Compliance training can be a boring topic for your learners. Spice it up and draw inspiration from these two award-winning elearning solutions. Connect Group: The Golden Rules The Golden Rules elearning course, developed by Make Sense Design, replaces 20,000 words of written material with engaging interactive content. We really like the combination of humor and gamification to encourage learners to interact with the content. Also, did we mention it won silver at the 2014 ELearning Awards! Why we like it: Immersive and engaging approach in order to create memorable learning experience. Good use of humour, games, leaderboards and strong visual design to grab attention and motivate learners to interact with the course. Responsive, mobile-friendly design Visit elearning: Connect Group’s The Golden Rules Tesco: Learning Leap Tesco and Sponge UK won bronze for Learning Leap in the 2014 Elearning Awards. This solution is an example of using previous course data and feedback to help design a new and improved programme. Why we like it: Uses a fun and easy to understand narrative where learners are represented as a parachutist getting ready to jump into the learning (Leapers) Utilizes gaming techniques such as real-time, animated leaderboards showing the number of learners at each stage of the training. The first finishers get a reward and line managers receive weekly emails telling them how well their team is doing. Once the main elearning is completed, staff receive bi-monthly emails, known as ‘PiPs’ or ‘Putting into Practice’; micro-learning quizzes related to the course topics, linked to web pages containing feedback and job aids to help reinforce the learning and provide an opportunity for people to put their training into practice. Visit elearning: Tesco’s Learning Leap The post Compliance training examples: Tesco and Connect Group appeared first on Elucidat Blog.

Elearning Superstars is a curated list of inspiring elearning examples, published every Tuesday. Subscribe to get weekly updates via email.   Cursim: One page scrolling   This is a great example of a course that uses one page scrolling to deliver learning. Visit elearning: Cursim’s one page scrolling Konworks: 2D & 3D animation studio   Visit elearning: Konworks’ animation studio Tesco: Learning leap Tesco and Sponge UK won bronze for Learning Leap in the 2014 Elearning Awards. This solution is an example of using previous course data and feedback to help design a new and improved programme.   Visit elearning: Tesco’s Learning Leap Connect Group: The Golden Rules The Golden Rules elearning course, developed by Make Sense Design, replaces 20,000 words of written material with engaging interactive content. We really like the combination of humor and gamification to encourage learners to interact with the content. Also, did we mention it won silver at the 2014 ELearning Awards!   Visit elearning: Connect Group’s The Golden Rules Showcase your elearning Have you created a great piece of elearning that you’re really proud of? Showcase your elearning here to win awards and get published on Elearning Superstars.   Elearning inspiration: Cursim, Konworks, Tesco, Connect GroupClick To Tweet The post Elearning inspiration: Cursim, Konworks, Tesco, Connect Group appeared first on Elucidat Blog.

Bringing the glad tidings that my favourite animation tool seems to be coming back! Xtranormal was a hugely popular video making tool with hundreds of teachers making videos for free, choosing characters, scenes, camera angles and really achieving a very professional looking outcome. Until they went bust. Despite its popularity, Xtranormal was not able to go on as a company and quietly went under about two or three years ago.  Some of the reasons have to do with the numerous free accounts and the cost of the huge amount of space they needed in order to store all these free videos. Read my related post here about free services. For a long time there was silence - complete silence about why or what was to happen. Until, almost two years ago, a new site redirected from the old site gave some hope. It looks like good news for now - the new service called nawmal is about to launch in December 2015 Watch their promo - it looks as good as it used to be and although it won’t come cheap, there is a lower price for schools and educators or students. Given the technology it takes to get done, I am not surprised. It looks like the same technology and they do have some affordable pricing plans for schools       ____________________________________________________________________________________  Camera Angles, Backgrounds, Effects and more! Using these animations and camera angles, faceless coursebook dialogues could come to life and student dialogues could be turned into great sketches. ELT teachers are not the only […]

