Enspire deploys its Signature Simulation line of leadership development products to clients worldwide. Opportunities and excitement come with the territory, as did a recent… military coup. Enspire Associate Taylor Nyberg was already in country when political events in Thailand temporarily derailed her team’s Bangkok deployment. Applying the maxim "improvise, adapt, and overcome" Taylor and Co. adjusted plans and hit the countryside to befriend an elephant, and this apparently well-fed tiger. The post Spotlight > Enspire Sims in Thailand appeared first on Enspire.

There’s a lot of developer buzz around AngularJS, and rightly so. Angular has pretty cool features right out of the box that can save web devs bunches of time. Two-way data-binding, dependency injection, and modularity are just some of the big features being touted for this framework. After scrolling through dozens of blog posts and articles discussing the benefits of Angular, we decided to take a look to see how it could fit into Enspire project workflow. Verdict: AngularJS needs some of its pointier angles filed down before it joins our toolbox. Why? Read on. Intangibles Parts of the Angular framework are described as "magic". Maybe this term is used to abstract away some of the framework’s complexity. Or maybe we’re just grouches, but calling something "magic" implies that what goes on behind the scenes is unknowable, or too complex to convey to users of the framework. This is a problem with any open-source framework that is as complex as Angular, because it can make it hard to find shortcomings or areas where the framework doesn’t line up with project need. In the end, that can make a dev’s life harder. This feeds into our second concern: There are very few people actually talking about limitations of AngularJS. Sure, there are plenty of people out there saying that Angular sucks (possibly, because it is unfamiliar). We actually think Angular is pretty cool and some of the things it can do take some of the burden off the shoulders of coders using it. But all frameworks have shortcomings. The fact that it is hard to find objective information regarding Angular’s pitfalls - perhaps because it’s new - makes it hard to evaluate the framework. Getting started with Angular is almost insanely easy: download the library, add it to your app, do a tutorial, and bang you can use Angular. Ok, ok - almost every framework or library touts how quick it is to get started building apps. That leaves something very important out of the conversation, however. It takes a good deal of familiarity with AngularJS to build a medium to large app that doesn’t look like spaghetti (I’m looking at you directives). This makes it more costly, both in time and resources, to get new developers ramped up on a project which uses Angular and can present a barrier to entry for otherwise qualified developers. Tangibles The documentation is terrible. Quite a few people have mentioned this, and it really should be one of the things Google addressed prior to releasing the framework as 1.0. Word on the street is that documentation has been getting better and by 2.0 should be fantastic. But that doesn’t help now. The two-way data binding which Angular is capable of is at once pretty cool and a potential nightmare. Having two thousand pieces of data rendered on the page seems like a large number and an argument can be made that having that much information displayed at once is bad UX and rightly so. Except that there are cases where you might have a great deal of information hidden until needed or even some large tables, grids, or other dynamic visualizations which easily hit two thousand discrete pieces of data very quickly. This is not something we would expect to encounter with every project but is a crucial bit of information when deciding which stack to use. Directives are also a really cool feature of Angular and a necessity if you plan on building anything with more than a modicum of complexity. Directives can be hard to figure out, even using the documentation, but are what really drives the time-savings when using Angular. The main problem I see with using directives is that it is difficult to tell when a directive has completed (for something like an animation) without using something hacky like a timeout. It may not look to bad from a pasta point of view, but if you want consistency across the widest range of browsers and devices then this is really a no-go solution. There are other issues with Angular including how the router works, lack of support for accessibility, 3rd-party library headaches, and consistency with TDD. But those can be worked around for the most part. I hope to find myself working with Angular one day on the right project, but for now there are a few roadblocks making it difficult for us to do so. The post Heretic: Our Reverse Angle on AngularJS appeared first on Enspire.

1) Would you guess that a typical adult learner spends more time in his or her email inbox or LMS? Obviously, the email inbox. So why not deliver courses via email? This would be a smart solution for bite-sized portions of learning content delivered over a period of time. Little and often. 2) Speaking of "little and often," Donald Clark lays out 10 ways to massively increase retention. All 10 strategies lead to one thing: spaced practice over time. The post Two for Tuesday: Email and Retention appeared first on Enspire.

