Today we don’t get to decide which device learners use to access our Learning - slide used in my mobile learning workshop According to a new forecast from the International Data Corporation (IDC), the shift from traditional Personal Computers to Mobile Devices continues forward faster than expected, and with no slowing down in sight. This naturally bodes well for all who follow the mobile learning revolution, but it also puts enormous pressure on learning designers to develop learning that can be consumed beyond just the desktop computer. As I say in my presentations and workshops, today we don’t get to decide which devices learners use to access our learning. "What started as a sign of tough economic times has quickly shifted to a change in the global computing paradigm with mobile being the primary benefactor," said Ryan Reith, Program Manager for IDC’s Mobility Trackers. "Tablets surpassing portables in 2013, and total PCs in 2015, marks a significant change in consumer attitudes about compute devices and the applications and ecosystems that power them. IDC continues to believe that PCs will have an important role in this new era of computing, especially among business users. But for many consumers, a tablet is a simple and elegant solution for core use cases that were previously addressed by the PC." via IDC Forecasts Worldwide Tablet Shipments to Surpass Portable PC Shipments in 2013, Total PC Shipments in 2015 - prUS24129713.

Written by Chris Osborn   Feedback and coaching are essential parts of employee growth. Today's Q&A Thursday video gives tips on how to give honest, constructive feedback.     Stay Up-to-Date on the Most Current Business Training Trends BizLibrary offers 7,000+ training videos in various business training topics, with new courses added every day.   10 Tips for Marketing Your Employee Training Program In this eBook we’ll discuss you'll learn 10 ways to improve the marketing of your online employee training program and boost employee engagement and participation. BizLibrary's Mobile Learning App meets the needs of today's digital learners. Employees no longer wait for training departments to push learning content to them. Employees are used to pulling information to themselves, when they need it, on their own terms and conditions, and on their own devices. Video Transcription Hi, Chris Osborn, VP of Marketing with BIzlibrary with today's Q&A. Today's question comes from Robyn. She's a manager at a multi-location manufacturing facility, and she wants to know how you help managers understand that they need to be honest regarding employee shortcomings in addition to strengths.   She says its imperative an ongoing record of weaknesses and strengths. We had mentioned that feedback and coaching can work best after wins and employees are most engaged and successful when working in areas of strength during a webinar this week. Robyn's question touches on a great point. We DO have to be open and honest with employees about their weaknesses too. First, we're not all as self-aware as we'd like, so we have to help employees understand both their strengths AND weaknesses. So, how's the best way to do that? My first recommendation is to NOT be confrontational. That's rarely a good strategy. If you don't believe me, just think about the political mess we see everyday in Washington. How well has confrontation solving problems there?   So, try asking employees about times they felt most productive. Then, ask them to compare those experiences to times they felt frustrated, or least productive. In which situation would they rather work the most often? They will tell you most productive. Then help them compare the competencies they had to apply in each situation. The competencies and skills they had to apply while least productive are almost certainly going to be their weaknesses. So ask the employee which situation they'd rather work in. Productive, using strengths? Or unproductive, using weaknesses. The answer is going to be pretty obvious and very clear and now you've helped them address and understand both their strengths and weaknesses. Just coach your managers to keep a record of that and now you have a place to really coach and develop your managers. You help them build strengths and avoid weaknesses.

by Willam Van Weelden   A few weeks ago I showed you how you can use multilevel lists to easily create complex lists with multiple levels. But multilevel lists are far more powerful than I could show you in a single article. This week, I'm going to expand on the multi-level list theme by teaching you how to add sub-numbers to lists:  Sub-numbering is important for many procedures and legal documents. You simply can't have sub numbering in RoboHelp without multilevel lists, unless you want to manually type in all sub-numbers. But with multilevel lists, you control this behavior right from the style sheet!To add sub-numbering to a Multilevel List, first Create a multilevel list. Then, on the Project Manager pod, double-click your style sheet to open the Styles dialog box.  In the Styles dialog box, select your multilevel list. From the Apply Formatting To drop-down menu, choose a level that will use the sub-numbers.   Click in the Edit Style field and, from the Insert Level drop-down menu, choose 1.   Click OK to close the Styles dialog and save your changes. And that's it. From this point forward, any of your multilevel lists can include sub-numbering (as shown in the image below):   *** Looking to learn RoboHelp? We offer a live, two-day online RoboHelp class once a month. Feel free to contact us to learn other ways to meet your RoboHelp training requirements.

One of the hardest things to find are real-life examples of different kinds of eLearning solutions. On May 21, Learn Trends will be hosting a free online event where the people who have developed interesting eLearning solutions will demonstrate and briefly discuss what they've done.This is an online call for people who can "demonstrate" their system. Even if you can't participate - please help me get the word out on this.Because of my concerns about bandwidth - demonstrations will really be screen shot slides. Sorry. This makes it a bit harder to demonstrate 3D worlds, video based training, etc. But it can still be done - just screen shot it and plan to explain it.Generally we are looking for examples of a variety of different kinds of solutions. We hope they will vary from practical solutions to common problems to leading edge solutions. Some example areas and this is by no means inclusive:Self-Paced CoursesPerformance Support ToolsMobile LearningCollaborative LearningSocial / Network Learning3D LearningGamesToolkitsInteresting ToolsWe especially would like participants who are developing solutions inside of organizations to participate. These are most often the hardest examples to see.To participate, you must be available May 21 from 9AM to Noon Pacific Time.If you are interested, please send me an email (akarrer@techempower.com) with:A brief descriptionA couple of example screen shotsWe expect to have more examples than we can show and discuss in the 3 hours, so we will likely only be able to choose some of what is sent in. We will try to choose a variety of different examples that represent effective patterns.We are also trying to come up with ways to effectively share examples that are not shown real-time during the session.Two last things:Please help me spread the word about this.If you know of places that examples already are captured, please point me to those. Another aspect of this is beginning to capture examples that will be available online. eLearning Technology Browse eLearning Content

