implementing multiple choice quizzes into eLearning courses: Inhibit high level cognitive and evaluative skills The quiz might be testing a user’s logical and interpretative skills rather than knowledge acquired Can restrict insights into how complete an understanding a learner has gained due to the element of chance involved Let’s dissect those drawbacks. Is your subject matter relatively straightforward such as a basic fire safety induction? Or, alternatively, is it of a more complex nature such as an accounting and finance course? If it’s the former, then perhaps a multiple choice quiz will be a suitable form of assessment, providing you also utilize at least one other form of assessment through your eLearning delivery. If it’s the latter, then you may miss out on insights into just how well your learners know the subject. If your learners have been able to truly understand the complex subject matter and explore combinations of your content and their own ideas, then they may be able to reach remarkable conclusions beyond the simple, finite answers you provide in your multiple choice quiz. To ensure you’re testing your learners’ knowledge - and not their ability to simply guess the right answer - you should manually generate your multiple choice quiz questions. All answers, both correct and incorrect, should have multiple variations and wordings. This way, you can pull answers from a bank of answers with varying tones; it makes your multiple choice quizzes more unpredictable. But these suggestions can only help you so much. What else do I need to consider? You need to think about the distinct requirements of your eLearning course. What are the desired learning outcomes that you would like your employees to reach? What type of knowledge do you require your employees to have? What level of understanding will your employees require to apply from their learning in the workplace? How will this new-found knowledge be applied in their roles? When you can answer these questions with confidence, you should then question which eLearning assessment method is most suitable for what you want to achieve from your eLearning-based training and development program. What are my options? There are so many different types of eLearning assessments available - what you need to focus on is which are most suitable in relation to the questions we just pondered. For example, let’s say that you require your employees to learn about the most recent anti-bribery legislation. This can be quite a complex subject matter to absorb. A simple multiple choice quiz may not have the capability to illustrate the level of learning or knowledge demonstration that you require from this particular training initiative. As such, you would opt for a method that would have that capability - in this instance, it may be audio-based assessments, or a memory matrix. What matters is being able to make that intangible link from your eLearning objectives to specific assessment methods. It’s important. Why? Measuring your employees’ learning is vital in ensuring that your investment in their training has actually been successful and worthwhile. It’s not always a straightforward process to select assessment methods; I actually advocate the use of multiple assessment methods anyway, in order to keep learners engaged, stimulated and challenged throughout their training. My final tip is to point you once again in the direction of the study by Terence Karran that I linked to earlier in this post. On pages 8-10 you will find a highly useful and actionable table outlining the advantages and disadvantages of a variety of eLearning assessment methods. With the help of this resource and from what you have taken away from this post, you will hopefully enjoy increased success in prescribing the most effective eLearning assessments to each online training program that you produce. The post Are Quizzes Really That Telling? - Assessing eLearning Assessments appeared first on eFront Blog.

Most instructional designers believe that their job ends with the launch of the eLearning program. While the content of your course determines its quality, the planning efforts needed to implement the course determine its delivery quality. Don’t get us wrong, but delivery quality truly creates a learning community - the inevitable soul of the eLearning course. A great content is brought to life when it is communicated through different views of the learners. Let’s discover how you can be mindful in planning and implementing a well-collaborated course - an increasingly important post-launch activity. While we know how precious the involvement and contribution of an SME is to an eLearning course, we cannot ignore how the content is relayed to the learners. Your eLearning course can become dynamic in terms of application if you collaborate with your learners based on their learning needs and the organization’s learning goals. A single concept has versatile applications. Bearing this in mind, you can drastically change how learners perceive and apply your content towards a better performance. Let’s explore the planning stage of eLearning program collaboration. Collaboration is an important part of the eLearning course. Creating effective collaboration requires real planning and continuous efforts on the part of the course mentor. Here’s what the best practices dictate: 1. Pre-plan the interaction: This includes ensuring that all assignments are not the regular Word-document submits. Require your learners to present themselves and become socially visible. Others should be able to recognize their presence easily. They should know what to expect. This comes from quality introductions. This is necessary in every eLearning course. While an "About Me" paragraph is becoming increasingly pedantic, you can create alternative methods of introduction. Have learners create a webpage that has a dynamic view of their interests and aspirations. Require them to record a video or some audio or an animated video to introduce themselves in a real-time manner. 2. Prepare an agenda for the collaboration and stick to that agenda: Create a collaboration visual or a diagram as a starting point for your eLearning program. Demonstrate what collaboration means for the course and how it will benefit everyone. When you list the benefits explicitly, learners will understand its value and participate instantly. 3. Summarize the previous week’s learning and make an attempt to wrap up learning objectives: Always relate concepts you teach with learning objectives. This keeps learning on-track and offers a sense of accomplishment. Also, relate the learning objectives directly with their work context. How were things done before the training? How will they be different at work now? Have learners comment on their real-world work-based problems. This will lead you to any uncovered concepts or ideas for another training program. 4. Ask unique questions to each participant and allow them to play an integral role in the session: Around the second or the third week of the course, you should have a fair amount of info about each learner. Try to frame questions for each learner. This works well for small groups of learners. For larger groups, create question topics as separate discussion board headings and groups learners based on the right question for them. For example, if you have an expert in productivity software, have them talk more about their ideas and software suggestions for various purposes. Productivity software is actually a set of eLearning tools that enable users to present their ideas, expressions, designs, and Internet searches in an innovative and collaborative manner. Also request them to create a tutorial or direct learners to tutorials to encourage them to adopt eLearning tools. 