OptumInsight is driven by the philosophy that information and technology are the keys to transform the healthcare industry and improve people’s lives. Over 8,000 OptumInsight employees world-wide, including doctors, nurses, biostatisticians, coders, epidemiologists, economists, engineers, and technologists are dedicated to this mission.  But with such a diverse workforce, many OptumInsight employees were unaware of all the markets the organization serves, or how it provides solutions to these various markets. OptumInsight partnered with Enspire and our media design arm, Houndstooth, to develop This is OptumInsight! an online onboarding program that prepares and unites new employees in a common understanding of the company. Learners explore through three doorways, "Working at OptumInsight," "Who We Serve," and "What Is OptumInsight?" A variety of sleek, vibrant, media types provide a fun, dynamic, and compelling welcome to the company, culminating with the OptumInsight challenge. The challenge is learners’ opportunity to showcase their new understanding of all that OptumInsight is and does. To see more, contact Enspire today for a demo of This is OptumInsight!   The post Friday Spotlight > This is OptumInsight! appeared first on Enspire.

Today, more than ever before in human history, knowledge is readily accessible. There is no need to cram training programs chock-full of content. Instead, learners can connect to just-in-time knowledge resources: ubiquitous internet access instant text/voice/video communication tools "cloud" workflow collaboration performance support systems knowledge management systems Just-in-time knowledge resources combined with a self-service model is the answer to course content glut. Text is a resource. Practice is instruction. Focus online learning programs on practice rather than knowledge acquisition. Create a risk-free tryout environment, contextualized to performance needs. Enable learners to sip from the fountains of knowledge, rather than to drown by a fire-hose of information. Knowledge is readily accessed. But experience is earned. The post Why less is needed more than ever before appeared first on Enspire.

Physicians’ Reciprocal Insurers (PRI) understands that effective communication in medical care is highly correlated with better patient adherence. According to an extensive review of literature published between 1949 and 2008, training physicians in communication skills results 1.62 times better odds of patient adherence. With this statistic in mind, PRI partnered with Enspire and our media arm, Houndstooth, to create Tuning In: Communication Skills for Partnering with Patients. The five-hour online curriculum features virtual patient encounters derived from real medical malpractice cases, and allows physicians to explore and enhance their medical soft skills in a variety of challenging patient situations. Learners make decisions about what to do, say, and the appropriate care to provide to virtual patients. These patients provide real-time feedback to the learner’s choices. Success is measured by whether patients understood and took an active role in the course of their care, and if they received the care that was best for them. The fun, immersive experience is facilitated by a virtual mentor who provides expert consultative feedback, enabling learners to draw valuable learning conclusions from larger patterns of behavior. To see more, contact Enspire today for a demo of Tuning In: Communication Skills for Partnering with Patients.   The post Friday Spotlight > Medical Soft Skills appeared first on Enspire.

Cisco needed a way to promote a new global initiative called Cisco Organizational Learning (COL), so we developed an e-learning course in the style of a graphic novel that introduces COL and motivates employees to participate. The learner is taken down two paths of the story to reveal cause and effects and discover the importance of the initiative. This course was a true collaboration between Cisco’s subject matter experts and Enspire  instructional designers, artists, and developers. If you’d like to learn more about the design and development process, watch a 2012 Brandon Hall webinar in which Cisco’s Dawn Adams Miller and I talk about the project. Or, watch the following short video for a few highlights from the course.   The post Friday Spotlight > Cisco appeared first on Enspire.

1) Our industry is obsessed with "the fold." It’s as if we think our learners forget how to scroll once they enter an online learning experience. Baloney. 2) Inspiration comes when you least expect it, and often not right when you need it. I think the trick is to continuously expose yourself to things that have the potential to inspire you and save those sources of inspiration for later retrieval. Get started now. Here are 10 unusual sources of inspiration. The post TFT: Above the Fold and Inspiration appeared first on Enspire.