Inarguably, one of the most valuable assets a company has is the knowledge and expertise that lives in the heads of seasoned employees. Their sharp know-how has been acquired over years of hands-on, in-the-field experience, and they’ve acted as examples and advisors to countless other employees. There is often concern over what to do when those high performing team members retire or choose to move on to another opportunity. The aging population has company leaders scrambling to address what’s become known as knowledge retention. Not only are you losing a valuable team member, but how do you extract that knowledge and pass it on to others? In some cases, that person might be the only one who knows what he knows. And he does have a job to do. He can’t be everywhere at once spending time mentoring and coaching everyone else. No, there has to be a more efficient way. Rest assured, there is a more efficient way, and it involves leveraging technology to make information more widely available. We’ve helped many companies set up and apply powerful knowledge sharing tools to shrink the knowledge gap and improve knowledge retention. The benefits go beyond departing employees. Cooperative learning has proven to be one of the most effective ways to spread knowledge within a group. People are more likely to listen to what their peers have to say than someone who isn’t doing the same job. What are the components of a typical knowledge sharing platform? You’ll commonly find: A content library to fill with how-to videos, step-by-step job aids, infographics, charts and photos so that users can find helpful material whenever they need it. Social sharing capabilities to allow your employees to collaboratively share learning content with one another. A discussion board where users can connect to ask or answer questions, while others benefit from reading the conversations. A messaging tool to create and send communications to users about new or updated content. A reporting mechanism to monitor timely content consumption. The hardest part, of course, is assembling learning content to make sure what you have is relevant and helpful to users. Recognize that while you might have a lot of training collateral, some of it might need to be repurposed or updated to make the knowledge sharing platform work as well as it can. Now, you need to turn to your seasoned veterans. Ask their opinion of existing training materials, or how training is currently conducted. They’ve probably witnessed a lot of training throughout their career and can offer valuable insight. Enlist their help in editing content so that it’s up-to-date. Depending on when it was written or who the original writer was, it might require adjustments in accuracy, tone or format. Interview them to uncover anything that might be missing from the current library. Anyone handling instructional design or the creation of learning content should sit down with veteran employees to pick their brain about new training opportunities. Ask for their support in helping other employees adapt to the new platform. By engaging them at the beginning, you’ll have their buy-in to help encourage others to use it. This "knowledge harvesting" process gives you a wealth of training material that is team-sourced rather than pushed down from the top. Then as a manager, training manager or admin, you can optionally curate this content into the correct forms and format for learners to absorb. Once knowledge sharing is put in place, training will be easier to maintain and update, and with everyone having access to the same information, the knowledge gap will be much smaller. You can see an example here. How has your company overcome the knowledge gap? Leave a comment below! Photo Credit: ryancr

Have you ever been inside a salesperson’s mobile office? By that, I mean...her car? It’s often full of stuff - sales collateral, contracts and other documentation, product brochures, samples, tchotchkes, and a large binder or three of company- or job-related info she might need to reference at a moment’s notice. You know, one of those things you put together when you’re feeling super organized, then rarely touch ever again. Let’s clean up that mobile office, and make the sales team smarter and more empowered at the same time. eLearning and mobile performance support puts everything a salesperson might need right at their fingertips. Salespeople have a lot they need to know, and it’s unrealistic to expect them to commit it all to memory. We can now give them a simple way to find new or refresher learning material when they need it most. Here are just a few common sales activities we can support with mobile learning. 1. Maintaining the CRM: Not every CRM is the most intuitive piece of software, and your company probably has specific guidelines for how it is to be used. Learning software is not always high on salespeople’s priority list, but if they are given quick-reference material to jog their memory on specific tasks, they are more likely to comply, making your customer database cleaner and more up-to-date. Some of these tasks include: Adding new contacts Updating call notes Changing contact status Adding customer service preferences 2. Submitting expense reports and receipts: Not all sales teams are fortunate enough to have a support person to handle this for them. Even if your company has a very systematic approach to submitting and processing expenses, employees could likely use some refresher material on how to complete the process, keeping the books current and avoiding an accumulation of undocumented expenses. 3. Learning new products and product features: A company’s product portfolio is an evolving entity, with updates to features, bug fixes and new product launches happening on the regular. A salesperson needs to be up to speed on these changes, and the quickest way to deliver that information is through eLearning. 4. Negotiating price with potential clients: As a manager, you want your highest-producing reps to feel empowered to negotiate price in order to close a deal … but not at the expense of the bottom line! Give your reps tools they can have on their iPad that review what volume-based price they are allowed to offer prospects, as well as selling the value of your products. Very few companies win by competing on price alone. 5. Target audience research: Marketing and sales departments both conduct target audience research, and it’s important that this information is aligned between the two. Knowledge sharing platforms that are accessible on mobile devices allow everyone to access the same information, and find out about updates as they happen. 6. New-hire orientation and training: When a new rep joins your sales team, they have a lot to learn. Very little of it will be retained if you try to teach it all at once during orientation. Instead, send learning opportunities their way in bite-sized chunks, and make sure they know that this information is available to them anytime for a refresh. Modern eLearning technology is transforming how salespeople are trained, coached and held accountable for applying what they’ve learned. We no longer need to expect them to retain everything covered during orientation. Knowledge can be reinforced over time and made available in a just-in-time fashion, meaning that the employee has access to the content they need at the exact time they need it. If you’re ready to learn more about how eLearning can support your sales team, schedule an assessment with our team! photo credit: Adam Tuttle