5. Take learners on web field trips: This is a great learning activity. Discover sites that are like information-museums to encourage reading and discovery. Have groups create a combined report. 6. Share real world experience and knowledge: This discussion can go forever if directed intelligently and with empathy. Ask learners to share one issue at work and propose how they would change it. Listen to what they have to say and probe further. 7. Make the material relevant and current: We know you prune your course before each session. Do look into current articles and blogs for latest information. A current topic is a sensational topic. 8. Do not rush collaboration: Start slow and steady, and build upon the responses you receive. 9. Use graphics and color to keep the collaboration interesting: Create interactive diagrams for concepts wherever possible and immediately have a slot for comments available under the interactivity. Keep them engaged! Collaboration is seldom automatic. Trainers need to learn the art of collaborating online with participants. Collaboration creates sense of direction in a course. It also brings out the much-needed excitement and anticipation of the eLearners. We hope you find these collaboration planning activities useful. Do share yours with us. The post Planning Collaboration Activities appeared first on eFront Blog.

The eLearning market has gotten increasingly larger with time, as businesses recognize its cost, time and efficiency benefits. But while eLearning is estimated to bring in around $110 billion global revenues by 2015, market pundits agree that there’s still plenty of room for the industry to grow both horizontally and vertically, as certain countries and certain industries have been quite slow to adopt it. The maritime industry is one such case. Of course, eLearning has started to make inroads there too, but it’s still not widely adopted as much as in most other industries. Which is surprising, because the nature of the maritime industry, and especially the shipping business, makes eLearning a great fit for it. Of course there are practical skills needed in the maritime world that cannot be properly taught through eLearning — stuff that requires face to face training. Still, that leaves all the other maritime skills and knowledge where eLearning is not merely applicable, but even more effective (in cost, time and results) than regular training. Besides, a capable, modern Learning Management System like eFrontPro can help businesses manage and keep track of both their online and traditional training needs, since it supports blended learning (aka Instructor-Led Training). What makes eLearning a good fit for the maritime / shipping industry The shipping industry is one of the most heavily regulated industries, with tons of complex rules, guidelines and regulations at the regional and global level that have to be followed — regulations such as construction standards, navigational rules and crew competence standards. This includes every rule issued by the International Maritime Organization (IMO), as well as export, environment and labor standards applicable to seafarers. eLearning enables shipping companies to train their employees in navigating this complex regulatory landscape efficiently and in a cost-effective manner. Specifically, by embracing eLearning for employee training, maritime businesses benefit from: Training Flexibility eLearning lets employees educate themselves at their own pace, removing the need for time off work to attend physical classes. Unlike the latter, which have to be scheduled in advance and might be held in some remote location, online training is available to the workers 24/7, and can even be followed from the convenience of their own home. In an industry with tight schedules, were there are often unexpected delays or rushed shipments, and that maintains offices and personnel the globe over (including in the middle of the sea), this flexibility is a real game changer. Cost Savings Online learning has an order of magnitude lower costs compared to traditional classroom based learning — and the savings only get bigger as the number of learners grows. While cost per seat in classroom based training can vary, and the total training cost can skyrocket when you need to rent multiple classrooms to fit all your students, eLearning just incurs a small upfront cost which can cover thousands (or hundreds of thousands) of "seats". Besides eliminating the need to maintain or rent classrooms to deliver your courses in, eLearning also removes the transportation and lodging costs that are often incurred when sending workers to attend a course. As for instructors, while you still need people to write any custom courses you might have, or interact with your students and oversee their training, eLearning is again much cheaper, as a single LMS platform can handle thousands of students with one or maybe a couple of instructors overseeing them all. Central Deployment and Control Maritime enterprises by necessity have to operate in multiple locations, not just within the same country, but often in many different countries around the world. With eLearning, a single deployment which the IT department can easily manage, monitor and secure, can deliver training material to all those locations, while also providing central management of the whole process. This enables maritime businesses to keep all of their employees up to date to the latest rules and regulations, as soon as they are delivered by the IMO and in the same, standardized manner. The same flexibility of central management and immediate and cheap network delivery, makes updating eLearning material far easier and more cost effective compared to traditional training (as there is no need to print new physical manuals and textbooks). Instant Insight When you have lots of offices and employees scattered around the world, not only scheduling and managing their training becomes difficult, but also assessing its effectiveness. At least that’s the case with traditional training. With eLearning, and the advanced reporting capabilities of eFrontPro, managers can keep track of courses, groups of learners, or even specific employees across all of their global branches and offices, and stay ahead of everything training related, from attendance and test scores to certificates awarded. Standardized Onboarding As employee orientation (or "onboarding") is nothing more than the fast-track training of new employees on their roles and responsibilities, eLearning applies here too. eFrontPro could be used with a special onboarding course to inform new hires of the company’s operating procedures and policies, and educate them in IMO’s and other agencies’ regulations and even sexual harassment laws and racial discrimination issues. The latter could even be used as legal proof in case the company ever gets caught up in a lawsuit because of some employee’s conduct (though you have to ask your lawyer about that, as this differs between jurisdictions). Conclusion Given eLearning’s obvious (and numerous) advantages over traditional face-to-face training, and taking into account the maritime industry’s needs and use cases, we’re certain that online learning will continue its meteoric rise there too, as has been the case in many other industries. Take eFrontPro for a free test drive, and talk to our sales and support stuff about how you can leverage eLearning to make plain sailing of your training needs. The post eLearning for the Maritime industry with eFrontPro appeared first on eFront Blog.