Have you ever sat in your office questioning why numbers aren’t where they should be or why performance isn’t higher than expected? It’s easy to immediately blame the employee- to start picking apart habits- say they should be working longer hours, wondering why aren’t they doing it this way, why are they doing it that way… ultimately thinking… maybe they aren’t right for the job. I certainly have had these thoughts.   It’s easy for a manager who is under stress and pressure to immediately react to problems. Whether it is to tell the employee that they need to improve, change or work harder- these often don’t yield long term results. These actions can often be destructive, by creating fear and an unhealthy work environment. Additionally, these actions can impact other employees infecting the culture.   Some managers know it is important to put a coaching plan in place, but often wonder why they fail. Is it the process or the employee?   What I have learned is that you have to take a step back and ask yourself 3 questions about the employee. Do they have the capacity to perform? - does the employee have the attitude and willingness to learn and grow into a top performer? Are they curious? - does the employee want to learn new things and show a desire to learn those things? Do they have a positive attitude? - are they excited about personal growth? If the answers to these 3 questions are yes, then you have employee that is coachable! Forget about what they have done in the past. Forget about what they should be doing. Determine what skills today they need help with and develop a plan.     A coaching process looks like this: Meet with your employee and share with them your confidence in their abilities and willingness to solve the problem. Specifically describe the performance problem, using data and examples. Focus on the specific behavior that needs improvement. Identify with the employee if there are any barriers from allowing them to work on or address this problem. Work to remove those roadblocks. Ask the employee for ideas on how to correct the problem. Discuss potential solutions , provide training recommendations and list actions to take. Write down an action plan and get buy in! List what the employee will do and what you will do as their leader in working on a solution. Find an end in sight- A specific time and date for follow up and progress check-ins must be included. Reinforce good performance - Catch employees doing it right and demonstrating positive behaviors. This will help boost employee confidence.   If you are struggling with coaching employees, take time to revisit the 3 magic questions. Coaching employees is a standard competency of management and leadership positions. Often times this skill is found to be an afterthought or only pointed out as a weakness when results are poor. Coaching employees is a very rewarding experience that builds trust and a positive work environment. It produces results and contributes to the bottom line.   Make time for coaching employees, the right employees.   Shannon Kluczny , VP of Client Services at BizLibrary Follow Shannon on Twitter at @Skluczny13   ABOUT SHANNON: I thrive on ensuring my staff has the best tools and resources available to continue to develop themselves. I respect others that are continuously learning, sharing and growing. My philosophy is if you're not learning, you're standing still. Social Media has also played a tremendous role in ongoing development, especially my own. I have an onsite and virtual team that I work with on a daily basis, and that's been a lot of fun to organize. I work hard to build a team of individuals with a variety of strengths that are intrinixly different and blend well in a multi-generational team. The best part of my team is that we all can learn from each other. We laugh, compete and work hard.     Developing the Coaching Skills of Your Managers and Leaders It comes down to people and the processes needed to support our people and organization. Download this complimentary eBook to get started with developing the coaching skills of your managers today! BizLibrary's Mobile Learning App meets the needs of today's digital learners. Employees no longer wait for training departments to push learning content to them. Employees are used to pulling information to themselves, when they need it, on their own terms and conditions, and on their own devices. - See more at: /technology/bizmobile.aspx#sthash.umjsk4e5.dpuf

by Jennie Ruby  I've talked about assure, ensure, and insure in the past, but I think these supremely confusable words deserve a reprise. Assure--to tell someone not to worry, is the way I think of it, as in the word reassure. This is also the word that the term quality assurance is based on. Here, I think of it as a process that allows a company to assure customers that the product is of high quality. The postal clerk assured me that the package would arrive on time. Ensure--to make sure or to make certain. This verb is the one you want when you ask a student to double-check something: The clerk ensured that the correct zip code was printed on the label. Please ensure that the checkbox is selected, then click the OK button. Insure--You are safest in usage on this one if you are talking about purchasing insurance. However, the U.S. military tends to use this also as a synonym for ensure. All of the specific usage I am discussing here goes beyond what descriptive dictionaries, such as Merriam Webster's, indicate. I found their differentiation of these terms to be too vague, compared with the standards I have typically been asked to follow when doing professional copyediting. So to be precise, make the distinctions indicated here. Here's a second set of confusing words: comprise/compose/constitute. Comprise--just memorize that the phrase is comprised of is always wrong. The larger thing comprises the parts, or draws them together: The monument comprises a stone obelisk and a colonnade. Compose--to make up. Is composed of is correct: The monument is composed of two parts: a stone obelisk and a colonnade. ***  This Week's Challenge: Which is correct?  We ensured/insured the ring for $3,000 after the jeweler apprised/appraised its/it's value. He told the participants to ensure/insure that their computers were logged out after the class. He also ensured/assured them that their files would not be erased. The new app is composed of/is comprised of two parts. The new app composes/comprises two separate parts, both of which are better than/then competing online services. Ensure/insure/assure that the dialog box is closed before exiting the program. The training program is comprised of/is composed ofdemonstrations, exercises, and quizzes. The individual programs of which the suite is comprised/of which the suite is composed/which the suite comprises are also available as stand-alones.  Feel free to post your answers below as comments. *** If you love Jennie's articles, you'll love her classes. Check out some of Jennie's mini courses.

