Pre-authoring is the content creation process that occurs before authoring. The media content you create that will end up being used in your authoring tool to create your final product. It's the tools you use to create videos, audio, graphics, animations, screen captures, and text for your eLearning courses. Tools like Powerpoint, Audacity, MovieMaker, Camtasia, SnagIt, Pixelmator, and so many other tools that don't fit the category of authoring tools. Yet they are equally vital to the production of the content we create and import into those authoring tools. And in some cases the content you pre-author is good enough to stand on it's own as learning content. And that is changing everything. Back When the Trend was Multimedia Authoring The trend in corporate training has been moving towards smaller and smaller pieces of content. One could argue that the growth of mobile is responsible for that shift. But we also now know that shorter content is more conducive to how our brains retain information. And we know that repetition is more important than quantity for deeper long term learning. In the early days before eLearning there was computer based training, CBT. There was no internet. And we had little hard science to back up the claims of behavioral psychologists. It was still 20th century school just digitized and delivered via computer. Hour long classroom courses were converted into hour long CBT courses. Nothing fundamentally instructional changed about how content was delivered other than not having a teacher, and not needing a school house to deliver the instruction. The content changed very little in most cases as we converted analog content to digital. 21st century technology has completely changed the way individuals consume media. It's a YouTube world out there. And it's no different if that media happens to be specifically consumed to meet a particular learning objective. Those hour long fully contained, and locked up, lessons are now being unbundled. The Khan Academy has become a cliched example, but there's a reason why. It works. And there are other examples of even shorter content on platforms like Instragram, and SnapChat. Everything is being unbundled and condensed. And if you don't believe me, ask a teenager. Are Authoring Tools Dying? This unbundling of CBTs brings us to why pre-authoring tools have overshadowed eLearning authoring tools in recent years. In most cases they are much less expensive than authoring tools. Some are even free. They've become more powerful and easier to use over the years. Some are even mobile apps. YouTube.com even allows for minor video editing within the browser. Authoring tools were necessary a decade ago because the trend was multimedia. You needed authoring tools to bring together multiple media formats into one interactive environment. An environment that also needed interface and navigation design as well as coding for tracking and data storage. Multimedia authoring was fun! But it came at a price. Fast forward back to present day eLearning and we find that browser designs have become the standard for user interface design and navigation. Cloud based learning management systems have taken advantage of this by handling the navigation and design for you. But they also give users the ability to customize if necessary. Your media content is added as individual modules and can be mixed and matched to create courses. And your courses can be combined to create comprehensive learning paths. All of this work used to be crammed into authoring tools and published for CD-ROMs or later as FLASH files. Within the cloud much of that work is no longer necessary. Instructional media creators can focus their efforts on simply creating the best media they can produce...or afford. That might be a video, or a series of videos. It might include a Powerpoint presentation accompanied by the voice of the subject matter expert. The choices of media selection are many with little need for additional value added by an authoring tool. SaaS and User Trends Point the Way Forward The software as a service platforms have become the standard for almost every industry. Combine SaaS trends with user trends in media consumption and you have a powerful indicator pointing you in the direction of pre-authoring becoming primary authoring. And your SaaS-based LMS being your publishing platform, tracking system, content library, eCommerce store, and so much more. The heavy lifting handled by authoring tools was required in the days of multimedia. But today it is largely unnecessary. We have become a single medium society consuming images, video, and text as separate elements. Video is becoming so ubiquitous that soon there will be very little not captured and published for the world to see...and learn from. It's really quite amazing if you don't let it freak you out. So where does that leave us? Is authoring dead? I have my thoughts, but I'd love to hear from you. Send me a tweet @Litmos or use the hashtag #TellLitmos or #askLitmos.   The post If Pre-Authoring Becomes Primary Authoring...is Authoring Dead? appeared first on Litmos.