eLearning programs are seldom developed without videos. If you have ever experienced one without videos, you may have noticed how lifeless it is. Videos add the "human" element to eLearning. The voice and the human footage create a sense of classroom environment that is so hard to create otherwise. In this article, we discuss some essential tips on creating eLearning videos. Videos are rapidly becoming the leading Internet traffic pathway in eLearning environments. In fact, an extant research indicates that videos would capture 84% of eLearning traffic by 2018. How will you beat a competition so fierce such as this? Revamp yourself with some new video development strategies. Pedagogy and andragogy experts tell us that showing a skill is better than telling a skill. Connect the learner directly to the real-world, and they immediately recognize the value of their learning program. Videos have a knack to do just that. By visually demonstrating the learning concepts, videos can hook learners right from the start! The popularity of YouTube videos suggest a strong affinity of humans towards visual content. Teaching strategies that incorporate videos, immediately motivate the learner and continue to engage them throughout the learning session. Let’s look at some in-demand practices for you, the eLearning developer, to create better videos in your next eLearning program: Establish Clear Goals Without a clear goal and matching objectives you cannot create a video. A clear goal is the same to a video that a theme or central idea is to a movie. Create a video storyboard and scripts based on learning objectives. Divide tough objectives into sub-objectives and then create the video in order to remain clear throughout the process. When your intentions are clear, they will come across loud and confidently through the video! Be Brief You are by no means creating the next Ben-Hur! If you really want to, then you are in the wrong business! eLearning videos are short and segmented. The story for each learning objective may be long, but it is presented in segments. Lengthy videos are broken into bite-sized snippets that may range from 1 to 2 minutes. The length should help learners digest the information easily. Include more visuals than text. Voiceover for Videos If you want to emulate the classroom training, add voiceover to your videos. To be honest, you can record your own voice, as long as you sound lively and speak clearly. Make sure you add closed captions for accessibility. Voiceovers are easier to prepare nowadays, with various websites offering professional VO services on the cheap. Closed Captioned Videos As mentioned before, closed captions add to the accessibility of your eLearning program. Your learners will also be aided by transcripts and closed captioning to make sure they have the "notes" of the lecture. Again, adding captions will make your eLearning akin to real classroom learning. Students who do not speak English as their native language will also thank you for this additional layer of information. A popular caption creating software is Camtasia Studio. Screen Capture Simulation videos are one of a kind. They capture a process or an application in progress through screen capture software like Camtasia and Screenr. You can even insert interactivity in simulations so that the steps are guided and controlled using questions and answers between course and learner. For example, you need to show your learner how to create pivot tables in Excel. You can create one while capturing your actions using Screenr and inserting the clip alongside your instructions. Learning about pivot tables will be more interesting and memorable this way than by reading only the instructions or viewing accompanying images. These tips should help you create effective videos for your eLearning courses. Creating videos is a fun activity. With the availability of video development and editing in handheld devices, videos are easier to produce to meet the demanding eLearning industry. The post 5 Tips on Using Videos for eLearning appeared first on eFront Blog.