Looking at the responses in Social Learning Designer to my services positioning template: For _________ (buyers) we help in their desire to __________ (benefits) by ________ (services) unlike others we _____________ (differentiation). There were only three responses: Jane Hart: I work with learning depts to help them create more participatory, collaborative approaches to learning - rather than just shoving content at people Colleen Carmean: for learning orgs, we help in their desire to increase knowledge within the org by shaping systems that make info needed available to anyone at anytime. Unlike others, we do this by creating distributed spaces, places and tools for sharing, finding and creating knowledge. John: For learning organizations we help build productive, skilled, thinking individuals and teams. Unlike others we do this in a collaborative, active, constructive manner. This sparked a couple of quick thoughts … Buyers / Audience - Learning Dept / Organizations I'm guessing that each of these responses are from a vendor perspective as they define the audience the same and it's not the organization itself, it's the learning organization / department.  Benefits - Learning / Knowledge In my post Social Learning Measurement - Will Thalheimer points out there are basically three reasons to measure learning: 1. To prove benefits 2. To improve the intervention 3. To improve learning. And I think you could make an argument that our benefits could fall in any of the three camps: business benefits, better interventions, improved learning. When I read each of the benefits above, I read them to be 3 - improved learning.  The closest to a real business benefit is "productive, skilled, thinking individuals" - but that's still a distance from what most business people would think of in terms of real business benefits. This is really a critical positioning issue … is our benefit improved learning or business benefits? I realize there will be times for us to define ourselves as one or the other, but I hope that we seek to define ourselves in terms of business benefit. In my post Social Learning Measurement - there are a host of things that we can measure around Social Learning (which was the focus of the post where these responses occurred).  These include things like: Networking patterns Learning efficiency Learning outcomes Contribution patterns  Content usage patterns Content quality Idea to development initiation cycle time Retention/Employee turn over Time to hire Prospect identification cost Prospect to hire conversion rate Hiring cost Training cost Time to acclimation for new employees And most of these really are measuring learning outcomes or Intermediate Factors in Learning (see also Intermediate Factors).  Real business outcomes really fall into either: increased revenue or reduced cost.  The rest are accepted intermediate factors for the business such as improved time-to-market, customer satisfaction, employee satisfaction, etc.  And there can be lots of these intermediate factors. So going back to a positioning question - I wonder if we shouldn't all be talking about specific kinds of business outcomes or intermediate factors that can be achieved? eLearning Technology Browse eLearning Content

View and download the webinar slides. View the webinar recording.     Additional Resources, Information and Inspiration:   "...if employees' relationship with their managers is fractured, then no amount of perks will persuade the employees to perform at top levels. Employee engagement is a direct reflection of how employees feel about their relationship with the boss." Source: Self-determination Theory And Facilitation Of Intrinsic Motivation, Social Development And Well-being, American Psychologist Association   From Bud to Boss: Secrets to Successful Transition to Remarkable Leadership by Kevin Eikenberry and Guy Harris   A Succession Plan for First Time Managers, Maria Plakhotnik and Tonette S. Rocco,   T&D Magazine, December 2011   Why Good Managers are So Rare, Harvard Business Review   When a Millenial Moves from Buddy to Boss, American Management Association   Drive by Daniel Pink         7 HR Law Training Topics for New Managers (and Experienced Ones Too!) In this eBook we’ll discuss: The main legal pitfalls that new managers need to avoid and what their legal responsibilities are as a manager The challenges faced by new managers The risk and costs associated with not training managers on employment law Legal responsibilities of managers.

by Kevin Siegel    You can add several types of video into a Captivate project, including AVI, MOV, and Flash Video (FLV or F4V). To insert a video, open or create a Captivate project and then choose Video > Insert Video to open the Insert Video dialog box.  You have two choices when inserting video: Event Video (typically video that is expected to play on only one slide) or Multi-Slide Synchronized Video (video that is expected to play across multiple slides). Most developers elect to use Event Video since videos that are confined to a single slide are easier to control.After you've made a decision between Event Video or Multi-Slide Synchronized Video, the next big decision is to load the video from a file that is already on your computer (by selecting On your Computer), or link to the video that is stored on a server (by selecting Already deployed to a web server, Adobe Media Streaming Service, or Flash Media Server).If you choose On your Computer (which most developers do), you simply Browse to the video that's on your computer or network drive, open it, and the video will be inserted onto the slide. From there, you use the Properties Inspector to set the video's timing and other attributes. It's a clean process with one major drawback: when you publish an eLearning lesson containing video, the resulting output could be quite large. And large lessons take longer to open and view over the Internet than smaller lessons that don't contain video.Instead of embedding the video in a Captivate project, you lower the size of the project and decrease load times for learners accessing your published content by linking to the videos that are stored on a server.If you have a web server, you can upload the videos to the server in advance and simply copy/paste the URL to the video into the URL field. Your corporate IT can set you up with a web server or, if you're up to the challenge, you can create your own web server using free media server software.If you don't have a web server, your server cannot handle large amounts of traffic, or you simply don't want to create your own server, a media service could be the way to go. Generally speaking, media services are servers available in the cloud that house your videos for you. When a learner watches your eLearning content and comes across a video you've added to a slide, the video is streamed from the media server to your learner. There are several pay-as-you-go companies/websites that provide media servers including Adobe Media Streaming Service, Wowza, Subsonic, and Plex.I'd love to get feedback from you about this topic. I've created a quick poll that asks how you're using video in eLearning and, just as important, where you're storing the videos. You can take the poll here.See also: Adobe Media Server 5 With Kevin Towes and a review on five of the top-selling media servers. *** Looking for instructor-led training on Adobe Captivate? Check out our live, online, instructor-led Captivate classes.

