Today’s post is from Breanne Dyck, founder and lead consultant at MNIB Consulting. She helps online training businesses to scale their impact, their team and their revenue by blending operations management, learning and product strategy, and business model development. Discover how to get more of your customers taking action with her free 4-step guide: From Understanding To Action. You’ve probably heard, over and over, that the road to success runs through your content. Content on your blog, in your emails, on social media, in your courses … content, content, content. It has even become its own buzzword: content marketing. As an expert, the thinking goes, your ability to drive sales of your courses is directly related to whether your content is good or not. But did you know that your expertise may actually be harming your business and marketing efforts, more than it helps? Let me explain. Experts Beware: You’re Cursed In 1999, a team of Stanford researchers conducted an experiment (PDF Source). Their goal was to figure out how successful experts are at predicting how long it will take novices to master a new skill. I won’t bore you with the details, but here’s the gist: Experts are terrible at predicting how long it will take a beginner to master even "simple" tasks. In fact, they found that the more expert you are, the more you will underestimate how long it will take. The researchers named this phenomenon the Curse of Expertise. In a nutshell, the Curse means that as you gain expertise, you become so unconscious of your competence that you lose the ability to make accurate predictions about how long it will take to teach something to a non-expert. Are you creating content? The Curse of Expertise might be affecting your marketing!Click To Tweet The Curse Extends Beyond The Obvious This is an obvious problem when you’re creating courses; if you can’t predict how long it will take someone to master what you’re teaching, where does that leave you? But perhaps more insidiously, the Curse of Expertise doesn’t just affect your ability to teach in your courses. It affects everything in your business — including your marketing. Think about it. No matter what type of content you share, your goal is always to educate your audience in some way. For example, you want them to learn: That you’re a trustworthy and credible expert. The benefits of what you have to offer. Why they should — or shouldn’t — buy from you. To be involved, participating and engaging in your material. Prospective customers don’t come into this world knowing how we can help them. We meet them where they are at, and then nurture them until they are ready to buy. Whether on social media, in blog posts, emails, or whatever other form our marketing might take, we’re taking our readers on a journey; every interaction is part of a bigger story we tell, in the hopes of moving the reader from where they are now, to where we (and they) want to be. Whatever form our marketing might take, we’re taking our readers on a journeyClick To Tweet The Problem of Hidden Learning What’s interesting about the Stanford study is that the experts had no trouble outlining their knowledge. In fact, they broke the process into the same number of steps as beginners did. The Curse didn’t prevent them from being able to explain what to do, but it did keep them from intuiting how challenging each step would be. This isn’t uncommon. When we think of breaking something down, we think about the actions to be taken. Read this. Click here. Buy this. Do that. What we don’t do is think about the learning journey that one has to take to be able to complete those actions. Take, for example, the question of saving a voicemail — the exact test that the researchers in the study used. On the surface, this is a simple multi-step process: Go into your voicemail Hit the key to retrieve the voicemail Listen to the message Save it Educational theory, though, tells us that there is more to mastering this process than just doing the four steps. In order for a beginner to apply the procedure, they must first remember and comprehend each individual piece. For example, they have to remember how the phone’s menus work and comprehend each prompt. Recalling that the ‘play’ command will play the message is one piece. Realizing that it makes extra menu options available — including the save option — is another. And so on, and so on, down the line. It’s this "hidden learning" within each step that makes the Curse of Expertise so nefarious. The hidden learning within each step is what makes the Curse of Expertise so nefariousClick To Tweet There’s More To Expertise Than a Beginning and an End What’s more, this hidden learning is something that experts can’t seem to shake. The Stanford research team tried (and tried, and tried!) to help their experts make better predictions. They told them to "think back" to when they were first learning. It didn’t help. They provided a list of common pitfalls and stumbling blocks. Still no improvement. In the end, the researchers were completely unable to get accurate predictions from the experts. The simple truth is that we just can’t ignore what we already know, no matter how hard we try to put ourselves in beginners’ shoes. Now, in fairness, beginners weren’t able to make accurate predictions, either.  In fact, the only people who were accurate were those in the midst of the learning process. And that’s the key. It’s easy to fixate on where someone is right now, and where we want them to be in the future. But what the Curse of Expertise tells us is that it’s the middle of the journey where the magic happens. There's more to your expertise than a beginning and end. The magic happens in the middleClick To Tweet Break The Curse Once And For All Those who are in the midst of the learning process are best positioned to give us the data we need, because they have the right expertise level to do so. Not too little, not too much. Just enough to not be affected by the Curse. When we apply that lesson to our marketing, we realize that there can be only one foolproof method for handling the Curse of Expertise. We need to stop predicting and start paying attention to what actually happens on the way from A to B. For example: Every time you share an idea in a new way, watch for indications (comments, tweets, replies to emails, etc.) of the impact it’s having as it’s having it. Get real sales pages in front of prospects, and consider A/B testing the pieces of your sales funnel to track the effectiveness of your customer education process. Run pilots of your courses and programs, being open to your customers’ experience and without putting pressure on yourself to create the perfect curriculum in advance. Track engagement trends on your social media at a campaign level so that you’re looking at the big picture, and not just focusing on individual posts, pins, comments or Tweets. When you base your decisions using data from the middle of the process, rather than just the start- or endpoints, you’ll be able to break the Curse of Expertise. That’s the key to having your expertise benefit your marketing — and your business — rather than hindering it. The post Is Your Expertise Hurting Your Marketing? appeared first on Thinkific.