Dr Carmen Simon, joint founder of Rexi Media is a cognitive scientist who applies the latest neuroscientific research findings to corporate presentation skills. A frequent keynote speaker at conferences in North America, Europe and Asia, Carmen holds doctorates in instructional technology and cognitive psychology, and was formerly in charge of eLearning Research and Development for AT&T. She is currently researching what helps people to remember and is working on a forthcoming book, "Impossible to Ignore: A scientific approach to influencing other people’s memory and decisions". David Evans - I’m interested in your background and how it led you to your current research interests. Carmen Simon - My first doctorate degree was in instructional design and distance education. When you study eLearning in those kinds of formal settings, you start developing a sense of how you can appeal to people in ways that they’re motivated to change behavior. And that’s the link to presentation skills and what I’m doing now; because it doesn’t matter ultimately if you’re creating eLearning or if you’re creating a presentation. If you are after behavioral change you have to narrow down some principles for behavioral change - and I think that what is missing in many communication artifacts is exactly what gets people moving into action. DE - So tell us something about your recent research projects on memory. CS - I believe that memory is a precursor to action. So as we study what moves people into action, we must first understand better how memory works. I completed a project two years ago, in which the question was, "How much would people remember after 48 hours from a deck of twenty slides?". I had included only one message per slide. The reason I chose 48 hours to test memory is because of how the brain remembers. Memories are not formed instantly, they require some consolidation period, and sleep helps with the consolidation. So it’s not efficient to test memory immediately after exposure to information if you are after long-term memory. If you’re after short term memory then that’s fine, but if you’re after a long term memory—which is what I’m intrigued by—then you have to give it a couple of days for things to consolidate. DE - However, when testing is done with eLearning, it’s usually immediately after completing a course? CS - The way we define short term memory is memory that lasts up to one minute. After completing eLearning segments, participants will probably keep some principles in mind longer than a minute, if nothing else to pass a test, which happens after maybe ten minutes, or however short the spreads are these days—I know there is a trend for microlearning, where you have shorter and shorter chunks. But the problem with a lot of mandatory and skill based learning is that you have to have enough repetition to make sure that it sticks long-term. Just because you said it once and they pass a test doesn’t mean that they will act on it weeks later. There’s nothing necessarily wrong with something being tested immediately. In another study I am completing currently, I am analyzing fifteen variables that may be able to predict whether people are going to like, click, download, embed, or comment on a SlideShare presentation. In order for viewers to complete any of these tasks, they have keep that information active in their memory. In order to make a comment after going through thirty, forty, fifty slides—it means they are acting on those memories. To embed something however is not always instant - a day or two later you might think ‘I’m going to put that Slideshare in my blog’ or ‘I’m going to use that in my next assignment’. Some responses are instant, and others require long-term memory. DE - But for some kinds of mandatory learning scenarios, for example, people will need to be tested regularly, to make sure their knowledge is still current? CS - Yes, we call this the distributed practice effect - what that means is that you’re exposing somebody to information today for 20 minutes, let’s just say. And then the following day you come back to that short segment again, for just 10 minutes. And a week or a month later you do a 5-minute review. With each exposure, it takes less time to reactivate memories and make them stick. Depending on how precisely you want people to remember your content, we can distinguish between two different types of memory: verbatim and gist. If you’re after verbatim, then you expect the information has to be recalled in exactly the same way. For gist, you expect people to remember the overall meaning. DE - How much do people tend to forget from business content? CS - When people approach content with no conscious effort to remember or categorize it, they will forget it exponentially. They forget fast at first, and slower later. We call that the "forgetting curve." We can explain this is a metaphorical way, we tend to forget 90% after a few days. I am saying "metaphorical," because outside of academic or formal learning environments, it is tough to place a strict statistic on how much people forget. For the ease of conversation, I look at it as a 90-10. The fifteen variables I’ve identified in my recent research are those that I think you could control when you want to influence somebody else’s memory. We have many other variables that we can’t control. If I wanted to influence your memory right now, I can’t control how much sleep you got last night, the mood you’re in right now or your level of stress or your hormones—and all of those affect memory as well. Another question I’ve been asking my research is: "Can we influence the metaphorical 10% and not leave it to chance?" Otherwise, what I am noticing is that if you leave it to chance, and 10 people listen to you, they will each walk away with a different 10%. If you don’t take control over a pattern, they will build their own patterns, because the brain is a pattern-building machine. However, you’ll have to wait until the book comes out for the answers to these questions! Stay tuned for part 2…! The post Interview with Carmen Simon - Part 1 appeared first on eFront Blog.

