Imagine the following scenario: you just started a project that you are very excited about. You meet the client, and you both agree that your first task will be conceptualizing and planning of the course’s content.  Meeting #1: Even though you had sent some of the project’s advances ahead of time, the client has just read them. He says that that's not the idea he had in mind and explains how he’d like the project to be restructured. Meeting #2: You did your best to prepare something close to your client’s expectations, but he says he has new ideas and proposes a change to the project. You accept these changes and begin working on the project again. Meeting #3: You both meet again, and the client goes over your work. He gives you some ambiguous feedback and notes that it has taken a long time for such a little progress in the project and asks you to return to the original idea.  Three months have passed, how would you feel? Even though it’s not directly your fault, you didn’t meet the project’s goal, and you feel FRUSTRATED.

Although classrooms offline have been delivering competency-based training for decades, the eLearning industry has only just woken up to the merits of this form of learning. However, competency-based training is yet to become a trend in online education simply because most designers and training managers are not sure what it means and how they can implement the concept in practice. So in this post we’ll be decoding the jargon. For starters, here’s an infographic that outlines the whys and the wherefores of competency-based learning. Read on, if you want to learn more.

It’s Halloween time, a time for all things spooky and scary. If you are an eLearning designer, you have horror stories of your own. Yes, our jobs as designers are not easy. Don’t get us wrong; we love the challenges that each new project brings. We love to exercise our gray cells to think up novel solutions, and we pride ourselves on surpassing our clients’ expectations every time. But we still get a sinking feeling in the pit of the stomach when we have to face our worst fears and nightmares, which are the following:

They know that they make the best burgers in town, but McDonald’s still spends billions of dollars on marketing. If it is fried chicken, then it has to be KFC, but the makers still market aggressively. The truth is that your audience has choices, so they won’t come to you. You have to take your offerings to them. Marketing is no longer a dirty word in eLearning. In fact, now it is not even an option. As eLearning designers, you HAVE to take your courses to your audience and convince them of their value. Else there are just 0-5 percent chances that they will take them. So the time has come for you to double up as a marketer. Below are some smart marketing tips to make your courses fly off the blocks:

Today's learner has ample avenues to seek out information. As an eLearning designer, you have competition! You have to create online courses that will keep your learners engaged from start to finish; else you will lose them, and worse, they might move away to your competitor (Facebook, email, Skype, etc.) Here are ten ideas to create captivating online courses that your learners just can’t leave:

Anyone seeking to create meaningful and engaging eLearning courses can benefit by remembering what it is like to be on the other side. It is bad practice to subject learners to any training that you would not participate in yourself. It’s time you stop blaming the "boring" content and commit to stop tormenting the learners who are required to take your course! Our job as eLearning designers is to FASCINATE the learner from beginning to end. In the excitement of launching a new course, it’s easy to overlook details. Therefore, it can be very useful to have a checklist for last minute touches.

For anyone who is new to the eLearning industry, getting familiarized with the jargon and industry phrases can be a cumbersome task. It can be overwhelming as well as demand a huge commitment. While there are a huge number of eLearning terms and phrases every newbie needs to stock up in their arsenal to get it right, here are a few which stand out, whether by the commonality of usage or the importance of what they stand for.

Bite-sized learning or Microlearning. It is the latest buzzword in the eLearning world. Designers and developers discuss it when they meet around the water cooler. HR and training managers have found ways to implement it in their learning strategies. The top brass of companies is no longer questioning its efficacy. Day-long PowerPoint training sessions are passé; microlearning is a new (and effective) way to train adult corporate learners. And the sooner your company adopts it, the happier your learners will be. Learner satisfaction, of course, translates into more business for you. But being the prudent person that you are, you will want to see "the numbers" before you decide to board the bus. So here are the numbers:

With benefits like automation, consistent messaging, wider reach, and the ability to provide 24/7 learning, eLearning is an option that more and more companies have started to embrace. But now what do you do with those PowerPoint slides that you created ages ago and had been delivering to your employees since then? If that training program is effective, don’t ditch it. You can convert it into an eLearning program without reinventing the wheel. But look out for these common mistakes that companies do when converting PowerPoint and Instructor-Led Training to eLearning because they don’t realize that eLearning and classroom learning are different:

With the world going digital, you can no longer stick to traditional training programs that have to be delivered in classrooms and whose efficacy is dependent on the skills and personalities of the trainers. Your learners who may be scattered physically want more freedom to choose the training they want to take and the time and place where they want to take it. Going digital is the only way you can meet the demands of the modern learner, who wants fast, personalised, bite-sized information, wherever they are. According to IOMA (2002) companies save between 50% and 70% when they replace instructor-based training with e-learning. Click to tweet.