[Post by Arden Rose, Account Manager at GeoMetrix Data Systems Inc.] The industry analysts at Bersin by Deloitte have released the UK Corporate Learning Factbook for 2016. The report presents benchmarks, trends, and analysis from a study of 220 U.K. organizations in 2015. Some of the findings of the report include that training has come home as outsourcing drops. "UK organisations’ reliance on external service providers declined when the recession prompted cuts in training expenditures." Bersin’s survey showed that: learning and development spending is rebounding staffing and training hours continue to rise use of informal learning methods are rising, while ILT training continues its sharp decline To read more about this report and download and abstract visit: Bersin by Deloitte

Chalk and Cheese - "you usually get what you pay for." A statement reported to have been made by an SFA policy manager during a talk at Bett recently said "The Skills Funding Agency isn’t going to implement a cheap rate for online learning. I think we all appreciate that it’s not the cheap option" […]

"Why is everyone so hung up on Leaders, Leadership and Leadership courses - it’s what gets us into a mess. Think banking, politics, sport…" - Donald Clark If all you have is a hammer, then every problem looks like a nail. If all you know is hierarchical leadership by virtue of one’s position, then all solutions are in the hands of the CEO. Conversations with 150 CEO’s only yield ‘CEO thinking’. "To raise the organization’s confidence in their decisions, leaders must carefully balance the various personal paradoxes involved in the decision-making process, including: doubt - anxiety versus fearlessness, omniscience versus ignorance; conviction - openness versus self-sufficiency, hubris versus humility; realism - realistic optimism, i.e., pragmatism, versus blind optimism, i.e., gambling; and patience - the right pacing or timing of decisions versus detrimental haste and hesitation." The great man theory of leadership is outdated, just as the divine right of kings was two centuries ago. Even the World Economic Forum thinks in terms of leadership as an individual achievement. The 4 skills you need to become a global leader, according to a WEF article, are: Have multiple skills so that you have flexibility in your options Be ready for set-backs Expose yourself to other cultures Learn to communicate well This is fairly pragmatic advice for everyone, not just those who are trying to move up the artificial ladders of institutions and organizations. But we don’t need better leaders. We need organizations and structures that let all people cooperate and collaborate. Positional leadership is a master-servant, parent-child, teacher-student, employer-employee relationship. It puts too much power in the hands of individuals and blocks human networks from realizing their potential. In the network era, leadership is helping the network make better decisions. The future, as proposed by current leadership, is not about becoming a better leader, it’s about all of us becoming better people. This starts by creating more human organizational structures, ones that enable self-governance. Leadership is an emergent property of a network in balance. Depending on one person to always be the leader will only dumb-down the entire network. Image: adapting to perpetual beta Further Reading: Network Leadership

Reading Time: 1 minutes

http://www.slideshare.net/andonisanz/gwc15-haidei-presentation-andoni-sanz

Since becoming a Chromebook school, I feel like I’m constantly searching for new Chrome extensions or apps to help enhance my classroom learning environment. I recently stumbled upon Momentum, and Chrome extension that provides a personalized message and image when new tabs are opened. After installing the Momentum extension, you’ll[Read more] The post Momentum: Great Chrome Extension for Teachers and Students! appeared first on Teaching with Technology.

By their very definition, PhD studies are seeking to untangle complex ideas and produce original thoughts on the subject matter, which is backed-up by a thorough examination of the evidence available. For this reason, deciding what the research student is actually seeking after is normally rather broad at first. When they start-out and get asked the question, "So, what is your PhD about?" the typical student will give a rather hesitant, half-page explanation. Ask this question again when they are on the point of completing the PhD and the reply is likely to be a very concise and quite specific, single sentence. The process of systematic research casts its net widely, then refines and re-focusses subsequent investigations to reinforce, or challenge, previous ideas and insights. Seeing the process as a little piece of a much larger, complex mosaic of ideas can be helpful, but a bit daunting. To help the process of the distillation of knowledge, there are some basic techniques that any researcher can use. Firstly, it is wise to recognise that the PhD, as with almost any complex task, can be broken down into a number of smaller tasks, and that the role of the dissertation is to explain these tasks logically and clearly. In compiling the dissertation, the research student needs to effectively present the story of the research, from the introduction to the conclusions, in a way that makes it easy for the reader to understand what might be complicated and challenging issues. To make a start on this story-board, some people might like to utilise the concept of mind-maps to graphically link and make sense of the multitude of tasks that will be necessary to write about. Personally speaking, mind-maps do not really work for me. I prefer to construct a hierarchical list of all the possible sections and sub-sections. This has the advantage that such a list can very quickly be edited to provide the contents pages to the dissertation. For those who like diagrammatic checklists but struggle to find mid-maps useful, another way to help to identify the tasks that are required is to use software such as https://www.draw.io/ to create an easy-to-construct flow diagram which uses simple text and drag-and-drop shapes to (re)organise the sequence in which the research tasks need to "flow". Whatever planning style is adopted, and regardless of whether the research student starts with a question, a hypothesis, or simply a broad subject title, the aim of the research planning at this stage is to lay out with a broad brush the likely trend of the enquiry. Obviously the actual course of the research is likely to change tack several times during the PhD as new ideas emerge and light is thrown in some currently-dark corners, but the directional trend of the story, from the first sentence of the introduction to last sentence of the conclusions, should remain relatively constant. To some extent, it helps at this stage to be as specific as possible in the identification of each possible section and sub-section of the future research, but obviously this itemisation needs to be treated lightly so that it is flexible enough to change and modify. Treat it like a story-line which can be embellished or contracted as the research student’s knowledge of the topic deepens and extends. Like all good stories, there should be a beginning, a middle, and an end, with a path to link them up.