In the first part of the interview with Carmen Simon of Rexi Media, we discussed her recent research on ways of making business presentations more memorable. In this second part, we turn to the implications of her findings for the creation of eLearning content. DE - Perhaps we could now move on to look at some of the major differences between presentations and eLearning in terms of how and what people remember, and how we can control that? CS - With eLearning, you can probably expect that an audience goes in with the intent to learn and remember, even if it’s just to pass a test. For presentations, we don’t have that luxury. People don’t come to a business presentation thinking, "You know I’m going to sit down here and I’m going to remember as much as I can." Here’s an example. In the US, we have the ability to erase from our records a minor traffic violation such as a speeding ticket so that the insurance does not go up. We can do this if we have not had any other violations in the past 18 months, and after we pass a traffic school test. Over the past five years or so, traffic school content has been converted to online training so that people can complete it online. Those are some of the worst eLearning courses you have ever seen. But because you are so motivated to pass the test, to achieve your goal which is to make sure that your insurance doesn’t increase, you will put up with that stuff; you will pay attention and you’ll remember enough to pass the test. In a business presentation, we hardly ever have that luxury from our audiences. These days you’re lucky if people even take out a piece of paper and take notes when you’re speaking. Most people sit skeptically with their arms crossed in poorly lit rooms already in a state of partial attention. You know that many are on their phones and it’s a little bit hard to achieve long-term memory here. DE - in your presentation research, you talk about the "10% slide"—ways of reinforcing the key messages that you want to get across by, and repeating it throughout a presentation. How would that work in a self-directed eLearning course, where people can choose their own route, and maybe skip bits they see as repetitive? CS - When you create these courses you’re still in charge of what it is they see on that path. In any PowerPoint template, I always advise people to use the opposite state in terms of the layout to enhance this 10% slide. Memory is, among many things, a problem of discrimination, and the reason people forget a lot is because so many slides look exactly alike. After two days, it is hard to remember which one was which. There’s nothing wrong with that because memory still needs some sidekicks, you can’t make everything stand out. You have to have some weaker stimuli in order to make other things stand out more strongly. So pick your strongest designs and reserve those for the slides that really count. DE - Some kinds of eLearning have always been very effective, and never had this problem. I’m thinking, for example, of what we might call high-stakes technical training, which often originated years ago with CBT? CS - The effectiveness of any communication, whether it’s eLearning or a presentation is often just a function of the amount of time you spent creating it, or preparing for it. And it’s to do with your expertise, so it shouldn’t take as much time to create it as if you’re a beginner designer. Take pilots, for instance. They might have some plane equipment that has changed, or they’re traveling to an international airport where some rules are different. Their online training ranges from simple information to skills training to very sophisticated simulations that may only take ten minute to complete but may have taken six months to develop. And in these circumstances, pilots come to the eLearning modules with the intent to remember. And it’s very likely that they will, through repetition and exposure—many complete the same modules multiple times through the distributed practice effect. So we can count on the fact that they remember more than 10%. Business presenters and sales presentations…they don’t have that luxury. DE - What about mandatory training, in areas like compliance, or health and safety that everyone has to complete, but only few people are really interested in? CS - To answer "how do we make mandatory training more exciting," we must look at some definitions of terms. There are three variables related to what pushes people into action: rewards, emotion, and motivation. Let’s consider rewards as stimuli that ensure our biological fitness. Emotion is the feeling we have as we get closer or further away from rewards. And motivation is the amount of work that we’re willing to do in order to obtain those rewards. So if those definitions are clear, it’s easier to understand, how we can make training more exciting, especially when it’s a dry subject. Let’s look at motivation, one of the elements that is lacking when mandatory training is concerned. We have to realize that sometimes we’re naturally motivated to do something. For instance, most children are naturally motivated to draw. But what scientists are noticing in studies is that if you give kids money for drawing (so there is a reward), they draw less creative pictures or they’re not even willing to put that much work into a drawing. If you ask a kid to have a vaccine (which does not come with natural motivation), then you have to give them some extrinsic reward to increase the amount of motivation. And it’s no different with training - there is some training that we’re naturally drawn to complete. For example, training that enables us to master a skill we value, or give us some sense of autonomy or purpose, or even training that we know leads to keeping your job, such as compliance training. We don’t have to add a lot of flashy things or animations in these kinds of training. If you just keep them short and clean and simple, people will be naturally drawn to complete them. The fake wax does not help with mandatory training. DE - Finally, I know that in your writing and your talks, you often draw examples from advertising. I wonder if there are any lessons for eLearning there too? CS - There are many lessons we can learn from how advertising messages are made. This is because many companies have large advertising budgets and they can also afford to do research and investigate what works and what does not work. For example, a 10% message in a campaign does not change, but it can vary across contexts, therefore ensuring consistency and novelty at the same time. In the US, we have an insurance company called Geico that use a line, ‘fifteen minutes will save you fifteen percent or more on your car insurance’. That message has been the same for many years. But what makes it fun is to watch how they portray this message across so many contexts, and in a humorous way. Ultimately, we often act on familiarity and consistency because if the message changes constantly then you won’t know what to trust. The post Interview with Carmen Simon - Part 2 appeared first on eFront Blog.