Technology is shifting again. It all started with a live-casting app called Meerkat at this year's SXSW event. It was quickly followed by Twitter's entry called Periscope. Google couldn't be left out so they launched YouNOW. And most recently Facebook entered the race with Mention. Unfortunately, Facebook made their early launch only available to celebrities. So, I won't...mention...Facebook's app much. HA! Yahoo is also getting in on the live-casting action with LiveText. It's a strange app because there is no audio. It's only texting with a live video stream. Hhhmmm... Not sure I get it. This trend is moving fast. I just recently blogged about the nationwide live-cast of the Applebees marketing event here. And it was just a few days ago that I witnessed another Ferguson protest via Periscope as it was happening. It won't be long before your students begin live-casting your classroom events. They might even begin live-casting your eLearning while they are taking the course. How are we, as a community of professionals, going to respond? My hope is that one day we will become confident technology leaders responding proactively to new technologies, and leaving our legacy of being fearful reactionaries behind. In the short time these apps have been around we've already seen some impressive use cases emerge. Sporting events: The MayWeather/Pacquio fight was pirated heavily via live-casting apps. Music Concerts: U2 partnered with Meerkat to live-cast parts of their recent concert tour. Live News Coverage: First it was a fire in New York covered by a Periscope use and most recently The 2nd shooting in Ferguson hit Periscope before the regular media news outlets knew it was even happening. Marketing Events: Applebee's streamed their new product announcement from locations across the country via Meerkat and Periscope. Let me just pause for a moment and ask the learning community to please leave the live-casting nomenclature alone. As this trend begins to grow you will no doubt find it useful as an education tool, and feel an overwhelming urge to rename it LEARN-Casting. Please do not. I'm begging you right now to resist.  Live-Casting for Training or Performance Support? My very informal survey of colleagues has shown a pattern of usage similar to the early days of Twitter. Many curiously looked but seeing only millennials rambling on about nothing turned off the desire to investigate any deeper. This is similar to the "I don't care what you had for breakfast" complaint heard by many during twitter's earliest days circa 2006. I'm sure most of you remember going through the process. Create Twitter account Decide it's stupid Don't touch it for months...years even. Go back and look to see if your account is still there...because everyone. It's easy to see how much more compelling live video can be when compared to 140 text characters. And with live video having already been around online in other forms, it's easier for non-techie types to "get it". The use case for training is too soon. However, I don't think it takes a lot of creativity to see the value in live-casting for the purpose of learning. And at some point it will end up as part of everyone's blended learning strategy. But will it carry primary content as part of your main training event or will it be considered more useful as a performance support tool? Like every other new trend, experiments will need to be tried. It will be interesting to see how it all plays out. For users of the Litmos LMS you don't need to worry about integration. Anything you can link to on the internet can be used as part of your course already. And with the recent announcement of Meerkat's open API, we will also be investigating a tighter integration with live-casting tools. A lot has changed since Meerkat's launch in April 2015.  And I have no doubts that the live-casting landscape will be very different before the end of the year. So hold on and enjoy the ride.   The post Live-Casting Trend Continues to Grow in eLearning appeared first on Litmos.

The role Learning & Development (L&D) can play in the organization is changing. There are great opportunities to assist in success than just offering courses.  The time is now for L&D to step up and become an ever-more valuable contributor. The nature of work is changing.  As things move faster, the ability to execute against known factors is dropping in importance.  The situations being seen in the workplace are increasingly ambiguous, unique, and changing.  What’s needed is an ability to adapt quickly, to innovate continually. This doesn’t come from courses alone. There are new developments on several fronts in how we think, work, and learn.  Our understanding of our own cognition has advanced, but unfortunately we are not seeing this reflected in workplace practices with sufficiency.  We need to account for these new realizations in our approaches. It used to be the model that all our thinking was done in the head.  We provided lots of knowledge and tested with ‘closed books’.  What’s now recognized by science, however, is that our cognition is distributed across our artifacts and representations as well as in our head.  Our thinking isn’t as formally logical as we’d like to believe, and external supports - checklists, lookup tables, wizards, etc. - are valuable complements in ensuring our outcomes excel. We’ve also recognized that creativity is not an independent activity. Innovation comes from creative friction, people working together with complementary skills. When properly facilitated, the room (as the saying goes) is smarter than the smartest person in the room.  Creating ways for people to work together is a new imperative. Finally, our learning isn’t best facilitated by content dump and knowledge test.  It’s hard to get rote and arbitrary information into our heads, and we’re better suited for decisions than remembering.  We should use the supports identified above to support remembering, and save our learning for better decisions. However, doing so implies a different form of pedagogy: meaningful and sufficient practice.  There is nothing inherently wrong with courses, but they need to be focused on business outcomes and provided with sufficient opportunity to develop the ability. Practice until they get it right won’t get it done; you need to practice until they can’t get it wrong. Further, we need to look at the bigger picture of learning.   Models such as the 70:20:10 Framework as touted by Charles Jennings or Jane Hart’s Modern Workplace Learning help us understand that learning doesn’t stop at the end of the course. Learners can and will continue to develop with mentoring and coaching, and by taking on challenging assignments. This is particularly true for the more complex decisions that we are increasingly seeing, and we should not only acknowledge this but design with it in mind and support the process. What do these realizations imply for the future of work?  