Written by Chris Osborn   Today's Q&A Thursday discusses how to use your training & development programs to recruit and retain top talent.     Stay Up-to-Date on the Most Current Business Training Trends BizLibrary offers 7,000+ training videos in various business training topics, with new courses added every day.   10 Tips for Marketing Your Employee Training Program In this eBook we’ll discuss you'll learn 10 ways to improve the marketing of your online employee training program and boost employee engagement and participation. BizLibrary's Mobile Learning App meets the needs of today's digital learners. Employees no longer wait for training departments to push learning content to them. Employees are used to pulling information to themselves, when they need it, on their own terms and conditions, and on their own devices. Video Transcription Hi, Chris Osborn, VP of Marketing at BizLibrary with today's Q&A. Today's question comes from Jessica. She's an HR specialist at a small SAAS technology company. She wants to know how we can using our training & development program to recruit top talent. I'm going to amplify the question a little bit to include retaining top talent as well. First, advertise your employee development program as a benefit. But do more than just talk about its existence. Explain the elements, and actual benefits to employees and their careers. For instance, if you have a tuition reimbursement program, explain the details. For instance, how long before an employee is eligible to participate. What the program covers, such as graduate degrees or certification programs, things like that. Second, use video. If you look at the best in class recruiting pages in various websites, they always include video elements. Use video to illustrate your development programs, and make sure to get testimonials from current employees. Last, add a video or at least a written greeting and statement from the president of your organization about your program and its importance. I know its obvious, but if the goal is to use your training program to attract talent, you have to make the program a highly visible element of your recruiting plan. So include marketing pieces and emails, your website, and social media and any other place you're trying to catch the attention of top talent. You can use your employee development and training program to attract and retain top talent, but you can't do it if you stay quiet about it. So use video, use it in marketing, get it out there in social media, and for goodness sakes get testimonials from employees and you can make great use of employee development, not only to raise the performance of employees, but to attract and retain the employees your organization needs to be successful.

This month's Big Question - Social Grid Value and a comment by Ken Allan on my Learning Goals post really got me to thinking. Ken said:I don't really think there's any new way of learning, but we may need to experiment with its delivery.At first I nodded my head, but then I started to wonder...Is there really no new way of learning?This is similar to the question raised in Brain 2.0 and I'm not really sure where we landed in that discussion. At the time, I said: I'm not claiming that the brain itself has changed, but instead what's changing is:metacognitionmetamemoryaccess to informationaccess to other peopleaccess to smart systemsAnd I still feel we are vastly underestimating what is happening around all of this. Our Better Memory changes what we remember, how we remember, how we find and filter information (Information Radar), how we process information (Processing Link Pages).The Social Grid and Network Learning have changed when and how we Search which is actually quite a change from how many of us learned to acquire information when we were in college.In fact, I still believe that this is THE challenge of the next 50 years plus. How do we accommodate the dramatic changes in the ways that humans interact with computers, information and each other? In 30 years we will be able to have implants that give us full, instant access to the web (no typing) including the social grid. Today, our access to all that information and other people is just a bit slower (we have to type). Sorry, I digress ...So, back to the original question - new way of learning?Part of the answer of whether there are new ways of learning is how we interpret the "way of learning." What is learning? Some definitions:the cognitive process of acquiring skill or knowledgerefers to the acquisition, and transfer to long-term memory, of experience, Information, and Knowledge, which may subsequently be used for solving problems, making decisions, and creating new knowledgeIf we are talking about brain function, I don't know enough to know whether there really is something different going on in how the brain works. So, if we interpret learning to be purely at that level, then an argument can be made that there's not anything different here because the brain still "learns" in the same way. Therefore the "way of learning" are the same. It's still some kind of physical activity within the brain. Once we are able to bypass visual / reading as our input mechanism from computers and have direct input into the brain that may be interpreted separate from those normal brain signals, then we can be assured that learning is different at this level. But I'm not sure that should be the hurdle we need to achieve in order to start to claim "new way of learning."If I look at the result of learning which according to the above definitions:skill or knowledgesubsequently be used for solving problems, making decisions, and creating new knowledgeI believe that so much is changed around this that it really has a profound impact on learning. We are already beginning down the 30 year path I'm describing above. Essentially we've begun to use computers as an extended brain. The social grid represents a Borg-like extended brain that gives us incredible access to expertise and problem solving. All of this changes:what we learnhow we choose what needs to be committed to long term memory vs. electronic memorywhat we need from a future look up standpointhow we solve problems and make decisionsSo while the physical level of learning may not be changing, the context has and is changing. It's changing enough that while it's technically accurate to claim there is no "new way of learning" - it feels misleading.I believe the way I learn today is very different than the way I learned 10 years ago. And dramatically differently than I the way I learned 25 years ago. eLearning Technology Browse eLearning Content

Adding video to eLearning can greatly enhance the learner experience.If you elect to include video in your project, you'll need to decide where the video will be stored when it's time to be viewed by the learner. Will you use a web server or media service?We're looking to find out what the eLearning community is doing when it comes to video. Spend a moment to take our Video in eLearning poll. We'll share the results with you here.Take the video in eLearning poll now.