If you’re a professional hermit and you never have to deal with anyone else — no coworkers, no direct reports, no bosses, no vendors and no customers — you can skip this post. Otherwise, your ability to influence others is critical. This is true especially of CEOs and others in executive roles. Researchers at the Center for Creative Leadership found that influence — the ability to lead across multiple constituencies and across boundaries — is the No. 1 challenge for C-suite executives. The Corporate Leadership Council ranked 21 competencies for effective leaders around the world and found that influence was the most important skill for effective leaders. Leading means influencing others. Though influence has always been important, in the 21st century workplace it’s the most important leadership skill. Why? First, the environment we work in is more complex than ever, and it’s changing faster. We often have less time to make decisions. We must often trust others to make the right decisions, without us looking over their shoulders. Our organizations are flatter; matrices are replacing hierarchies as companies re-organize themselves to compete more effectively. More of our work involves teams, with more collaboration across boundaries. Even in fields that might be perceived as slow moving or "traditional," such as government and banking, effective leadership often means being able to coordinate efforts across multiple independent agencies or companies. In other words, effective leaders must be able to influence others.   What is influence? Influence is "the interpersonal behaviors we use to have a positive impact on another party’s choices." But what does it really mean to be influential? It means you’re involved in decisions. That you can access information beyond your immediate area of management control. That you’re included in special events at work, and also outside work (where informal networks and new relationships develop). You’re targeted for promotion and development. And you’re asked to coach or mentor others. But influence isn’t a single, monolithic skill. There are many ways to influence people, and all people have preferences in how they influence — their influence style. That influence style (especially if unconscious) has a major impact on how effective leaders are in different situations. Different circumstances often call for different influence styles. Negotiating a labor contract with a union, for example, calls for a different approach than pulling together a team to respond to a crisis or developing a new product or service.   Assessing your influence style DLI’s Influence Style Indicator assessment allows individuals to understand their own influence preferences. Understanding your own preferences, and alternative approaches to influence, can dramatically improve your influential leadership skills. Here are the five major influence styles, along with some of the key influencing tactics used in each style. Think about when you’ve seen or heard some of these tactics. When have you used them yourself? Asserting style: If you’ve ever heard someone say something like "The policy requires that …" or "I am 100% certain …" then you’ve seen the asserting style in action. Asserting influence tactics include: Advocating by debate. Insisting your ideas be heard. Challenging the ideas of others. Inspiring style: Inspiring influence style seeks to convince others by, well, inspiring them. You might hear someone say "Just think of what this can mean to the future of …" and "You’re the best I’ve ever seen at this. Would you be willing to …" Inspiring tactics include: Presenting a sense of shared purpose. Putting forth exciting possibilities. Bridging style: Leaders use bridging when they want establish a sense of mutual interest or rapport. You might hear phrases like "I think I understand your dilemma so can you help me understand why …" or "I had this same issue last year and let me tell you how …" Bridging tactics include: Connecting with others. Building relationships and coalitions. Negotiating style: When using negotiating style, you’ll hear leaders say things such as "Let’s agree to discuss this later when everybody is calmer" and "If you will … then I can …" Negotiating tactics include: Agreeing to compromises, concessions and trade offs to satisfy your greater interest. Exchanging favors to get things done. Rationalizing style: When leaders use the rationalizing style of influence, they use logic and data to persuade. You’d hear leaders say things like "The experts say …" or "Our analysis shows that …" Key rationalizing style tactics include: Using expert views and historical data to build a position. Suggesting logical solutions to problems. Citing relevant facts and data. Influential leaders choose their styles Your influence style, and the behaviors that go along with them, are not fixed. You may prefer one style, but most people have some ability to shift from to different styles depending on circumstances. Skillful leaders, leaders who are influential, take this one step further. They recognize that in different situations, different influence styles are more effective. They also recognize the influence styles used by those around them, whether it’s someone they’re facing across the negotiating table or their own direct reports. Being aware of influence style preferences, when each style is best used and who is using what style makes leaders much more influential. That, in turn, enables them to deliver results for their organizations. Want to learn more about how an awareness of influence styles makes leaders more effective? Sign-up for a free online webinar with Dr. Chris Musselwhite, the developer of Discovery Learning’s Influence Style Indicator Assessment. Dr. Musselwhite has worked in organizational and leadership development for over 30 years and has developed several widely used assessments and simulations. His work is based on extensive research and assessment data from thousands of individuals.]   Sign Up for the Free Webinar The post Do you have what it takes to be an influential leader? appeared first on Discovery Learning Inc..