This week Enspire’s Product division delivered Executive Challenge to 270 new Full-Time MBA students at the University of Texas at Austin’s McCombs School of Business. Enspire has delivered the simulation - one of Enspire’s suite of Challenge business simulations - since 2007. The Executive Challenge day begins early with a fast-paced introduction to the sim, then proceeds through several quarters during which learners make critical business and organizational decisions under time pressure. Between rounds, learners are encouraged to break out and strategize their company’s actions for coming quarters.  The simulation is  part McCombs’ orientation to its top-ranked MBA program, and serves the following goals: To offer a shared experience during which students can network and build relationships they can leverage in the future To introduce students to important concepts which will be built upon in business school To encourage the students to think about the ethical implications of business decisions As the end of day capstone, Learner companies pitch to a panel of investors. Enspire will also be executing Executive Challenge with their Executive MBA and Executive MBA at Mexico City students later this month. If you think ExChal might be right for your business program, contact Enspire today!       The post Friday Spotlight > Executive Challenge appeared first on Enspire.

Think of the most engaging asynchronous course you’ve ever experienced as an online learner at work. Can you picture it? Remember the interactivities, practice opportunities, and challenges included in the learning experience? Now ask yourself: Did you use a keyboard? Maybe you typed a password that enabled you to launch the course. Or, you entered your name to "personalize" the course (that’s not really personalization, by the way). Other than that, you most likely only interacted with the course by clicking or touching. You were probably not asked to write anything. Now, think of the work emails you’ve composed this week. Can you picture them? Remember the explanations, justifications, and clarifications you painstakingly detailed? Now ask yourself: did the composition of your emails or the completion of the online learning experience require deeper thinking? Most likely: the emails. That brings up three questions: Why is the act of writing such a powerful learning experience? As I said in an earlier post, writing promotes reflection, increases creativity, builds networks, and more. Perhaps the greatest benefit is that writing helps clarify ideas. The process of writing this very post is a great example — I’ve written and rewritten these paragraphs multiple times as I’ve sharpened my thoughts. What is it about writing for an audience that is so powerful? Wired recently included an excerpt from Clive Thompson’s new book, Smarter Than You Think, that explains this phenomenon. It’s called the audience effect — the shift in our performance when we know people are watching. When a person is asked to communicate an idea to someone else, they focus and learn more. For most people, the size of an audience doesn’t matter. Thompson argues that "the cognitive shift in going from an audience of zero (talking to yourself) to an audience of 10 (a few friends or random strangers checking out your online post) is so big that it’s actually huger than going from 10 people to a million." Why don’t we ask our online learners to write more often? Perhaps the most common explanation is that it’s difficult to track online learners’ writing. The SCORM standard doesn’t make this easy. In theory, a SCORM package could tell an LMS, "Hey, Joe Blow wrote the following paragraph…" However, SCORM packages have a finite number of characters that can be stored and communicated to an LMS. So, depending on a variety of technical factors, one could ask learners to type short responses to a handful of questions that are then reported to the LMS. But, unless someone is going to read all of the responses submitted to the LMS, no one is going to be able to verify that they were sufficiently written. Besides, writing for an audience of one (i.e. the LMS) isn’t very motivating. Despite the challenges associated with providing writing opportunities during an asynchronous learning experience, it’s possible. Here are a few ideas to get your started: Early in the design process, send a survey to your target audience asking for their thoughts on a topic. Then, include a sampling of those responses word-for-word in the course. Ask learners to respond to questions outside of the SCORM package. Link to a discussion board where learners can write their thoughts and read posts written by others. If tracking participation is important, provide a numeric code on the "Thank You" screen that appears after a post has been submitted. Learners could then enter that numeric code within the course to demonstrate completion of the activity. Based on a learner’s performance within the formal learning experience, assign them to one of two groups: experts and up-and-comers. Then, pair a member from each group together and ask them to connect via e-mail. However you do it, try to stop ignoring the keyboard when designing asynchronous learning experiences. Pointing and clicking can make for great learning experiences, but writing can make them even better. The post Keyboardless Corporate Training appeared first on Enspire.

Enspire’s design and media arm, Houndstooth, collaborates on all our learning and edumarketing projects, but also does fantastic work  (check out the work on their homepage) for clients outside the learning industry. Last month HT collaborated with BarkBox to create film bumpers for BarkFest 2014. Sponsored by BarkBox and presented by the Madison Park Conservancy on July 26th, 2014, BarkFest showcased a number of creative, dog-focused films in the free, outdoor venue of Madison Square Park. Not surprisingly for an event termed "BarkFest", this  was an (extremely) dog-friendly event. New York photographer Brian Eden (@brianeden) did a great job capturing a compendium of canines which you can see on his site here.   The post Friday Spotlight > Houndstooth appeared first on Enspire.