Here is a not-so-surprising dilemma for you to ponder on: What would you choose: A lavish freebie-filled day off at an event held at a glamorous venue accompanied by an overnight stay in a swanky hotel? Or, taking time away from your usual work to take an eLearning course at your desk instead? For many, the draw of training outside your normal work environment is just too much, and that alone can sometimes influence how we elect to develop our professional skills. But that shouldn’t stop your business from utilizing eLearning to the benefit of your organization. Of course, there are various other factors that we take into consideration - there are benefits and drawbacks to each and every different type of learning. However the point is this: we can’t allow the initial appeal of other types of training detract from the actual benefits of the most suitable training method in each scenario. That’s the purpose of this post. Below I offer up some solid strategies on how you can incentivise other learning methods that are of clear benefit to the business, but are perhaps deemed undesirable by your workforce. Specifically, I’ll be using eLearning as the example throughout. Hopefully however, from my workings you can adapt my suggestions to meet your own requirements if eLearning isn’t the type of training you’re trying to encourage the uptake of. I’ll demonstrate exactly how you can combat the benefits of these other methods by positioning eLearning as beneficial for both similar and additional reasons. Let’s start with why your employees may favor other training and development methods over eLearning. The benefits of traditional training Business decision makers such as HR managers need to be able to make an informed decision on the types of training that are most suited to employees’ specific roles and thus have the optimum benefit and ROI for the organization. In order to do so, it’s important that such decision makers possess up to date knowledge of the benefits of all different types of learning available. L&D decision makers will already be acquainted with the factors to take into consideration when allocating training to staff - learning styles, available resources, individual progression plans and the nature of the learning topic to name but a few. But when informed and aware of all the reasons why any particular learning method could be more beneficial than another, the job of the decision maker will be made much easier. What is most suited for each individual - as well as the business as a whole from a financial perspective - will instantly become more apparent. The purpose of this post isn’t to go in to so much depth as to describe the benefits of every type of learning that your staff can undertake, however. This post from TrainingToday already serves this purpose, and as such makes a good reference for L&D decision makers. Incentivising eLearning Your employees don’t always know what’s best for them. It’s your job to determine the most suitable method of training for each employee, in collaboration with your staff. Use the following suggestions to aid your communication and implementation of any potential new training method. Reward performance Because eLearning is entirely under your control, it’s so simple to measure the performance of your employees. This is an advantage to your management and your business as a whole, but that same benefit might be lost to each individual staff member who is understandably interested in their own development, rather than your advancement as a business. So why not change that? Use this to your advantage and incentivize performance so that your employees can be rewarded for their results and learning outcomes. Obviously this will also act as an excellent staff motivator too, so it’s a win-win really, and to what cost? However you reward your employees - financially or not - it’s likely that the benefits to this scheme will outweigh the drawbacks. Incorporate into your review process This tactic may seem a little underhand, but you could be surprised by the level of positive responses you receive in its implementation. Setting targets based around an agreed learning method can aid in increasing acceptance of the shift to a new L&D system for the company. It positions the desired training method as commonplace, widely accepted and almost non-debatable. Set staggered goals The issue you may encounter - with some employees of a certain disposition at least - is that eLearning could potentially be viewed as extra ‘work’, and thus become less interesting to your employees. Repositioning this as an ‘opportunity’ can be quite patronising, so instead, allow your employees to realise the full potential of the opportunity themselves by gently nudging them in the right direction. The idea of running through an eLearning course hour after hour is kind of boring really - so set staggered objectives and deadlines! If you task your employees with only completing one assigned module at any given time, they’re more likely to crack on with the training. Once their learning has begun, they’ll soon discover the benefits and enjoyment of what you have set out for them. Encourage knowledge sharing There’s so much to be learnt in such a short space of time - talking about this experience can help fortify that new found knowledge, and spread expertise throughout your entire organization. Information sharing also provides a welcome break from the monotony of eLearning and could actually aid the learning experience - after all, studies show that we’re more productive when we take breaks from our work. How will you incentivize your desired training method? Use the above ideas as inspiration, direct solutions or simply prompts to reconsider how your employees learn, and perhaps your workforce will benefit from a change in tactic. The post How to Incentivise in-House eLearning & Succeed At It appeared first on eFront Blog.

We curated a list of the best content on elearning gamification from our industry’s top companies and influencers. Read on to learn how leading companies are using gamification to increase learner engagement. 5 killer examples of gamified elearning Games are often more effective for learning than traditional training approaches. So in this article we show you five examples of great gamified elearning and guide you on how to design your own great gamified course. 8-step elearning gamification checklist Gamification is the buzz word in eLearning at the moment, but of course, you don’t want to gamify elearning for the sake of it. In this post, we’ll explore the principles underpinning good gaming design for eLearning, and set out an eight point checklist to help you create better, gamified learning. 4 innovative companies that gamified elearning: Deloitte, ExactTarget, Brainscape and Class Dojo In an era when over a million students drop out of high school every year and workplaces suffer from contagious, chronic disengagement, getting people to invest in their own learning is of paramount importance. 23 useful resources for gamifying your elearning There are loads of great resources available to help you design really killer gamified elearning. Here we’ve curated just a handful. See what you think and feel free to contribute to the list in the comments section. 5 tools to help you gamify your elearning content How can you "gamify" your eLearning content? There are many HTML5-based authoring tools that can help you create engaging online content. We’ve rounded up 5 tools to help you do just that. The post Elearning gamification tips to help you create more effective elearning appeared first on Elucidat Blog.