Designing and delivering instructor-led webinars and courses in an online environment is sometimes more of a necessity than a luxury. Re-creating the traditional set-up in the eLearning format is not a challenge anymore. Thanks to the plethora of educational technology tools available, eLearning developers can quickly create a virtual classroom. The question is, why should you create a virtual classroom? Ever since the concept of Human Computer Interaction has come to the limelight, all things virtual have become increasingly important. Virtual worlds, virtual environments and virtual classrooms are suddenly the focus of all Internet technology design. The idea is to create human performance solutions that are ergonomic to the human brain. Now, this is a far-fetched statement but it really is happening all over the world. Software engineers and user experience (UX) designers are trying to inch the daily technology solutions closer to the way that humans access and use it. This includes, but is not limited to, modifying or developing technology that functions like a human being and even out-performs human beings. We may be talking about space sciences or a small classroom in an urban school - virtual technologies are leading us to make valuable mistakes in a relatively safer environment. The result? A more time and cost-effective solution that trains amateurs towards mastery at record-breaking pace. Now that is something truly worth our time and budget. In the eLearning environment, an eLearning course is essentially a virtual classroom. The classroom occurs in a virtual space. We see a personal portal that displays our preferences and settings. We are notified of what others are doing or what is expected of us. We understand our learning responsibilities and can reasonably expect the learning programs that are upcoming. Virtual learning environments are also designed to mimic game consoles so that the learner is engaged and motivated by emotional values such as excitement, suspense and even disappointment. Creating such environments requires the training and expertise of an instructional designer and an eLearning developer. A familiar example of a virtual learning environment is the learning management system. The learning management system is your gateway to the virtual classroom. It enables you to log into your portal and access your learning materials. Learning management systems have also come a long way since the 2000s. They are more gamified and icon-based than the previous text-based screens. This is another example of how developers are bringing daily use tools closer to human usability. Virtual classroom courses are complete programs of learning. They comprise of sequences of synchronous and asynchronous activities. Live meetings, chats, discussion forums are all synchronous activities, while asynchronous events include independent or group task-works, submitting assignments and emailing the course instructor for additional questions. Virtual classrooms try to emulate ILT (instructor-led-training) to create a hybrid learning situation. These classrooms are as rigorous and as tough, grading wise, as the traditional classroom. Let’s find out why you need virtual classrooms for some courses and how they enhance the effectiveness of your efforts. For starters, virtual classrooms require a course mentor who can lead learners through the subject and who can also attend online meetings. Once this basic requirement is met, virtual classroom courses offer the following benefits over independent eLearning courses: 1) Flexibility in learning and improved activity: These courses have the freedom to combine lectures, Q&A sessions, individual and team activities, reading and even online testing. Learners can work directly with peers and gain meaningful feedback from them. Scaffolding on new topics is much quicker and smoother. 2) More disciplined learning community: A strong sense of community and "cohort" feeling is instilled in the group. They engage more actively and take responsibility for their comments and feedback. The group feels a sense of community and moves towards common learning goals. Direct contact with the instructor and peers help keep learning more disciplined and consistent. 3) Virtual classrooms invoke a sense of familiarity: Learners in virtual classrooms are familiar with the requirements and expectations of the course. They find themselves comfortable with the teaching, learning and testing methods. 4) More adaptability for the learners: The instructor monitors the classroom directly and is able to assess the individual needs of each learner and the needs of the group more easily in a virtual classroom. The instructor can address any upcoming concerns and issues more responsively. The content and presentation can also be adapted closely to the learner’s needs. As a rule of thumb, if you need to teach unstructured and implicit knowledge, you need to create a virtual classroom course. Also, courses that require many discussions and where learners have many questions also require virtual classrooms. If your course needs more interactivity than a simple eLearning program can provide, create a virtual classroom for a more satisfying teaching and learning experience. Virtual classrooms use collaboration tools to re-create the structure and learning experiences of a physical classroom. Well designed virtual classrooms provide a richer interaction while alleviating the requirement for everyone to be at the same location. Find out if your course needs to be delivered as a virtual classroom. The post Why Create a Virtual Classroom? appeared first on TalentLMS Blog.

Have you ever used radio programs or audio CDs for learning? You cannot deny their popularity in all age groups. There is truly something mesmerizing about hearing a human voice, miles away, yet so clearly through the speakers or headphones. Audio podcasts are like radio programs, and can be used for learning. In this article, we will discover the best scenarios that call for podcasts and best practices for producing them. The TEDx podcasts have a million-count audience. This expresses the popularity and ease of access that such podcasts to the general public. Podcasts based on important seminars or long lectures are excellent media to share with your learners. They help create an authentic learning environment - something that is a challenge in the online world. Podcasts often record live lectures, including question and answer sessions that may also be useful to the learner. They offer cost-effective mediums to teach real-world and current topics, right through the experts and celebrities. If you have access to paid podcasts through your institutions, your learners will enjoy the privilege and will be motivated to listen to the "exclusive" material. A debriefing session can follow in which a discussion to achieve learning objectives can facilitate learning. The aim of effective eLearning design is to include it in the daily lives of the learners. Smartphones are the first and the last devices consulted for all kinds of productivity tasks. Sending out notifications to listen to a podcasts simplifies and aids the productivity-inclined individual. Podcasts can be heard any time of the day, at the convenience of the learner - at the gym, at the doctor’s office or on the bus. It’s more economic to have experts talk about heir expertise than write it down in the form of text-based lessons. Podcasts are truly excellent when music and language are involved, but they may be difficult to produce if the subject is visual. The key to producing meaningful podcasts is to create factual and procedural information. So what are the best practices for creating podcasts for eLearning? Better educational podcasts can be developed by keeping the following in mind when integrating into eLearning courses: Rehearse and rehearse again before recording. Edit out mistakes and long pauses and sound of breaths. Include some written information or tips to put together longer segments together. Repeat material that is important more than once or twice to make it memorable. Provide learning mnemonics and emphasize key points. Add URLs, names and other details on a web location that learners can find on their own later. Keep your wording simple, coherent and easy to follow. Think about your learners listening to the podcast while driving! Limit each segment to 10 minutes and do not require anything to be jotted down. Make the introduction and the conclusion brief. This is especially important for learners who listen to podcast series back to back. Try to use familiar vocabulary. Any new terminology needs to be explained before using. Select music according to your audiences. Make voices clear and pleasant by investing in a good microphone. Use audio editing software that automatically equalizes and normalizes voices. Speak in an upbeat and emotional voice. Try imagining audience while you speak. Podcasting is still a hot trend, in general and in eLearning. But not all situations lend themselves to effective podcast use. Determine the best scenario for podcasting depending on the need for visual or descriptive content. Once you have the right equipment, podcasts are great time savers for you and your learners. Since podcasts are easier and cheaper to develop, most people get carried away when recording. Remember, educational podcasts are very different from entertaining ones. By keeping these best strategies in mind you are on your way to producing great podcast content. The post Podcasts in eLearning appeared first on TalentLMS Blog.