We are incredibly proud to be included on the Weatherhead 100 list of Upstarts for 2014! If you haven’t heard of it, Case Western Reserve University is located in Cleveland, Ohio, not far from our home in Akron. It’s one of the top schools in the country and is recognized especially for the Weatherhead School of Management. Each year, the Weatherhead School celebrates entrepreneurship in Northeast Ohio by assembling a list of the fastest-growing companies based here in the area. Last night, nine members of the Expand team attended the awards dinner, donning our finest, to rub elbows with other winners and accept our award. We’re thrilled to be included, and are honored to be keeping company with so many great companies from our hometown and nearby. The entrepreneurial spirit is alive and well here, and it was very apparent how much the area means to local business owners, who are passionate about sustaining growth and creating jobs. To be included, companies need to demonstrate continued growth over a 5 year period, and we’re very proud we’ve met the criteria. Below are a few of our favorite photos from the evening!

What test, you ask? The success test. Does it work? Does the audience like it and find it helpful? How do you know? Your course is never really done, even if you’ve clicked the publish button. It needs occasional preening and polishing to stay relevant, effective and keep up with an ever-changing environment. But that doesn’t mean it has to be a 3-month project. There are many quick updates you make in a day or two that will have an immediate impact on the the performance of your course and results. There’s always room for improvement. Here are 7 things you can address to quickly improve an eLearning course. Make it shorter. We all know how attention spans are nowadays. Take a look at your course and see if there’s any "fat" you can trim to make it shorter. Something almost always jumps out when viewed with a fresh set of eyes. Replace cheesy clipart or stock photography. Generally, free clipart or stock photos are not only lame, but send a message that the training content was hastily slapped together. Graphics and photography are great, but should enhance what’s on the screen. Break up busy or content-heavy slides. Look over each slide/screen of your course and break apart any that are too content-heavy. Limit each slide to one idea with a supporting visual. Add an assessment. If you haven’t, you want to add at least one assessment question or exercise to help gauge whether the course is effective. Is the audience comprehending the material presented? Collect feedback. Find out what your audience thought of your course. Did they find it helpful? Did they learn something new? Will they be able to apply the new knowledge in their jobs? Follow up after training. It’s not a safe assumption that your learners will remember everything covered in your course, or that they know how to apply it. It’s important to follow up. Create a few pieces of reminder content or post-training assessment questions and keep in touch with the audience in the weeks/months immediately following the training. Review your learning objective. Don’t have a learning objective? Create one! If your course was created with an objective in mind, review it. Does it still make sense for your organization and your audience? Is your course meeting it? It’s okay (and encouraged) to make adjustments as needed. It also helps to get outside perspectives. Just as it’s recommended to ask someone to proofread a piece of writing, if you’ve authored an eLearning course, your perspective won’t be as fresh as someone who did not work on the project with you. Don’t hesitate to ask others for suggestions on how to implement any of the improvements listed above. While you may have people at your disposal within your organization to help, it can also help to talk to an eLearning or Instructional Design consultant. Let us be of service! If you want to improve upon an existing course, our team is happy to take a look. Get in touch today, and we’ll set something up. photo credit: Seven