If you’re the head of training, head of eLearning or part of a team that coordinates learning and development in your organization, you are probably already looking at ways to speed up eLearning content development. In this post, I’ll look at why speed is important and some of the ways that you can help reduce development time. Why is speed important? Shelf life of content: A lot of training in organizations has a sell-by date, either because changes in the business require new or additional knowledge or because the audience needs it done differently. Demands of the organization: For example, compliance, product knowledge and new hires each require unique training. Urgency in response time to issues affecting business needs: A lot of the time a new training request comes in because there is an immediate need. An organization with a crystal-ball approach to planning what interventions will be needed in a month, six months or even next year may be able to do it differently, but for most others, where organizations have to respond quickly to events and trends from outside, there’s a pressure to respond rapidly. Let’s look at three strategies to help you speed up development. 1. Manage your team more effectively with these tools Your team may no longer be centrally located in one office. Distributed team working is a becoming more and more prevalent. In fact, Gartner estimates that over 54 million employees are currently involved in some form of remote work. It’s increasingly likely you’ll be working with a distributed team at some point, e.g., multiple authors in different offices, freelancers and agencies. Use these tools to help you manage your team as if they are all in the same office: Trello Project management tools such as Trello help you assign your team tasks and monitor their progress. You can access Trello from anywhere on any device. Slack Communication tools such as Slack run in an app or from a browser. You can set up groups for your team for real-time communication on any device. Elucidat Cloud-based eLearning tools such as Elucidat allow multiple authors to work on one project simultaneously, cutting the time needed to set up freelancers and agencies, as well as the time needed to package, distribute and update project files. Every member of the team has access 24/7 to the most recent project and there is no confusion caused by duplications and/or earlier drafts. Plus, you can spend less time managing the team. 2. Look for features that help you speed up development Cloud-based eLearning tools can help support a full end-to-end process for developing eLearning content - from prototyping, through production and on to release and implementation. You can work straight out of your prototype - no need to switch tools and technology. Here are some features to look for when selecting an effective eLearning tool: Instant publishing Select a development tool from which content can be published immediately and uploaded to an LMS in seconds. This can help cut the waiting time for getting a project built or published. Only use one tool Make sure your whole team is working within one tool so you can reduce time spent on version control issues and managing releases. Re-use projects Some tools let you design once and use many times. Reusing and gifting projects within teams is a great time saver. The concept of master courses - efficiently managed from a central template - reduces time wasted maintaining individual variations. This can speed up eLearning content development time, as you’re not reinventing the wheel, and you can also ensure consistency across your team’s projects, which means reduced time needed when applying these retrospectively. For inspiration, check out this example by the Royal College of General Practitioners. Prebuilt themes Tools that offer prebuilt templates and themes allow your designers and developers to create themes and interactions that can be used over and over. Multi-device compatible Tools that let your team simultaneously develop content for desktop and mobile devices can effectively cut time in half, allowing you to create one version of your content for all devices. This eliminates the need to create, publish or maintain multiple versions. For inspiration, take a look at this multi-device eLearning example by Channel 4. The added bonus of a tool that allows you to create responsive eLearning is that you’ll have happier learners receiving high-quality eLearning from any device - no COMPROMISE. Easy maintenance Don’t underestimate the time (and cost) that maintenance can add to your project. Consider tools that allow you or your client to maintain content - making changes, updates and publishing - quickly and reliably. Some tools, like Elucidat, organize your projects so that all the courses under a course master will update with the pushed changes - EVEN the ones on an LMS. No need to redeploy! 3. Embrace collaboration Inbuilt reviewing and commenting Consider adopting eLearning development tools that have inbuilt reviewing and commenting capabilities. This will empower your non-technical SMEs and scriptwriters to edit courses with no training. Such tools can help reduce the workload by letting you dispense with other solutions such as Word scripts or Excel spreadsheets to capture modifications or bugs. Inbuilt file management A system that has an inbuilt method for handling files is a bonus. Once selected and uploaded, you can store assets such as images and sound files that are then available for use in all your projects. This helps reduce the time spent trying to locate these assets over and over again. The added benefit of having the assets in the cloud also means that agencies and freelancers you work with can use them without needing to access your internal networks. Speed up development time by using the right tools Not all eLearning tools are the same. Give some thought as to what your specific requirements are and what tools are best for speeding up your eLearning content development. Desktop tools are great for small or one-person development teams, but can create challenges for high-volume authoring teams. Elucidat is a cloud-based authoring tool designed to solve the specific challenges of high-volume eLearning teams. It makes the process of authoring, publishing and maintaining eLearning easy and pain free. A version of this article first appeared on ElearningIndustry.com The post How to speed up elearning content development appeared first on Elucidat Blog.