You may remember back in November 2015 we were selected as finalists in the Institute of Customer Service Customer Satisfaction Awards category of Customer Focus Award. We are now thrilled to have been chosen as one of 6 finalists in the Red Rose Customer Service Award. The criteria for the category was to be able to demonstrate how customer service sits at the heart of the business and ways that we have gone above and beyond.     

When it comes to keeping your employees safe while on the job everyone agrees it is the right, necessary and even legal thing to do. What many disagree about is how best to deliver the safety training. Traditional safety training involves a classroom, an instructor, usually a PowerPoint presentation and material that, while safety focused, is generic and designed to appeal to "most" companies. Some have moved to safety videos or web-based training courses chosen from a library of "off the shelf" safety topics. The appeal to these is the convenience and relatively low cost but the trade off is relevance. Most of this training does not apply to your workers, here’s why: The work demonstrated in the video is not the same as yours. The equipment shown is not the same as what your employees use. The safety procedures don’t match what you want your employees doing. Terminology used in a generic video will never match your company. The actors used are clearly not real workers and don’t know the job. For these reasons many employees are critical of the training and dismiss it as not relevant since it’s only marginally related to their job. So how effective is safety training if your employees are not engaged and not taking it seriously? Over the past several years we’ve seen a shift in the design and delivery of safety training and more importantly, the positive effects it has on safety metrics. Custom designed content is the fastest growing training method being used by leading companies in the field. It connects with your employees because it is relevant to them, their job and your company. It makes sense that workers will closely relate to training that is specifically designed for them, and in the training world, there is a strong correlation between relating to a topic and understanding it. Custom designed content simply means training designed for a specific job, process, or company. The training uses your employees, your approved procedures, speaking in your company terminology, filmed at your plant or job site. It is powerful because it immediately connects to the workers. They recognize the people demonstrating the safety procedures and the work they are doing. This is an important difference from "generic" safety courses. Consider the following example: Johnson Services employs field workers who repair pipelines in the field. Working on the pipes is often hazardous and requires a specific set of safety procedures, tools and protocol that all field workers must follow. Recently there has been an increase in accidents involving new support stands that are used when working on sections of pipe. The field safety engineer determined that the workers are not using the support stands correctly and the pipes are shifting causing injuries. Johnson turned to the manufacturer of the stands and asked for training help. The manufacturer sent their company video on how to use the stands properly. Johnson brought a group of field workers in for this training and afterward asked them if this was helpful and could it reduce the pipe support accidents. The workers explained that while the video was "kind of like what we do" there were many differences and only some of it was helpful. Some comments were: "Those guys were working on different pipes, ours don’t sit in the supports the same way". "The video was nice and all but they showed the supports being used in a shop environment, not in the field where conditions change and you don’t have a flat floor". The takeaway for safety training is "relevance".   Johnson recognized the generic safety video would not reduce accidents and contacted a custom designed content provider. The training company’s approach was twofold; learn how the manufacturer suggested the supports be used and learn how Johnson was actually using them. They worked closely with Johnson’s safety engineers in the field to design a safety course that combined both the manufacturer’s recommendations and practical application on Johnson projects. The result was a video based training course filmed in the field showing how to properly use the supports at an actual job site. Johnson employees were shown properly placing and attaching the supports then explaining why they did it that way. The safety engineer (that workers all knew and respected) was also filmed explaining the importance of this training and the company’s commitment to safety. At the end of the course there was a recap of the most important sections and a short quiz to ensure employees understood the critical safety points. The response from the field workers was amazing. This training was different because it connected to the work they do, they respected the people demonstrating the safety procedures and it used their tools and procedures. It was relevant. Custom designed content is the fastest growing training method for one simple reason…. it works. It’s easy to get started to improve your safety training and reduce accidents with content that your employees can relate to. For information on how your safety program can benefit from custom designed content, contact us at info@kmilearning.com The post Customized Safety Training - The Crucial Factor of The Right Delivery appeared first on KMI Learning.