When we’re talking to a new client, we like to learn as much as we can about the training program they currently have in place. A really important part of that discussion is "How’s it working?" And even more important, "How do you know?" That second question is a tough one to answer. At most organizations, if anyone is bothering to figure out whether a training course is actually doing anything (in terms of improving performance) they’re relying largely on anecdotal evidence. We found some telling statistics on eLearning Measurement in a study published by The eLearning Guild. Take a look. 87.5% of organizations participating in the study tracked completions. Good start, but the numbers go down from there. Only 64.7% asked assessment questions to test memory recall. 65.2% tracked learner satisfaction, but… Only 49.1% measured whether the learner felt the training was of value. At best, 28.6% tracked whether learners successfully applied training material in a real-world setting. About 15% tracked successful real-world application. 31.7% monitored changes in performance, while about 20% measured business impact in terms of ROI. 10% tracked nothing. Nothing! So, 80% of the organizations that participated in the study couldn’t answer the two questions I posed at the beginning of this post. Yikes... Completions and satisfaction data is useful information and we aren’t here to question its value, but it offers a very limited view of how successful a course actually is. A course with high satisfaction ratings isn’t necessarily effective...it just means the audience liked it. Strong assessment scores suggest audience members learned a lot from the course, but it doesn’t capture whether they are applying it on-the-job. It doesn’t tell us whether there has been sustained behavioral change as a result of the course in the weeks and months following completion. Prove To The Higher-Ups That Training Works We feel quite strongly about the importance of robust eLearning measurement, so we set out to build measurement tools into our eLearning software platform, ExpandShare. We look at measuring course effectiveness as a pyramid that builds on Kirkpatrick’s Four Levels of Training Evaluation. You can see Satisfaction and Learning there on the bottom, and that we’ve added three additional areas we feel are important to determining the true success of an eLearning program. Measuring Confidence in eLearning Take a step beyond simply measuring Satisfaction. Again, Satisfaction tells us whether an audience enjoyed the course, but Confidence digs a little deeper. By measuring Confidence, we uncover whether the audience members feel better equipped to do their job (or complete a specific task, etc.) as a result of taking the offered eLearning. Measuring Behavioral Changes in eLearning We offer training because we want people to do things a certain way, right? They need to be taught the steps as well as the reason for doing things a certain way. Considering this is why we have training in the first place, it’s really interesting to look at the study mentioned above and realize how few organizations actually measure it. Simulations and assessments are great to determine if your audience is getting the idea. These tools aren’t a surefire indicator audience members will continue to apply course knowledge in the real world. We need to continue monitoring and testing their application of the course material in the weeks and months following course completion. Measuring Results in eLearning Now comes the hard part. The most valuable measure organizations can track is overall impact. Is the business seeing results from training? Results are often defined differently by different organizations. It could mean growth in sales or ROI, increased unit sales, decreased equipment downtime, less employee overtime… It depends on the organization’s unique definition of success. But ultimately, if we can’t definitively say training efforts are making a difference, we run the risk of wasting resources. We’re not serving our ultimate purpose, either. Does your training team measure the impact of your training? Leave a comment below and let us know what success indicators you monitor, and how your findings inform the creation of future eLearning courses. Don’t keep producing training that isn’t based on actionable data gathered from past and current efforts. Prove your training works. We can help! photo credit: Lots of yardage