Learning technologies — like any other tool — can be put to good or wrong purposes. Often we put a tool to "wrong" purposes when we use that tool in ways that don’t match its natural affordances. I like the analogy of a pencil: it’s a great tool for writing on  paper, but not such a good tool for punching holes into paper — although I can recall using it for such purposes back when paper was popular ;-). To be sure, you can punch holes into paper with a pencil, but those holes are apt to be ragged and misaligned. That’s an example of a technology being extended beyond the affordances of its design, beyond its purpose. We understand tools to be utilitarian objects created and applied to problem-solving. The history of human innovation is not the result of invention for its own sake, to discover appropriate uses later, but invention for the sake of specific problem-solving activities. We must approach learning technologies this way too. Like the pencil punching, we too often try to shoehorn learning technology into places it doesn’t fit well. Ask yourself: what problem am I trying to solve? What are the action possibilities of the tool? How can we use lit to mitigate learning problems? Facilitate group learning? Enhance or enrich an individual learning experience? Put to purpose, learning technologies help us in one or more of the AAA learning tools categories: ACCESS: for just-in-time learning and information retrieval ASSISTANCE: for performance support and augmented communication tools ADAPTIVE: for personalization, individual pathways, targeted remediation, and accommodations for people with disabilities or learning differences. The post AAA Learning Tools appeared first on Enspire.

What is at the heart of any training initiative? The ability to make a difference. That could mean an employee able to do their job with more efficiency, consumers buying a product after understanding the value, or preparing a university student for success in a course to pass that final exam. Training is done for a lot of reasons, but the one thing we all want to know is: Did it work? Let’s look at how we can find out. First, let’s look at a brief overview of some standards for any training evaluation project. Most people in the training industry use the Kirkpatrick levels for training evaluation. I’ll break them down for you, below. Level 1:  Did they enjoy the training experience? The first thing most people want to know is if the people who took the course enjoyed the experience. This is important to know because if you have a group of people who were bored, angry, irritated, or frustrated the technology didn’t work, any impacts of the training aren’t going to be seen if all of these blockers stand in their way. So how do we find this out? Most people do a survey that is emailed out after the course, or pops up as part of the course at the end. Level 2:  Did they learn what they were supposed to? So next, we want to know if they actually gleaned what was intended from the course.  Did they understand the material? After they took the training, could the learner describe or remember what they learned? How do we determine this? Usually by a knowledge check or test at the end of the training. Level 3:  Were they able to use the training? After they learned the critical objectives from the training course, we want to know if they actually did something with it. For example, say Company B is training its employees to push Button X instead of Button Y at the end of the day. Now that they are outside of the training environment, and back at work, did they actually change the way they behaved? Did Button X get pushed or were people still pushing Y? How do we determine this? This one can be a little tricky. So if you have a way to measure something like button pushes, this is easy. But if you’re training people on soft skills, like politeness or customer service EQ, then it gets more complicated. You might have to have observation involved, or some kind of pre- and post-test simulation exercise to determine if the learner’s behavior and skills changed. Level 4: Did we make a difference? Now that your group of learners has enjoyed the training, remembered it, and you were able to see they actually used it, the next question is:  Did we make an impact? This is when you can look at metrics and data and say, "Wow, look at the increase in Button  X pushes! We’ve had a 95% increase in Button X usage." Assume Button X actually saves you $10 every time an employee pushes it. Well, do a little math and you just saved your company a lot of money! How do we determine this? This is usually relying on cold, hard data. You want numbers. You have to look at what you want to achieve. What is the end result? Are you trying to save time, steps, volume? Get the data to show that, and then add the money factor to it. If this training initiative shaved 2 hours off an employee’s weekly workload and you had 500 employees take the training, that’s 1000 hours. Say the average employee’s salary is $20/hour. You can just tell your boss that your training idea saved the company $20,000 a week! And who wouldn’t want to give you a promotion? Now that we have the basics down, let’s examine a case study to give you some more specifics. With an actual example! Case Study:  The call center. Call centers are a mecca of training initiatives. There is always opportunity for employees to do their job quicker, more easily, and with fewer support resources. So this is what happened when I was tasked with revising a new hire training for a call center that supported customers calling in with their tech issues. Current state: There was high employee turnover, customer satisfaction scores (also known as CSAT) were dropping, the calls took longer than they were supposed to, and the managers and trainers were constantly doing just in time training initiatives hoping for the best results. How can a call center support its customers and make a profit in this shape? Answer: They can’t. What was the solution? After going in and doing a job analysis, interviewing some groups of employees and identifying that the problem was they weren’t adequately prepared to do the job, I revised their new hire training so that it was more engaging, covered all of the top call drivers, and had the new employees doing the job in the safety of the training environment (via tools simulation and mock calls) before they got on the floor to take calls. Then it was time to measure.  Did it work? Remember that the problem of the current state had a few measurables that could be tied to training: 1) the CSAT was poor, and 2) the calls took too long. These were both data points that could be used in order to do an ROI analysis. So after a month on the floor, I compared the new batches of call center employees who had gone through the revamped training, with the previous few groups who went through the previous training. I used sample sizes that were around the same (around 100), and the same time period to try and do an apples to apples comparison. What I found was that for the new batch of employees, the CSAT scores had gone up by 10%, and their calls were 2 minutes shorter. And the only thing that had changed was the training. This was great news. Customers were happier because they got their issues resolved faster and more accurately, and the business was happier because those metrics are what they live and breathe by. Not only had we shown that there was a measurable difference in quality, but we could now look at how much we were saving per call. By assuming the employees made on average $15/hour, with a 100 employees, over time those 2 minutes per call were going to add up. All this money saved just by introducing a new training program catered to employee needs, and doing an effective training evaluation after it was implemented. Do you want to know more about conducting an evaluation of a training project? Trying to figure out which data to use or how to get started? Contact Enspire for a consultation today! The post Assess Training Success! appeared first on Enspire.