A few years ago, I stumbled upon an informative and inspirational blog post; "5 Morning Rituals to Keep You Productive All Day Long" by James Reinhart. As I am always on the lookout for tricks and tools to help me become more efficient, I was interested to see what he had to say. Among his toolbox of suggestions was one that excited me and motivated me to action; "Pick Three Wins for the Day." As I’ve continued to put his advice into action over the past few years and have found it to positively impact my day, I wanted to share it with you again. James wrote that in the morning you should "Decide on the three things that you'd like to accomplish in the next 12 hours in order for you to feel like the day was a success". Doing this at the start of every day will allow you to map out your day’s actions accordingly to try to reach your three "wins" before your head hits the pillow that night.  It’s goal setting, but in a fun and simplified manner. We’re not talking lifelong goals, monthly goals or even weekly goals. It’s basic - what will make you feel like your day has been a success? For the online student, an example of a "three daily win" list might read: 1.    Complete the next module in my online course and pass the module exam with a 75% grade or higher. In order to have the highest success of attaining this goal, the next step would involve estimating the time needed to complete that course section as well as allowing time to study for the exam. Block out the time on a daily planner and move on to #2. 2.    Arrange for online tutoring in a subject that is giving me trouble. That might include sending an email to a tutoring center, or exploring online help centers.  3.    Post a reply in the online classroom forum. Reach out to other students taking the course to share inspiration and motivation. Consider connecting through social media sites such as Facebook or Twitter to get to know one another better. Of course, not every day will be a complete success. But by mapping out your daily goals, the steps and time necessary to attain them, you will well be on your way to feeling accomplished at the end of the day. And that’s a pretty powerful feeling. What will your three wins be for today?   Source:  Entrepreneur.com - See more at: https://ed4online.com/blog/pick-three-wins-day#sthash.afuWgqg7.dpuf            

This is a guest post by Steve Penfold, Customer Success Director at Elucidat. If your organization relies on delivering eLearning content to a paying audience, the authoring tool you choose can dramatically impact both the learner experience and your bottom line. Here are 10 things that you should consider when choosing an eLearning authoring tool for your organization.   1. Ease of use The authoring tool you select should be simple to use. If your subject matter experts (SMEs) can produce content without help from tech-savvy developers, the time required to create training content will be shorter, the number of courses created can increase, and the return on investment for your authoring tool will be higher.   2. Design flexibility and control Your brand is important to you, so you’ll want a lot of control over where your logo appears and the color palettes and fonts that are used in your courses. A high level of control is good, but if you have several people developing courses, you don’t want them to apply your standards in non-standard ways. Modern eLearning authoring tools like Elucidat address this issue by allowing you to create themes or templates that position and lock-in certain on-screen elements, including logos, background colors, and formatted text blocks. That leaves the course author free to focus on manipulating dynamic elements, for example, text content, images, and drag and drop components.   3. Scalability One advantage of cloud-based authoring tools is that your workforce can flex and upscale according to your current development needs. If you suddenly need to create additional eLearning content for a major project, a scalable authoring tool allows you to leverage the skills of team members or experts in multiple locations. SMEs can access your cloud-based authoring tool from anywhere in the world and use your branded templates to contribute to the project.   4. Streamlined comment and feedback system To ensure quality, your course authors need to collaborate quickly and accurately with stakeholders, reviewers, and testers. Consider using an eLearning authoring tool that offers a streamlined online system. The feature allows reviewers to make comments or recommendations right on the page they’re reviewing. That means no more crossed or missed email recommendations and no more duplicate or conflicting change requests. In addition to reducing frustrations, this efficiency delivers higher-quality content in less time. Also see: Why online collaboration is the solution to your team’s efficiency problem   5. Mobile learning-ready Content that can be written once and deployed simultaneously to a desktop, tablet, and mobile device is a huge advantage. It increases your potential audience by making it convenient for them to access your content in multiple ways. This case study shows how Utility Warehouse was able to reach 46,000 learners by using Elucidat’s responsive write-once-publish-anywhere design feature that allows learners to access content on their tablet and mobile devices. Also see: Why mobile learning is important (4 reasons)   6. Fast publishing and maintenance (in the cloud) It’s inevitable that you’ll need to make changes to courses that you’ve published, either because the material changes, or because you find an error that must be fixed. When that happens, cloud-based authoring tools are usually more efficient and convenient than their desktop equivalents. That’s because the source files for your courses and the eLearning authoring tool itself are held centrally and are accessible to all of your authors, wherever they are. So, for example, if a course requires an urgent fix, and the primary author is on the road, another author can quickly make changes, or the primary author can make the changes from his or her hotel room or home. All that’s needed is a web browser and Internet connection. To further streamline the process, Elucidat has a rapid release feature that, with a button click, can save and publish course changes directly to an LMS like LearnUpon.   7. Easy localization At some point, it may be necessary to translate your courses into multiple languages. You might want to access foreign markets, for example. In that case, it’s a good idea to use an authoring tool that has a built-in translation workflow. A common standard that allows translation from one language to another is XLIFF (XML Localization Interchange File Format) and is supported by Elucidat. An XLIFF file is a structured file that contains all the text to be translated and corresponding spaces for a human translator to enter alternative language versions of that same text.   8. Prebuilt page types and interactions The best eLearning authoring tools shield you from the complexities of what they’re doing under the hood, yet they enable you to incorporate powerful, engaging interactive elements into your courses. For example, an Elucidat theme can contain dozens of page types, like drag and drop, hotspots, text and graphics, and multiple choice questions. Where appropriate, these page types give you a simple mechanism to customize them (e.g., to position hotspots or add an answer option to a multiple choice question page), but the high-tech programming that makes them function will be hidden. These simple-to-use prebuilt page types become the building blocks that you use to create your highly interactive learning masterpiece in the quickest possible time.   9. Integrations/Easy export to LMS Most eLearning authoring tools will publish a SCORM or Tin Can (xAPI) package suitable for importing into a compliant LMS like LearnUpon. The main purpose of SCORM and xAPI standards is to allow content and tools from different vendors to launch and track learner progress using a common set of protocols. It’s important that your authoring tool of choice supports at the very least the SCORM standard and that you can easily export to HTML5 formats, if not to both Flash and HTML5 formats.   10. Analytics Data about who your learners are and how they access and use your courses is an important part of understanding your business. Without it, how do you know how effective your courses are? Good data can reveal a new potential market or indicate ways to better serve current customers. Some of this information will be available from an LMS like LearnUpon, but granular demographic data can also be captured by linking Google Analytics to your courseware. Related: Stay on top of the latest eLearning ideas, trends and technologies by subscribing to the Elucidat weekly newsletter.   In conclusion Your eLearning authoring tool is one of the most important pieces of software that you’ll rely on, so it pays to do your homework before you commit to one. Next steps? I recommend you read this review of five high-profile authoring tools. Most of these tools have generous free trials. Take advantage of the trials to test them out and see if one is a good fit for your organization.   Author Steve Penfold Steve Penfold is Customer Success Director at Elucidat. He helps large organizations and online training providers use Elucidat’s award-winning elearning authoring tool. The post How to choose an eLearning authoring tool appeared first on LearnUpon.