It suggests that courses need to change the focus, and we need to supplement courses with a variety of other resources.   Our perspective has to shift to one of facilitating organizational outcomes, and that learning also includes research, problem-solving, design, and more.  Our tools will include performance support and social media. Our processes need to change as well.  We have to start looking at performance consulting before we start designing courses. We need to ask what the core gap in performance is, and then whether it’s a knowledge, skill, or motivation problem. If it’s not a skill problem, we need other solutions than courses.  If we do this, however, we’re now focusing on delivering a bigger solution to the organizational performance problem than just one component.   To complement the focus on performance, we also should consider how we develop the ability of the organization to learn beyond and outside of courses.   To support coaching and mentoring we need to ensure we have good practices and good tools. We also need meaningful work.   In addition, when we innovate, trouble-shoot, create, we don’t know the answer when we start, so that too is a form of learning. Here we need to facilitate people working well together, as well as learning on their own. These should not be assumed, but developed, and here too is a role for assessment and courses. With this perspective, we see courses as a rich component of a full suite of support for organizational learning. Formal learning provides not only the optimal execution for what is done by the individual, but serves as a channel for developing learning and social working skills.  Moreover, as courses begin to expand to a wider definition, incorporating "micro-learning" or small content chunks that can include ‘how-to’ videos and troubleshooting guides, these too need to be hosted and tracked.  The goal is to have resources that go beyond ‘just in case’ to include the ‘just in time’ needs that are increasingly seen. This can seem like an expanding role, and a consequent bandwidth challenge for already strapped resources.  Increasingly, organizations are finding two strategies help mitigate this problem. One includes being more opportunistic, and the other includes being more focused. Too often, it’s easy (particularly under the sway of the Subject Matter Expert or SME) to want to offer everything potentially relevant.  However, when you’ve got motivated workers focused on achieving outcomes, they really don’t want everything, and they’d prefer just the minimum necessary.  A useful approach is the Least Assistance Principle, where the realization is that "what’s the least I can do for you" isn’t a rude response.  Giving folks just enough to get back to performing is desirable for your resources and the audience.  This is a good principle in the design of solutions whether mobile or coursework, and also supports using other approaches such as performance support instead of creating a full course.  A mantra is ‘resources before courses’. An associated mantra is ‘curation over creation’.  Increasingly, materials can be found that meet an organizational need, and when so, they should be used.  In fact, a reasonable policy is not to create anything that isn’t proprietary; for general business needs a ‘buy not build’ approach should be chosen.  An alternative to ‘a course for everything’ is to have a course on how to learn from resources, and then pointers to books or outside courses rather than investing development resources internally. With policies like these, the organization can become more efficient and effective, while also becoming a more strategic contributor to the organization.  The opportunity exists for L&D to ‘go big’.  L&D can begin to grow to include a much more flexible definition of course, and perform against a richer in facilitating organizational success.     The post Integrating the Bigger Picture of Learning appeared first on Litmos.

In 2012 I was introduced to the Business Model Canvas at a gathering of creative design thinkers. Recently I discovered that a colleague in the corporate training community had modified the canvas slightly to be an effective for learning & development. And the Learning Model Canvas was born. The creative mind behind the LMC is John Delano, CEO of saltbox. He spent some time on skype with me recently to introduce the learning model canvas, explain how it benefits learning leaders, and share some of his professional experiences. If you work in corporate training in any capacity I think you will find the LMC quite useful. Rest assured this is not another ADDIE model or like any other design model in existence. The learning model canvas is a solid design thinking tool that will help you think strategically about ANY training issue you may be trying to solve. I recorded our skype conversation which you can see below. But before you watch the video you might want to download the Interactive Learning Model Canvas for free. John's team also offers an online course and onsite workshops. But honestly, I'm not blogging about this just to promote John's work...although I do think it's brilliant. I would encourage you to even start with the original Business Model Canvas and read the book: Business Model Generation. This will give you a much broader sense of how many different problems can be solved through the design thinking fostered by the canvas. After 20+ years in this industry I've seen tools and models come and go. I've succeeded and failed with most of them. There is no magic to the canvas itself. As a matter of fact there is nothing stopping you from just drawing the 9 quadrants yourself on a sheet of paper and digging in. The magic is in how you use it. At the very least you can use it as a sort of check list when creating a new training department or project. Its a gut check to make sure you haven't missed something. I can say with confidence that one of the greatest problems with most training professionals is their inability to "speak business". You may never get an MBA, but simply reviewing the LMC as it relates to your course, curriculum, or training department, will get you out of your ISD head and into your business head. And that's where you want to be. This is just another tool in the toolbox of providing business value instead of just being satisfied with "creating training". I hope you enjoy listening to my conversation with John. And if you find the video, and LMC, useful please let me know. I'd love to hear from you. The post A Design Thinking Tool for Learning and Development appeared first on Litmos.