Having likely worked in retail in our younger days, many of us know that most retail jobs are very process-oriented. They’re usually pretty simple for the most part. Clear instructions for how to best complete these simple tasks have are explained and the employee’s first week on the job involves reviewing those instructions, which they’re supposed to commit to memory until they can perform them in their sleep. Most employees are able to do that for tasks they perform every time they are on the job. Frequent repetition makes it easy to memorize those processes quickly. But let’s look at some training challenges retail establishments encounter with employees: a brand new—or recently changed—process needs to be taught to current employees an underperforming employee needs some help learning and remembering the correct processes some processes aren’t performed regularly (perhaps weekly or even monthly) so opportunities for application aren’t frequent In each of these situations, what’s needed is practice. The more an employee can practice the steps of a process, the better they will get and the more likely they will remember it. Training alone—the transfer of knowledge—doesn’t allow for practice. Training is important, but in order to drive real behavioral change (in this case, helping all employees complete current processes correctly) we need to place emphasis on application and practice. Impactful Exercises for Knowledge Application Scenarios and simulations are powerful tools to test whether learners are able to take what they are learning and turn it into actionable on-the-job results. After initial training, if we send employees back to their jobs in the real world, we can’t be certain they’re applying what they’ve learned - correctly or even at all. Studies Prove the Importance of Practice Source: "Edgar Dale's cone of learning" by Jeffrey Anderson It’s been well-documented by models such as Edgar’s Cone of Experience that "people generally remember 20% of what they hear, 30% of what they see...and 90% of what they do." The case for adding application and practice exercises to training courses is strong. Scenarios, simulations and real-time application are not created equal, however, and each come with their own set of reasonable expected outcomes. It’s important to know the differences so you can choose the right type of exercise for your audience. Understanding the Difference Between Scenarios, Simulations and Real-time Application Scenarios are often completed as part of a training course, and often describe a fictional, realistic-but-simplified situation an employee might find herself in on-the-job. The employee is then asked questions to assess her ability to choose the correct course of action. They are beneficial in their ease of measurement and relative ease of inclusion in a training course - whether eLearning or ILT (instructor-led training). Simulations more closely resemble the real world, and can be built electronically using games or virtual reality or a staged, physical environment. The point is to—as accurately and detailed as possible—recreate a situation an employee has or will encounter and ask her to work through it. There is more involved in building a simulation than a scenario, but it’s the closest you can get to real, on-the-job experience without associated risk. Rather self-explanatory, real-time application occurs when the employee is actually on the job. The case can be made that this is the best way to learn a process, but it does come with a certain degree of risk letting an employee practice on real customers, systems or machines. Even the best crafted scenarios and simulations can’t fully replace real-world experience. However, there are many processes and procedures that are too important to not use any kind of applied learning. You’ll want to consider these factors before choosing an applied learning approach for your retail employees. Does your company use scenarios or simulations in employee training? What results and feedback have you realized from your retail employees who have participated in these types of applied learning exercises? Leave us a comment below; we’d love to hear about your experience.   photo credit: via photopin (license)

Regardless of whether your training is online or instructor-led, it’s really important to collect and analyze audience feedback data. The audience we’re talking about today is franchisees; most likely new franchisees who are in the process of learning how to run a successful operation at one of your company’s stores. For a franchisee, franchise training is a make-or-break matter. Your company has put together a tried-and-true, detailed system for store success and a franchisee who fails to learn and apply the system as directed will struggle. But how do you know the training program is working? Training feedback. Let’s talk about a few different types of feedback you should be collecting from your training programs. 5 Ways to Collect Useful Feedback from Franchisee Training Ask Satisfaction & Confidence questions. Do franchisees like the course? The temptation to think this doesn’t matter is real, but in a world of constant distractions, training has to hold franchisees’ attention. It needs to be interesting, well-executed and even entertaining. Do they feel it was a good use of time? If not, they are less likely to apply what you’ve tried to teach. Was it too long, too short or just right? Let them channel their inner Goldilocks. Too long and attention spans waver. Too short, and knowledge transfer can’t take place. What device did they use to access the course and how was that experience? Look for trends in device-preference. Do they feel more confident in their knowledge and ability having taken the training? Because liking a course isn’t enough. Ask Assessment questions. Comprehension - Are franchisees able to demonstrate that they’ve understood the material as presented? Application - Using scenarios, simulations and real-world application, are they able to correctly apply what they’ve learned? Ask them again. Don’t just ask once; ask the same questions in different ways to improve feedback validity. Ask them frequently. Don’t put all of your questions at the end of your course. You’ll overwhelm your franchisees (who are probably anxious to get back to their new business) and they may be tempted to rush through the questions. Instead, scatter them throughout the training after each module, or even interspersed within a module for specific, immediate feedback. Ask them after-the-fact. Follow up after training is complete. Do the franchisees remember what was taught? Are they applying knowledge correctly to running their location(s)? It’s one thing to be able to answer comprehensive and application questions immediately following a training module. It’s another to still answer them correctly weeks and months after training’s end. Using Feedback to Make Training Programs Better Franchisee feedback on training programs is useful in a number of ways. Below are just a few ideas for using this data once you’ve collected it. Identify where edits and adjustments to course content are needed. Identify where new courses should be created. Identify application exercises that did or didn’t work and make adjustments as needed. Determine your plan for follow-up, performance support and coaching. Optimize content for different devices based on actual device usage. Start to measure the true impact of your training. Is it changing behaviors? How is it affecting overall business performance? For example, this could be measured by point-of-sale activities like collecting customer email addresses, store performance on inspections and sales growth. How has audience feedback impacted training program development at your organization? What metrics have you found especially valuable? We’d love to hear from you; leave a comment below! photo credit: Mandolin chord: C