You can find a TED talk on just about any subject. Being in the learning biz, and many of us parents to boot, we were drawn to Adora Svitak‘s 2010 talk that deftly inverts the adult-as-teacher-child-as-student paradigm. As noted on the TED site, Adora "says the world needs "childish" thinking: bold ideas, wild creativity and especially optimism. Kids’ big dreams deserve high expectations, she says, starting with grownups’ willingness to learn from children as much as to teach." Watch Adora’s 2010 speech below.   The post Learning from Our Kids appeared first on Enspire.

Houndstooth Executive Producer Mark Heaps will deliver the Creative Keynote at PePcon 2015, a leading conference in the print and e-publishing fields, this Wednesday, 3 June at 9:00 AM. Formerly at Google, Apple, and Duarte in creative lead roles, Mark is an Adobe Certified Expert and Community Professional with 20 years of experience. Mark’s keynote will help creative service providers hone their client-facing skills and guide engagements to a successful conclusion. Bringing his long Adobe experience to bear, Mark will also speak on Tuesday, 2 June from 4-5:00 PM on Shockingly Helpful Tips for Photoshop and Illustrator. Find more info on the complete PePcon schedule, here!   The post Houndstooth at PePcon appeared first on Enspire.

Enspire is pleased to announce that the joint Enspire / MasterCard team have won a Silver Brandon Hall award in the 2014 Best Use of Mobile Learning category. MasterCard needed a compelling, mobile-enabled interactive program that transformed employees into advocates for the organization. This brand training, which serves as the first level of a three-part training initiative called EDGE (Employees Driving the Global Enterprise), delivers a wealth of information that empowers MasterCard employees to deliver the company’s value message, both face-to-face and on social media. MasterCard EDGE is designed for all MasterCard employees - people with a wide variety of experience in different sectors of the organization. Nearly three-fourths of MasterCard’s employees were born after 1965. To address the needs of this diverse group, MasterCard and Enspire devised a goal-based learning experience. Using a  morning train commute to work as a metaphor, learners accept a series of challenges, interact with characters, and gain insights into the MasterCard brand. Deployment on tablet devices allowed the experience to make use of new HTML5 API’s  for navigation through  the experience. At the same time, jettisoning a Flash or shrinkwrapped software approach facilitated a completely custom approach, with contemporary media and technical implementation. EDGE also won the Award of Excellence from Diversity Journal in August. (See page 36). Contact Enspire to learn more about EDGE, or any of our hundreds of other successful programs.     The post Enspire Wins Silver appeared first on Enspire.