Teachers will be the next millionaires! I've been making this statement for the last decade. But it's only been in the last few years that I've actually seen it becoming a reality. Training-preneurs are all over the internet. They are the people who have seen what technology has done to other industries, as well as what it's done for individuals. The tools of the internet have changed the world of education/training for ever. The tools mixed with the natural creativity of those born to teach makes for a powerful combination. And that wave of change has only just begun to swell. The next millionaires are on the rise...and they're selling knowledge. Who are these Training-preneurs Training-preneur is an awkward term at best. But it's the best way to describe in one word those who earn a living by teaching outside the traditional education system. Most often their entrepreneurial instincts see a need There are major success stories like Lynda.com and Khan Academy. But there are also small startups. And for the biggest collection of Training-preneurs you need look no further than YouTube. Many sell their knowledge on blogs and monetize via online advertising platforms. Some do it better than others. And they may not be millionaires, but many are making a good living, or extra fun money at the very least. Teachers are even selling their lesson plans to one another. I recently experienced live guitar lessons on the popular blab.im LiveCasting system. Many training-preneurs have even stepped up their game with training platforms like Litmos.com to manage their entire training business. The list of ways to make money in education are growing, and I can't list them all here. Heck, I don't even know what they all are. Nobody does. But it's safe to say there are enough options to give everyone a shot at it. A New Breed of Learning Professionals Training-preneurs are no different than any other teacher drawn to their career by an inner passion for learning and sharing. This growing population has a natural instinct for both teaching and learning. When they gain new knowledge they are compelled to share it with others. And how that sharing occurs is not restricted by any rules, models, methods, or school systems defining "the right" way to deliver instruction. They simply do what comes natural, build an audience, and deliver on what that audience responds too. I've seen many business models in the education space come and go over the years. Lynda.com is a great example of how just giving the learner/customer what they want actually works. Short high quality videos on highly focused topics. YouTube is no different. It's everyman's Lynda.com. No matter how BAD your video is, you can still post it to YouTube and learn from that experience. The hope is that you get better and better with each new video. Most YouTubers that stick with it actually do get pretty darn good. Their delivery improves, the video quality improves, the content improves, and their following grows. And as their audience grows they begin to see financial returns. Others taking a more traditional business model approach simply see a need and build a business plan around it. My favorite example is Paula Cooper, founder of Dine Aware. The following is a quote from her case study you can read here. "Dine Aware™ is a new brand with an end goal to change food service perceptions industry-wide and worldwide. Their mission is to teach all employees in the food and beverage industry how to manage and interact with the food allergy and food intolerant public in a way that inspires confidence." It's a brilliant idea.  And from personal experience I can assure you her training in this area should be required for all the restaurants in my neighborhood. And if you think certification programs are a wide open market, think about CEUs (Continuing Education Units). Continuing Education  training is a massive industry. Most licensed professionals are required to have a certain number of hours in CEUs to keep their credentials current. This of course makes for an amazing opportunity for those willing to put in the work. The Technology is Amazing! Technology has created new opportunities in just about every industry. The technology today is powerful, fast, and finally in the mainstream. When you have 82 year old grandmothers becoming famous on YouTube, it's definitely gone mainstream. And okay so maybe their show is more about entertainment, but that doesn't mean it can't be educational. But I'll save the "what's learning and what not" conversation for someone else. The reality is that technology is not only amazing but it's being used on a regular basis by all ages. The latest trend is livecasting. Live video streaming from mobile devices with apps like Meerkat, and Periscope. And more recently a platform called blab.im has made a HUGE entrance onto the scene. While it's anyone's guess as to which companies will win and which will lose, its the basic idea of easy video streaming that is the big winner for everyone. Even before mobile livecasting there was Google Hangouts, Ustream, and others. Technology is no longer the barrier. It's even incredibly easy to create a beautiful website faster than ever before. Look at Strikingly.com. So, you can create a web presence with something like strikingly.com. Create and sell courses with Litmos.com, and publish supplemental, or primary, content via YouTube or Vimeo. And promote your efforts on social media to engage your audience of learners. The Training-preneurs are real. They're already here and they're making money. And they aren't instructional designers or learning gurus. They're teachers using technology to do what they love. And I think that's pretty awesome! The post The Rise of the Training-preneur appeared first on Litmos.