A year ago I wrote a post entitled An Honest Assessment of Adobe Captivate 6 [First Impressions], which garnered 81 ReTweets and 62 comments, and to this day is the most read post here on my blog. Here’s how I concluded my review of Adobe Captivate 6 back then: Sadly I’m very disappointed with what I’ve seen out of the new Captivate version, and I say sadly because for years this product was my baby, from my early days working at eHelp, later Macromedia and more recently Adobe as a Senior Product Evangelist for Captivate and the eLearning Suite. It’s not even this particular version that disappoints me; it’s the overall lack of vision that Adobe has clearly shown in this release. There’s nothing in there that addresses real solutions for today’s trending topics, such as Cloud computing, Mobile Learning, Responsive Design, Adaptive publishing, Mobile Apps, etc. Having said that, I cannot recommend this version of Captivate nor would I recommend relying on Adobe as the future vendor that can deliver innovating and breakthrough eLearning and mLearning experiences for the 21st Century. via An Honest Assessment of Adobe Captivate 6 [First Impressions] | The mLearning Revolution Blog. Shortly after publishing the above review, I followed it up with another post entitled Here’s how Adobe Captivate 6 could have been a Game-Changer for mLearning, where I shared some ways in which Captivate could help take instructional designers to the next level. Fast Forward One Year Later Here we are 12 months later and Adobe India releases a new version of Captivate just in time for the mLearnCon conference. I give the team credit for what is obviously a faster upgrade cycle, as compared to the old 18-month upgrade cycle.  I think this makes a lot of sense, especially with the pace with which change happens in Technology these days. Don’t get me wrong, there are some nice new feature in version 7, however I cannot find that game-changing feature that I think every software upgrade needs to have, the ‘killer app’ if you will. In fact I think that most of the new features being promoted by Adobe have been there for a while in competing products like Articulate software, namely the ability to include YouTube videos in a course, as well as embedding a browser session on a slide. Same goes for the drag-and-drop widgets, which is something Articulate customers have been enjoying for a while now, so nothing terribly exciting there either. The team did add Tin-Can-API support, which I think is a must these days as learning moves more and more to mobile devices, so that’s definitely a nice addition. I’m not sure I understand the benefits of having an Equation Editor or how the Learning Notes feature works, but these are probably a good thing for certain verticals. Captivate needs to let go of the past and embrace the new Post-eLearning era My biggest problem is that Captivate (and the team for that matter) is holding on to the past and is risking becoming obsolete.  There’s a mobile revolution out there and is passing this once-great product by, in the way Kodak was left behind in the new digital age. There’s nothing that I have seen in this product that tells me I should be hopeful as a Learning professional, that Adobe will help me get to the next level, by helping me develop learning that can be accessed anytime, anywhere and most importantly on every device. Hence the title of this post. In fact I think the team is adding more and more of the things we absolutely don’t need in this new Post-eLearning era. Take for example the expanded list of Smart Learning Interactions, there are now 15 more, and this is bad news in opinion. In the Post-eLearning era, we don’t need more feature, which more often than not lead to heavier courses, we need less, we need simpler learning experience that adapt well to multiple screens and not make us wait for heavy courses to download to our mobile devices, only to have to pinch, zoom and swipe left, right, top and bottom to see the entire course, as illustrated here: Adobe Captivate 6 project converted to HTML5 and viewed on multiple devices. Note the scroll bars needed for all devices except for the iPad in landscape mode. Another example is the HTML5 support for PowerPoint, which Adobe is promoting heavily. I ran a quick ‘HTML5 Tracker‘ test with an old project and I’m still getting pretty much the same amount of unsupported features I did with Captivate 6, so not much in the way of improvements there. However even if Adobe managed to fix the long list of HTML5 conversion issue they have, this would still not be true mLearning. It would just be trying to retrofit an old format into a new medium, in other words it would be shrinking something big that fits on the desktop into something smaller in order to fit it on a mobile device. In my opinion, this is precisely what we should be trying to avoid. If your Learning Design calls for Absolute Dimensions, you have already Failed Here’s a slide that I show whenever I teach my workshop on Mobile Learning Design: A slide in Section 3 of my mLearning Design workshop The point I try to make with this slide is that today we don’t get to decide which device learners use to access our Learning and thus we need to think about design beyond the 1024 x 768 box. I recommend to my students that in choosing the right tool for mLearning, they need to look for tools that are designed more along the lines of Dreamweaver (i.e. based on relative screen percentages) and stay away from tools that force you to pick absolute dimensions, which will only yield great results on a single screen. In my mind this is a big problem for a lot of tools today, well beyond Adobe Captivate. Conclusion In all honesty, when Captivate 7 was announced I had no intention of writing about it, but I did because I saw an opportunity to share some of my thoughts on the changing Learning landscape and the new mindset we need to embrace, if we are going to seize the learning opportunities mobile presents to our Industry. I apologies if my brutally honest style of writing about Captivate offends anyone, this is not my intention. I could have easily write about the new features like most reviewer do, but then again that wouldn’t be the real RJ Jacquez. I leave you with this quote I once included in one of my posts, which I believe encompasses quite nicely how mobile design is different from the old desktop design paradigm we need to abandon, and why I believe embracing simplicity is a key ingredient to mobile learning:

One of the coolest things about working for BizLibrary is unlimited Learning! Each month BizLibrary Employees share their favorite courses. This month features four employees from the Marketing team.   August Pix from Left to Right:   Jessica Petry, Marketing Specialist @JessLPetry Great Managers Help People Hone Their Strength Short video, simple message and super powerful. Love this!This short leadership lesson video features author, Marcus Buckingham, of the book " First Break All the Rules. " According to Marcus Buckingham companies that focus on cultivating employees' strengths rather than simply improving their weaknesses stand to dramatically increase efficiency while allowing for maximum personal growth and success. Is powerful as a stand alone video or as part of a blended learning leadership development program. View the video preview below:   AJ Srivastava, Web Marketing Specialist Perspectives on Net Neutrality Net neutrality is an important issue facing the public today. Since its birth, the internet has always honored the idea of "neutral net", where providers do not prioritize any data or information. ISPs are looking to implement a tiered internet system, where priority is given to more expensive "high speed lanes" products. They would be given free rein to prioritize data, throttle bandwidth to content providers who do not pay, and collect more fees from both consumers and organizations. This video gives a high-level overview of net neutrality, as well as updates on recent developments. The guest, Peter Vogel, does a great job of explaining both sides of the issue. With the dependence we have on the internet, a good understanding of net neutrality will help managers and leaders understand the potential impact that it may have on their organizations. View the video preview below:   Amanda Holloran, Marketing Automation Specialist Keep Your Cool: Attitude (Part 3) Have you ever been told that 'a positive attitude renders a positive outcome just like a negative attitude delivers a negative outcome'? The Keep Your Cool series teaches you exactly that - how to keep your cool. Part 3 of this series focuses on how an attitude change is the start of keeping cool. A majority of the time we find ourselves wanting to control everything but the reality is that we can only control so much. Realizing that we can only control so much, and letting go of the anger we have over things we cannot control is the healthiest thing we can do. Keeping a positive attitude, by any of the suggested methods, is the best way to avoid anger. View the video preview below:   Erin Pinkowski, Marketing Manager How to Work a Room, Part 1and Part 2 One of my favorite courses right now is How to Work a Room.  I watched both Part 1 and Part 2 a few weeks back just before heading off to SHRM 2014 in Orlando .  I knew that the conference was going to involve some networking events so I figured I would brush up on my "networking" skills. These courses give some great quick tips for business professionals on working a room and meeting new people. The best takeaway tip was the importance of having your business cards handy as opposed to digging through your purse at each interaction…I hope I have never done that!! What’s even better?  The courses are between 5 and 7 minutes each! View the video preview below:       Learn something new! BizLibrary provides 7,000+ training videos and eLearning courses in various business training topics, with new courses added every day.   10 Tips for Marketing Your Employee Training Program In this eBook we’ll discuss you'll learn 10 ways to improve the marketing of your online employee training program and boost employee engagement and participation. BizLibrary's Mobile Learning App meets the needs of today's digital learners. Employees no longer wait for training departments to push learning content to them. Employees are used to pulling information to themselves, when they need it, on their own terms and conditions, and on their own devices.