Successful radical innovations are rare - and most attempts at them fail. High uncertainty and the risk of failure lead many senior managers to stay in their comfort zone: they resist radical innovation and instead focus on incremental improvements to existing offerings.

The Problem Facing L&D Companies have extensive investments in Training Programs and that content is depreciating at a staggering rate. Training programs become unusable, irrelevant, or outdated if they are not properly managed and maintained. Companies that constantly maintain and reuse their learning assets enjoy a much better return on investment for training expenditure.1 The value of outdated workplace training programs can be maximized by reducing the amount of extraneous content, reusing instructionally sound content, and recycling content with an eye towards improving and modernizing its design. Reducing the amount of extraneous training content improves the impact of training and increases learner engagement. A common issue with older training programs is that they are overly long, contain too much information for employees to remember on the job,2 and rehash some of the same concepts multiple times throughout the program. After auditing older training programs, learning professionals can strategically prune away extraneous training content to ensure that whatever content remains is more succinct and impactful.5 As long as the content is instructionally sound and contains useful information, it can be leveraged for the development of new training programs in the future as well. Perform an Audit Auditing your training portfolio and identifying extraneous content that can be condensed or removed requires a critical eye. Here are four questions to keep in mind when performing a training portfolio audit: Are the programs too time consuming? Training workshops that pull employees away from their jobs days at a time and hour long e-learning courses are good candidates for consolidation. Think 70/20/10 Will learners suffer from information overload? Learners can only retain so much information at a time from formal training programs. Content that is too information-rich and relies on workers to memorize lots of information becomes unwieldy and should be condensed. Are there learning assets that have gotten negative feedback from workers? Unpopular training content should be removed from your company’s training portfolio. However, if some of the base content is still useful, it should be partitioned away from the program as a whole instead of deleting it. Are there learning objects that are no longer accessible due to technological limitations? For e-learning content in particular, older content published in legacy formats can become inaccessible on modern Internet browsers, learning management systems, and mobile devices. After Reducing Now What? Reducing extraneous content is only the first step to maximize training ROI. Read more, download the Modernize eBook from InfoPro Learning. Download the Modernize EBook Ebbinghaus, H. (1885). "Memory: A Contribution to Experimental Psychology." Translated by Ruger, H., & Bussenius, C. (1913). New York: Teachers College, Columbia University. Barker, E., James, H., Knight, G., et. al. (2004). "Long-Term Retention and Reuse of E- Learning Objects and Materials." Report commissioned by the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC). About the author: Kyle Miller is an enterprise learning consultant with InfoPro Learning based out of Princeton, NJ. Prior to joining InfoPro, Kyle served as a research associate on subjects including e-learning, online education, game-based learning, and social media usage in higher education at St. John’s University in New York. The post How To Audit Training Programs: Reduce for a Greater ROI appeared first on .

Welcome to week one of the post-acquisition Rustici Software world. I just thought I’d take a moment here to discuss one of the reasons we agreed to sell Rustici Software to LTG, because it’s not all about the money. Mike and I were seeking investment funding for Watershed, but we really weren’t on the lookout for anything related to Rustici Software. It was a profitable business, I know very well how to run it, and we have several sets of work that give us cause for optimism. LTG, however, saw the value in both Watershed from an investment point of view and Rustici Software from a market and profitability point of view. After LTG’s first visit, Mike and I asked ourselves two questions. Did we believe that we would be able to maintain our strange and highly-valued culture through an acquisition? Having a place we want to come to work has always been a fundamental requirement for us. Did we believe that we would be able to serve our customers in the way we always had?   Throughout the negotiations, due diligence, and these two long days as an LTG company we’ve consistently believed that we could do both of those things and still do. LTG is not an LMS provider like some of our prior suitors have been. We always used to worry that an acquisition of that sort might include aggressive interactions with our customers. With LTG, we’re going to continue to be agnostic, supportive of the standards, and generally the same company we always have been. We’re excited about it, and excited about continuing to support our customers and the industry in general in exactly the same way. The post More of the same appeared first on Rustici Software.

Why transitioning to a middle manager feels a lot like starting middle school.

To close the #LearningPerforming gap, we are re-imagining how we think about fusing technology with our L&D practices, and in doing so, a new role has emerged.