Doing more with less has been a mantra in corporate training departments for the last decade and if you’re an eLearning manager looking for new ways to develop eLearning more efficiently, read on. Likewise, the ability to create home-grown courses on a shoestring budget has an obvious appeal and certainly is a way forward for small businesses as an accompaniment to their one-to-one training. So how do organizations - large and small - ensure that training is well designed, compliant and adds value to the business? The Agile eLearning Authoring Team With the growth in eLearning authoring tools, seemingly anyone can be their own eLearning developer, designer and project manager. The benefit of this do-it-yourself approach is that organizations can save thousands from their budgets, whilst retaining complete control over the content and design. With this being the case, commissioning departments no longer require the services of eLearning agencies - but that doesn’t mean they don’t need an agile eLearning authoring team. So how do you get your team to think like an eLearning agency? 1. Boost productivity by using the right tools Choose the right tools. If you have non-technical or inexperienced authors creating your eLearning, you’ll need to source a simple system - like Elucidat - that is easy to use. By empowering more of your team to author eLearning, you can increase your team’s productivity and get your courses out to learners faster. 2. Collaborate and iterate directly inside your authoring tools If you’ve been around the eLearning block a few times, you’ll be familiar with the roadblock that the review phase creates. One of the biggest challenges in managing your project is that subject matter experts and reviewers are busy people with full-time jobs and often content reviews have to fit in around the day job. Make this process as easy as possible for SMEs and reviewers by using a tool with an online review and comment system. In the old days, if you had an eLearning module built in Flash that needed review, you would end up with a Word document full of screen shots. Reviewers would leave feedback by referencing Page 4 or that picture in a separate document. Fortunately, these new tools allow your team to put a fully-functioning module online for your reviewers who can write a comment directly onto the system. In terms of tools, online review is a huge step forward in helping your review cycles to become more efficient. Watch this video to see how a comment and review system works: 3. Design and develop once, build many One of the big challenges (ergo, opportunities) that you may be facing in your organization is BYOD (bring your own device) and how to ensure your content renders correctly on different browsers and devices. It’s not feasible to build a separate module for every device - the development and maintenance alone would bust your budget. So the key is to select authoring tools that have done the hard work to ensure cross-browser compatibility and responsive rendering on different devices. This will allow you to design and develop once, but build for many environments. Related: How Utility Warehouse Rolled Out Responsive eLearning To 46,000 BYOD Learners For elearning inspiration, check out PetSync’s living with a dog in a shared community. Developed in HTML5, this elearning utilizes a responsive design which allows the course to be displayed on desktops as well as mobile devices. 4. Create an agile culture We know that easy-to-use authoring tools, a central system and an agreed process all help create a high-performance team. We’ve done research into what makes a high-performance learning team that shows this. Whilst the widening choice of eLearning development tools available to author and develop online learning has greatly helped, the need to involve multiple team members with different talents in the process still poses a number of challenges. These will have an effect on your culture, but the most important thing is how you view your team. In an agile approach, the team is one and everybody in the team is responsible for the result. This is a big game changer. No more being late because the testing didn’t finish on time. The team is responsible for the tasks (user stories) and for keeping the project on track. In the ideal situation, all members have all necessary skills. This is never the case in the real world, but it is still surprising how much work and responsibility people can share if that’s the expectation set from the start. 5. Create an agile customer In waterfall methodologies such as ADDIE you will have a lot of contact with the customer (internal or external) during the sales process and the design stage. But during the production period, there will be hardly any contact. And then suddenly: the delivery of the result. In an agile approach, you stay in contact all the time, iterating and demonstrating the results every week or every two weeks. You show progress, get feedback and decide together what the next priority needs to be. This connects the customer with the process and gives them responsibility. Instead of being we (developers) and them (customers), it can become us (collaborators). Final thoughts to help you build an agile authoring team Use inbuilt online review. The best way to improve team efficiency is to use a tool with inbuilt online review. Consider selecting an authoring tool - like Elucidat - that provides reviewing and commenting functionality. Host team hangouts. Try hosting knowledge-sharing hangouts twice a month where your team comes together and presents a project. Discuss the challenges they encountered and how they worked around them. This helps teach your team new practices that increase efficiency. Improve design skills. There is a lot more to eLearning development than meets the eye. That’s why instructional and graphical design as disciplines are differentiators in good eLearning. Great eLearning design not only covers the important knowledge and skills, but also maximizes learning and actually changes behavior.  It is not simply enough to put the information on a page and hope that learners will assimilate it. Remember the basics. Improve efficiency by reusing assets, aligning the right person with the right task and sharing knowledge across your team. The biggest mistake I see is eLearning managers letting their teams work in silos. This is an instant efficiency killer - avoid it at all costs. Keep learning. Stay up-to-date on the latest technology and ideas that can be used to make your authoring process more efficient. Register for Elucidat’s eLearning time-saver course. A version of this article originally appeared on Elearning Industry. The post How To Build An Agile Elearning Authoring Team appeared first on Elucidat Blog.