by Jennie Ruby    I felt like a video star the other day. Well, at least in a tiny little way. I taught a class a few years ago. It was for a fairly large organization. The section of the class I taught had an attendance of about 40 people, and they had several more sessions scheduled. But I didn't teach them--at least not in person. They videotaped the first session, and although the audio quality of their equipment was pretty terrible, they used the videos for the remaining sessions, and then continued to use them for new hires for a couple of years afterward. I walked by that company's building the other day, and a stranger said "Hey, Jennie Ruby!"I think I am still pretty far from needing to wear sunglasses to avoid public recognition, but the incident made me think about how asynchronous learning extends the reach of one trainer. With one day's work, I had trained hundreds of people. However, people in the live seminar were able to ask questions and have them answered, while people who saw only the video did not have that opportunity.On the other hand, people who saw the video could presumably stop the action, take time to practice the skills being taught, and then re-watch the action if needed. Even just the ability to re-wind and re-watch the action provides added value. That is still far from the interaction and involvement we try to encourage when creating eLearning courses, where we include constant opportunities for learners to practice the skills and actions they need to learn. Nevertheless, asynchronous training has some pretty compelling advantages.But the reason I am thinking about all of this today is that I was recently asked how to show that live classroom training still has an advantage over eLearning. What? For years I have seen people struggling to prove the opposite--to prove that eLearning works. And now I was being asked to justify classroom training.My question for you this week is probably an old, familiar one, but one that comes up in both directions in the training world. Which is better, classroom training/live interactive training or self-paced/asynchronous eLearning?Are classroom trainers going the way of the dinosaur? Will we ever? Are there different reasons for different kinds of training? Is there room for both? Are there new ways to combine classroom and eLearning modes of training? Are you being asked these kinds of questions in your work?If you have been dealing with these issues and questions, we would love to hear from you. Whether you have long since reached an opinion, or whether you are doing on-going research about this, I would like to know. I'll share the results here down the road. *** If you love Jennie's articles, you'll love her classes. Check out some of Jennie's mini courses.

I'm actively engaged in all kinds of sites that can be roughly described as social networking.  Through this, and because of my My LinkedIn Open Connection Approach where I basically treat LinkedIn like a really big business mixer, I have lots of opportunity to "meet" new people online. My guess is that about 25% of the people I run into do not have a profile photo.  I'm writing this post to encourage you to: Spend a little bit of time to create a reasonable profile photo Attach it to every online profile when you create it And when I say every, I mean every - don't join that new Ning group without attaching your photo.  Add it to your Elluminate and WebEx profiles. It doesn't take a lot to add a profile photo, and it's fairly significant.  Why? It helps me believe that you are a real person.  That your request isn't from some faceless person out there in cyber space.  You are real.  If you walk up and talk to me at a big mixer, I will talk to you.  But if you are an unknown from cyberspace with no photo, it just doesn't feel as real. It helps me remember you.  I have a hard time associating names with faces.  A really hard time.  Your profile photo can be really helpful to me to connect the dots repeatedly. It shows me you are serious.  If I receive an inquiry or link/friend request from someone without a profile photo, I'm much more likely to ignore it.  It's a signal that you are just playing around. A few other thoughts on this topic: In business networking, using stylized photos or anything other than a normal photorealistic picture says - I'm playful and fun, but maybe not all that serious about all this stuff.  It's your choice, but I believe it hurts you on all three of the above items. Have a reasonably complete LinkedIn profile and link to it everywhere.  When I meet someone online, I commonly go search for them on LinkedIn to see who they are and what they do.  If I can't find them or they have really limited information, that suggests they aren't as serious about online connections.  In my experience, it's not as effective to spend time with them online.  I'm not saying this is a rule, but there's a correlation in my experience.  And while I'm at it, if you have less than 200 connections, you probably aren't trying all that hard online either. eLearning Technology Browse eLearning Content

by AJ Walther   While Microsoft PowerPoint's clip art sometimes gets a bad rap, you'll often find a perfect image buried among the clip art gallery. Let's say you find this image in PowerPoint: For your purposes, the image looks nice, is relevant, and using it won't get you judged and/or fired at your office. The only problem is that now you need 20 similar-looking images for the rest of your project. After scouring the remaining clip art  available in the gallery, you find other animals, but none of them look like the image above (they're drawn in a completely different style). Now what? Believe it or not, clip art images on the Microsoft Office website are grouped by style number. You may just need a bit of guidance locating them. And here's how... Find a clip art image in PowerPoint's clip art Gallery that you like. With the Clip Art pane visible, click the More Arrow to the right of the image to view the image's drop-down menu. From the drop-down menu, choose Preview/Properties to open the Preview/Properties dialog box. From the Name field, highlight the name of the image and copy it. In a web browser, navigate to http://office.microsoft.com/. In the search bar at the top of the page, paste in the name of your image and press [enter] on your keyboard. (The image you used in PowerPoint should appear in the Image Results area.) From the Image results area, click the clip art image to open the image page. (To the right of the image you will see a Download button, Dimensions, Resolution, File size, Downloads, Style, Rating, and Keywords.) From the Style area, click the style number link. (You will be redirected to a page, or multiple pages, of clip art images of the same style. Click any image you like to be redirected to that image's page. There you can either download the image or use the listed keywords to find the image from within PowerPoint. The Microsoft Office website is a great resource, as PowerPoint's clip art pane does not list the style numbers for images, nor does it let you search by style number if you already know it. *** If you love AJ's articles, you'll love her PowerPoint mini courses.