  It’s a lot of fun working with both hosted and locally installed platforms. Yes, technically the deployments vary a lot (and I’m thankful for our super talented developers who manage both worlds), but it gives us the chance to work with many types of companies and products. Some folks gravitate towards the flexibility of SCORM Cloud as a hosted solution that scales with them as their business grows. Other folks require a more controlled, locally installed solution and need our Engine player for those very reasons. Recently we’ve noticed another benefit of offering both deployment options— migrating from one deployment method to the other as business models change. Case in point? Atomic Learning. Check out their story: Atomic Learning was a SCORM Cloud customer from the early days. They leveraged the SCORM Cloud API to integrate SCORM functionality into their K-12 Assessment platform. The flexibility of SCORM Cloud licensing worked great with their initial business model where usage spiked dramatically in May and September, coinciding with the start and end of the school year. Atomic Learning could simply scale their account size up and down to align with that usage pattern. Last year, Atomic Learning shifted their content strategy—going from two assessments per user annually to delivering smaller bites of learning more frequently. It quickly became apparent that the registration-based licensing would not be feasible with this new business model. The SCORM Engine Web Services option provided a way for Atomic Learning to move to an annual user based licensing model that better supported the fact that users who previously only took 2 courses per year could now generate as many as 20-30 registrations. And, because they had built an integration against the SCORM Cloud API, the transition to the locally installed version was fairly seamless. Once they had the server configuration set up on their end, they simply redirected the Cloud API calls to local calls and they were off and running. Need help figuring out which deployment method is right for you? This chart should help- and you can always ask us. The post What happens when your business model changes? appeared first on SCORM - .

Well, not really, but it’s the closest thing that the e-learning industry has to offer in the area of "prestigious awards for doing awesome things". The Brandon Hall Group Excellence Awards Program is the most prestigious awards program in the e-learning industry, and was the first awards program put in place in the e-learning industry (back in 1994). So what cool things have we been doing and what did we win? ADL released the official 1.0 version of the Tin Can API in April of 2013, and the e-learning world was then able to do amazing new things that weren’t possible with SCORM alone. SCORM serves its purpose, but the really exciting things happen when you start using the Tin Can API. LifeWay Christian Resources wanted to deliver and track video content in a way that would produce metrics that SCORM alone couldn’t produce, so we outfitted their systems with the Tin Can API, and tracked all the metrics they wanted to track with the Learning Record Store that’s built into SCORM Engine. What did that get us? A Brandon Hall Group Excellence Award! You can read a lot of the details here. AT&T wanted to do things with their training program that they couldn’t do in a traditional SCORM environment, so we set them up with the Watershed LRS and they began learning what motivated their employees to learn and how various types of learning affected employees’ real-world performance. And yep, another Brandon Hall Group Excellence Award! While we’re talking about awards, we’d like to acknowledge our friends and customers that also won Brandon Hall Group Excellence Awards: Accenture American Red Cross BizLibrary CA Technologies, Inc. Convergys Corporation CypherWorx KFC-US (Yum! Brands, Inc.) Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory NogginLabs, Inc. PANDORA A/S Tata Consultancy Services Ltd Tribridge Triple Creek Workplace Answers We’re happy to see so much innovation happening in the e-learning industry, and proud to know that Tin Can is at the heart of revolutionizing a fair bit of it. Click here to see a full list of this year’s winners. If you have any questions or would like to talk to us about how you can use the Tin Can API in your organization, please get in touch. We love talking about this stuff! The post We won two Grammys! appeared first on SCORM - .

Working in the Cloud is supposed to make things easier. Well, if you’re working with the SCORM Cloud API, we’ve made it even easier. SCORM Cloud is built to be integrated into other applications. To let SCORM Cloud communicate with these applications, we use identifiers called "app IDs" for each of them. THEN: Lots of applications = lots of manual work. Previously, adding a new app ID required API users to log in and use the Cloud interface. Many of our API users segment their usage across their customers, so this manual step created some serious extra work for them. NOW: NO MORE MANUAL WORK! You can now use the API to create a new app ID for each new customer you bring on board. We’ve added this functionality into the API. API users, take a moment to rejoice! To ensure that managing your service is easy and safe, we’ve added a security precaution. API users will have a dedicated set of credentials (app ID and secret) for adding new app IDs. This "Master" App ID is reserved for managing your service while other app IDs are used for managing your customers. You asked, we listened. This is in response to a customer request we get quite often. And when enough people are asking for a feature, it’s important for us to deliver! The new App Management feature for the SCORM Cloud API is available today. To read more about how it works and where to get it, go here. The post Easier App Management with SCORM Cloud API appeared first on SCORM - .

With over 28 improvements and enhancements, this is the most robust upgrade for SCORM Engine since, well, ever. We’ve been working hard over the past few months to prepare for seamless installs and upgrades. We’re excited to announce that we’re ready for you, so come and get it! Here are my favorite improvements: It’s SCORM and Tin Can conformant! The new Tin Can (xAPI) Conformance Test Suite from ADL includes hundreds of tests to assess LRS conformance. Rest assured, SCORM Engine 2014 passes them all. Engine supports Recipes! It automatically indexes incoming Tin Can API statements using these Recipes’ specifications, making Tin Can even simpler. It’s even faster than before. We’ve made database improvements for increased speed and robustness. How/when can you get it? New installs and upgrades are available now! Contact us to secure your spot in line. Where can you find more information? For more top-level technical details on the new release, visit the Documentation page or contact us. The post SCORM Engine 2014.1 is Now Available! appeared first on SCORM - .