AUSTIN TX  - 5 June 2015 - Training Industry has named Enspire, a leading developer of training content and media, to its Content Development Companies Watchlist for 2015. Training Industry has named Enspire to the list, or as a Top 20 Content Development company,  for 4 years in a row. In 2014 Enspire was also named as a Top 20 Gamification Company in recognition of its 15 years of simulation and game work for Fortune 500 clients. Selection to the 2015 Content Development Watch List was based on the following criteria: Industry visibility, innovation and impact Capability to develop and deliver multiple types of content Company size and growth potential Depth and breadth of subject matter expertise Quality of clients Geographic reach Each company who participates undergoes extensive research, including thorough analysis of its capabilities, experience, and expertise. "We are very proud to be included in Training Industry’s Content Development Company watchlist," said Enspire and Houndstooth CEO Mary Maltbie. "Our team has worked extremely hard to deliver great learning content through all of our capabilities - online, blended, in physical spaces such as workshops and museums, and through our commercial media." Enspire and its Houndstooth experience design and media arm have developed internal and consumer-facing training since 2001. The post Enspire named Top Content Company appeared first on Enspire.

If you could time travel back 8000 years to an Indo-European speaking village and ask somebody to tell you a joke,  you’d probably get this one: "If you don’t like the weather, stick around. It’ll change!"  Ha ha! Humans throughout time have told that joke because weather humor is 1) unfailingly hilarious, and 2) offers up the makings of inoffensive, vanilla conversation mumble-able in elevators, office parties, village market days, or periods of awkward silence.  Our fair city of Austin, Texas is no exception to the changing weather rule, but it offers relief for the climate-overwhelmed through a greatly simplified system. The folks who plan Austin music festivals know this, and craftily park their events on blocks of calendar time when the weather inflects from one of its two states to the other.  I diagrammed it out for easy reference:   This year’s warm autumn breezes not only tell me it’s time for the Austin City Limits music festival to spin up like a dust devil a couple of blocks away, but (talk about burying the lead) they’ve carried Enspire and Houndstooth south! After nearly 13 years in our beloved 1940′s three story walk-up a stone’s throw from the University of Texas campus and several nice phở establishments, we’ve decamped to digs a mile south and at least two generations newer. We’ll miss some things about the old space (phở joints, proximity to pub next door) more than others (see "three story walk-up"). A good deal of great work was done and wonderful times had a 1708 Guadalupe. But the best things about Enspire and Houndstooth are our clients, our projects, and our co-workers. All of those three can be found at our new address in the Crescent building: 127 E Riverside Drive Suite 101 Austin, TX 78704 Oh! We have a rooftop deck, too - see the picture at the very top of the story. Come by and we’ll offer you a beer. The post We’ve moved! appeared first on Enspire.

Get Enspire’s 2015 #Medical Case Studies! Medical soft skills, #nurse critical care training, and #Cancer navigator training, and more. Get them, here: http://ow.ly/O028v The post Medical Case Studies appeared first on Enspire.

Enspire hosted its annual Oktoberfest celebration on Friday, 17 October. Inaugurating a new tradition, this year’s Fest was held on Enspire’s expansive rooftop deck with an excellent (see earlier blog post) view of downtown Austin. Previous celebrations had been held at Scholtz Garten, an establishment near our old offices that has been in continuous operation at the same location since 1866 - an artifact of Central Texas’ extremely large German and Czech populations. Everybody knows Oktoberfest is about beer, but that gives short shrift to the mass quantities of wurst, kraut, chickens, fish, ham hocks and pretzels consumed under German Fest tents. In Germany eating and drinking are cut with dancing and acres of carnival rides that agitate the collective into an appropriate state of Gemütlichkeit. Enspire’s satellite Austin Oktoberfest achieved the same with plenty of beer, spirits, food, and tours of our new office for Enspire clients, alums, and friends and family members. The post Gruß vom Oktoberfest! appeared first on Enspire.