View and download the webinar slides. View the webinar recording.       ADDITIONAL RESOURCES AND REFERENCES:   Developing a Corporate Learning Strategy, Pat Alvarado, CLO Magazine, Sept. 2003 It's a VUCA World, by Denise Caron 10 Hot Job Titles That Barely Existed 5 Years Ago     Alignment: the idea of alignment being a process of continuing adjustment so parts are in their "proper relative position."   Learning Culture: Each organization’s current learning culture is crucial. Is learning embedded into workflows? Are employees committed to continuous improvement? Is the organization receptive to performance change and improvement? Is the organization ready for a technology-based learning solution?   Performance Analysis: Not all business problems require or need learning solutions. Your efforts and limited resources should be focused on where you can see results that will yield business benefits.    Content Strategy : curation of content, revised definition of content, delivery of content   Success Criteria : What does success look like? How to I know?    Marketing and Communication    Measuring the Business Impact       Learn something new! BizLibrary provides 7,000+ training videos and eLearning courses in various business training topics, with new courses added every day.   10 Tips for Marketing Your Employee Training Program In this eBook we’ll discuss you'll learn 10 ways to improve the marketing of your online employee training program and boost employee engagement and participation. BizLibrary's Mobile Learning App meets the needs of today's digital learners. Employees no longer wait for training departments to push learning content to them. Employees are used to pulling information to themselves, when they need it, on their own terms and conditions, and on their own devices.

Send to Kindle ASTD Houston Keynote Presentation by @rjacquez I had the great fortune of being invited to deliver the opening keynote presentation at this year’s annual ASTD Houston conference. I will always be indebted to Debbie Richards and her ASTD team for this great opportunity, and I hope there are more Keynote opportunities for me in the near feature. The title of my presentation was ‘The Time to Mobilize Learning is Now!‘ and you can find all 105 slides I used, embedded below.   frameborder="0" marginwidth="0" marginheight="0" scrolling="no">

Here is the best stuff from last week via eLearning Learning.Top Posts The following are the top posts from featured sources based on social signals. Overcoming Top 10 Objections to Social Learning- Social Enterprise Blog, April 24, 2009Ten commandments of e-learning (content design)- Clive on Learning, April 30, 2009Twitter Learning- eLearning Technology, April 30, 2009Learning Goals- eLearning Technology, April 29, 2009An eight-step process using Post-it notes to gain meeting consensus.- Business Casual, April 25, 2009Fantastic File Converter- eLearning Acupuncture, April 24, 2009Call for eLearning Demonstrations- eLearning Technology, May 1, 2009When should you use Informal Learning?- Upside Learning Blog, April 27, 2009Online CEU Credits- eLearning Technology, April 27, 2009508 Compliance, Even If You Do Not Need To- MinuteBio, April 30, 2009Diffusion of Innovations- Kapp Notes, April 30, 2009Gathering comments with Yahoo Pipes?- WISE Pedagogy, April 29, 2009eLearning mash-up follow-up: Articulate presenter and Flash 10 compatibility- Ignatia Webs, April 28, 2009Twitter Chat- Adventures in Corporate Education, April 24, 2009Steps for Designing a Virtual Learning World Experience- Kapp Notes, April 24, 2009 Top Other Items The following are the top other items based on social signals. Enterprise: List of 40 Social Media Staff Guidelines, April 23, 2009NYTimes OpEd | End the University as We Know It, April 27, 2009The future of e-learning is social learning, April 25, 2009OpenGov: One big challenge? Or a thousand small hurdles : Tim's Blog, April 28, 2009Ten Commandments of eLearning Design, April 25, 200920 Ways to Evaluate Contributions to a Corporate Social Network | Dave Duarte, April 28, 2009Ignore This Post If You Don’t Care About Effective Learning, April 28, 2009Incredibly Dull: Social Architecture, April 28, 2009"Ba" for Management Development, April 24, 2009Emergent practices need practice, April 24, 2009Rough week for higher education, April 25, 2009The Business Case for Social Learning: Dealing with the "Capability Recession" at Lower Cost, April 30, 2009The intersection between work and learning, April 30, 2009Social Learning and Emerging Technology, April 23, 2009 Top Keywords Social Network Analysis (3)Twitter (30)Social Media (20)Mzinga (3)Management (30)Learning (83)Enterprise 2.0 (4)Social Networks (23)Adoption (8) eLearning Technology Browse eLearning Content

Written by Chris Osborn   How can we minimize costs and keep required yearly content fresh? Today's Q&A Thursday offers suggestions to help keep your compliance training from becoming boring.     Stay Up-to-Date on the Most Current Business Training Trends BizLibrary offers 7,000+ training videos in various business training topics, with new courses added every day.   10 Tips for Marketing Your Employee Training Program In this eBook we’ll discuss you'll learn 10 ways to improve the marketing of your online employee training program and boost employee engagement and participation. BizLibrary's Mobile Learning App meets the needs of today's digital learners. Employees no longer wait for training departments to push learning content to them. Employees are used to pulling information to themselves, when they need it, on their own terms and conditions, and on their own devices. Video Transcription Hi,Chris Osborn, VP of Marketing at BizLibrary with today's Q&A. Today's question comes from Julio, he's a safety and compliance manager at a manufacturing facility and he wants to know how can we minimize the cost and keep our employees engaged while conducting the same compliance training year after year. Well, let's start with an assumption that Julio makes in his question that I think might be an error. You don't HAVE to offer the exact same training year after year. You might need to train on the same content each year, but that isn't the same thing as offering the same training program each year. So let's start by finding multiple ways to offer your safety and compliance training. First, video programs. Find a variety of video programs, there are multiple companies that produce high quality safety and compliance training videos on the same or very similar topics. Find ways to access a library of content with choices for your employees. You can also switch up your classroom training. Flip the class! Offer the video before holding a classroom session and then discuss the content of the video during the class. You CAN be limited to delivering the same old compliance training, the same old ways if you want, or you can be a bit creative. Find a video library. And, BizLibrary has such a library with 7,000 videos just waiting for you to try for free. Flip your classroom training. Have the employees take the core content by video before coming to the class and again use the classroom time to discuss the training. And last, but not least, just change your core classroom content. Any of these methods will work, any of these methods will change it up, and Julio you don't have to offer the same training year after year if you adopt any one of those three methods.