Enspire Account Director Robert Bell will be attending InstructureCon 2015, June 16-18 in Park City, Utah. The conference is hosted by Instructure, makers of the Canvas LMS for educational institutions. Enspire has extensive expertise in developing envelope-pushing, student-centered custom tools that can be easily integrated into the Canvas platform, most notably for the University of Texas’s OnRamps program. We are continually pursuing innovation in educational technology — by leveraging a third party cognitive computing platform, we are developing a new tool that promises to deliver unique and valuable student personality insights to educators. For more information, contact Robert today: robert.bell@enspire.com. The post Enspire at InstructureCon 2015 appeared first on Enspire.

Can you recognize the learning goals behind these academic masks? By the end of this training, you will be able to… Design and don appropriate attire, as specified in Team Handbook, Section IV: Appropriate Attire, page 132, for the occasion. Approach a minimum of 20 domiciles in the vicinity of a 1-mile radius, and effectively articulate requests to residents for specific holiday-themed needs. Acquire a minimum of 2 confectionary donations per domicile within 15 seconds after requesting provisions. Don’t cloak learning objectives in unnecessary garb. Sure, number 2 of Gagne’s Nine Events of Instruction is to "inform learner of objectives," but the purpose of doing so, even according to Gagne, is to help set the learner’s expectations. Your learners probably need the "what’s in it for me?" version. Were you able to remove the academic masks and see these learner-centered objectives? This training will enable you to…. Make and wear a fun costume. Go to neighbors’ houses and yell "trick or treat!" Get tons of candy! Happy Halloween! The post Are Your Learning Objectives in Disguise? appeared first on Enspire.

Training Specialists from the Texas Juvenile Justice Department (TJJD) invited Enspire’s Creative Director, Jan Farquhar, to share best practices for designing meaningful training with participants of the 2015 Training Coordinators’ Conference, a two-and-a-half-day conference 6/15-6/17 in Austin, Texas. Conference participants, who are responsible for training probation officers in communities across the state, have, historically, primarily used lecture-based presentations. However, with employees increasingly expecting more variety in their training (including online and mobile learning opportunities), TJJD turned to Enspire to provide information and inspiration for designing creative, effective training. Working from the core believe that to be effective, trainers must create relevancy, maintain attention, and enable processing, Jan presented demonstrations and led discussions about four key strategies that help trainers meet those goals: Collaboration Stories and scenario-based learning Games and gamification Self reflection Additionally, Jan incorporated each strategy into the workshop, subtly role-modeling the tactics she was promoting. For example, "benefits of collaboration" was reinforced as learners worked together to answer questions. "Self reflection" was reinforced by asking learners periodically to jot down notes as to how they might apply each strategy in the field. Therefore, in addition to seeing demonstrations and discussing meaningful learning experiences, learners actually experienced each of the strategies first hand. The post Consulting with TJJD appeared first on Enspire.

Enspire Learning (www.enspire.com) welcomes the addition of Duarte alumnus Mark Heaps to its leadership team as Executive Producer of Houndstooth (www.houndstoothstudio.com), the commercial media and experience design arm of Enspire. Prior to Duarte, Mark served as a technical leader at Google, and Apple, and taught as a Senior Instructor of Graphic Design at Brooks College in Sunnyvale, CA. Mark has been a long standing Adobe Community Professional, and Adobe Certified Expert, who has spoken at conferences such as Adobe MAX, SXSW Interactive, PePcon, and many others. As a member of the Enspire leadership team, Mark will work to further the Houndstooth brand while at the same time integrating its commercial-quality design with Enspire Learning’s portfolio of services and a client base established over 15 years. "We are thrilled to have Mark join the Enspire team," Mary Maltbie, CEO of Enspire, said. "His team-leading experience, engagement with our current and potential clients, and ability to easily move between tactical and strategic endeavors make him a very welcome addition to our corporate family." An organic part of Enspire since 2010, Houndstooth is a multidisciplinary design and production studio wholly owned by Enspire and co-located in our office space. Created to capitalize on the wealth of interactive installation and event-planning talent in the Enspire multimedia department, Houndstooth services all Enspire projects while also pursuing engagements entirely outside the learning space under its own brand. Houndstooth specializes in motion graphics design, interactive installations, events, and sound and music design. Founded in 2001 to become a leading source of high-quality learning applications, Enspire creates solutions designed to educate, delight, and change learner behavior. The post HT welcomes EP appeared first on Enspire.