by Kevin Siegel      Last week's poll about how eLearning developers work with the storage demands of video in eLearning garnered several responses. Here are the results: Which eLearning development tool do you use the most? Adobe Captivate Adobe Presenter Articulate Storyline Articulate Presenter TechSmith Camtasia Studio Other (please specify) While many developers use two or more of the tools listed above, the majority of respondents use Adobe Captivate the most (56%). Second was Camtasia Studio (24%) followed by Articulate Storyline (16%).When adding video to your project, which option are you using? Video stored on your computer or network Your corporate media server (or a server you created on your own) A media service Other (please specify) Most developers (54%) store the videos on their computer or server. Media service placed second (38%).   If you set up your own media server, tell us your story. Specifically, what hardware and software did you use? What did it cost to set up?Top comments about this question: "Previously attempted to do this with Adobe's Flash Media Server but it was too complicated and expensive. Did Windows Media Streaming as it came with Windows Server years ago. Generally due to cost, I have customer setup private Vimeo account and stream from there. We're getting a beefy streaming service setup (Kaltura).""We have a central server for our L&D team, run by operations.""IT set-up MediaMill for us... and we set-up YouTube channels."If you're using a media service, which one are you using? Top responses: Amazon  YouTube Kaltura Respondents were able to select any or all of the options above. Most selected the first two (creating or including videos feature themselves/talking head or video of industry-related tasks). Plenty of people also said that they use video of a demo already created in an eLearning authoring tool.

Send to Kindle If you truly want to develop learning, or any other type of content that can be viewed on multiple screens, including desktops and laptops, smartphones, tablets, as well as future devices, such as Google Glass, the only solid solution is by using Responsive Web Design principles. The real beauty of Responsive design is that it enables you to go from static content that is formatted using absolute dimensions (e.g. 1024 x 768) into content that is fluid, meaning the content will flow seamlessly from screen to screen regardless of the screen’s resolution. Unfortunately, most rapid eLearning tools today require us to use absolute dimensions when developing learning, this means the resulting learning will only look optimized (or at least decently optimized) on devices with that specific resolution. However for all other devices with different resolutions, the learners will have to experience the content via swiping left and right and up and down in order to see the rest of the course. A 1024 x 768 Adobe Captivate 6 course converted to HTML5 and viewed on an Apple iPhone This of course provides a bad user experience. Until rapid eLearning tools embrace modern approaches to learning design for this new multi-screen world we live in, we may need to get our hands dirty with HTML5, Javascript and CSS3 media queries, which are all technologies that make up the principles around Responsive Web Design. Having said that, this morning I came across this list of free online tools that can help us optimize our CSS files and I recommend you take a look at them. I have tested them all and my two favorites are CSS Beautifier and Clean CSS. I’d also like to recommend a tool called kaleidoscope, which allows you to spot the differences between two text files (e.g. css files), images and folders. Here are the tools in the article I found. For links to the tools listed, click the link to the original article below: These tools we are sharing today are free online tools that can parse, check, format, beautify, clean, validate, compress and optimize your CSS code for today’s web. Online Tools for CSS Optimization This is a brilliant resource for all web designers. Devilous Probably my favorite tool for optimizing large size CSS files. Devilous smartens your CSS code by removing unnecessary codes and making them tidy, clean and slick. This is probably the best CSS code compressor available on the internet right now. It also supports CSS 3.0 CSS Comb The tool claims to be the greatest tool for sorting out your CSS codes. And you know what… it’s hard to argue with that. This tool really does the job better than anyone else. It can parse your code, sort your code alphabetically and through other standards, checks, formats and optimizes your CSS code. Supports up to CSS4 (Yes, there is a CSS4). CSS Beautifier Almost the same as CSS Comb but CSS Beautifier does not sorts your code as powerfully as CSS Comb does. Sometimes web templates and themes come with difficult to read CSS files. You just copy the code and paste in this CSS tool and voila! CSS Lint CSS Lint is one of the truest CSS tools for code optimization. It can do loads of stuff. Details would take too much time, so just go to site and click the arrow button on the right side of Lint button. zBugs This is one of the simplest CSS tools. It compresses and minifies your CSS code and converts the file into Gzip format. This tool also supports JavaScript. CleanCSS A fairly simple tool. Doesn’t support CSS3. Nice resource for beginners but not that awesome for the gurus. ProCSSor This CSS tool does nearly everything you can ask for from a code optimizer. via 7 Best Yet Free Online Tools for CSS Optimization.

Adobe has announced a free update to its popular Adobe Captivate 8 software. The update fixes several bugs and includes some nice enhancements. To get the update, choose Help > Updates from within the Captivate program. Once the update is installed, your new Captivate version will be 8.0.1.242. Here's a partial list of what's new in the update: Responsive drag-and-drop interactions Google Maps enabled geo-location support Native app publisher Custom shapes and lines are now supported in responsive projects Streaming video support through embedded code in Web objects Success/Failure/Hint captions in quiz questions can now be replaced with smart shapes Swatches integration in color palette Symmetrical shapes The EXE publish option is back More information.