When I started working with Inmarsat back in 2011, they didn't have any elearning. With a team of trainers travelling all corners of the globe, there was an understandable push to reduce travel costs. My remit was to introduce an elearning strategy that would not only provide a cost-saving against classroom training, but that would allow these highly technical trainers to spend less time delivering repeat courses and more time to deliver training in which their expertise would be maximized. So whilst we were busy implementing a new Learning Management System (you can read a Beginners Guide to Implementing a Learning Management System if you need some guidance on the basics), we also identified some courses that would deliver an immediate cost-saving to the business. The first course that we identified as a ‘quick-win’ was an accredited product training course. IsatPhone Pro Repair Training One of Inmarsat's key products is the IsatPhone satellite phone. This provides someone in an area without normal phone reception with a form of reliable communication - such as on top of a mountain or in the middle of the ocean. The phones are being sold worldwide via a global network of third-party resellers. These resellers are accredited by Inmarsat to undertake repairs and adjustments. The accreditation process involved a 1/2 day practical training session, which would teach partners resellers how to repair the phone correctly and was followed by an exam. This course was delivered by a technical trainer, who would fly out to the partner and deliver the training onsite. This was clearly an inefficient use of the trainers' time - the training was fairly basic and very repetitive i.e. the same training was delivered with little variation each time. And despite attempting to group local partners together in order to deliver the course to a larger audience, thus reducing the number of training courses required, this would often prove unsuccessful. So each time the training needed to be delivered, it would mean a round-the-world trip for the trainer which had not only a cost implication, but restricted the trainers' schedule from delivering higher value training. Our Solution Our solution was to build an elearning course using Articulate Storyline that would be hosted on our LMS. The course consisted of an introduction, followed by a series of demonstration videos that we recorded ourselves, which teaches the learner how to repair the phone. We embedded the videos into the Storyline course and used the same exam to ensure that learners correctly understood what they had learnt during the training. We then set up the course within the LMS to generate a certificate of completion, with a report that was sent directly to the Training Manager once the course had been completed. You can see the finished elearning course by clicking here. The course was tested on a sample group of partners who required the training, and then launched globally after a successful pilot. After having ironed out a few bugs and glitches, and adjusted the course based on feedback from the pilot group, the course was launched and immediately removed this course from the trainer’s list of responsibilities. We were left with happy customers, very happy trainers and a Training Manager with budget to spare! Doing the Math Inmarsat had been running this classroom training at least 10 times per year, sometimes more. Each session was costing the company around £5,000 (travel, salary, admin etc.) so a realistic cost for this training per year could be estimated to be £50,000. The elearning course took less than a month to build at a cost of less than £5,000 (one instructional designer for a month armed with a copy of Storyline, the SME for 2 days of filming and an HD video camera). Ironically, the cost to create this elearning course turned out to be the same as flying a trainer to the other side of the world to deliver the course once! So from looking at the calculations spread over the year, we can see that the cost saving is immense. What about the Learning Management System? Now you would be correct if you noticed that these calculations don’t take into account the cost of the LMS. And if you were only delivering one course via your LMS, then this would be a significant investment. However, most cloud-based LMS have a simple pricing structure that means once you are delivering several courses, economies of scale kick-in and delivering online training becomes the most efficient way to deliver training. (One of my favourite features of Litmos is the pricing system where you only pay for active learners). Keeping the Course Updated This course was built in 2011 and when Inmarsat launched a new version of the phone in 2014, the training was updated to reflect the changes. Because the overall structure of the course remained identical, it was simply a case of recording new videos and swapping them in the elearning course. Easy! In addition to this, the accreditation was set to expire after 12 months, which meant that repeat training had to be undertaken annually to ensure the resellers maintained their accredited status - there is an ongoing cost saving here too! No more follow-up training sessions required! Conclusion It doesn't take a rocket scientist to understand the cost-savings that elearning provides. (And I did work with a few rocket scientists at Inmarsat!) But it is often difficult to demonstrate the saving. And fortunately this was one example that made the calculation very obvious. If you’re interested in replacing a classroom training course with a custom elearning course please click here. If you enjoyed reading this post, you may also enjoy my article on 5 Questions to Ask Yourself before Finding Someone to build your eLearning Course. Other useful articles There is a fantastic article discusses how Cisco, world leader in networking hardware, switched from classroom training to a web-based solution for its 28,000 sales representatives and cut overall training costs by 40-60%. Another great article which explains how elearning can save you money whilst developing a franchised business model is How to Grow Your Franchise and Save Money By Taking Training Online. The post How I Saved $50,000 Moving from Classroom Training to eLearning appeared first on Litmos.

Blab.im is the latest social media phenomenon. It's a fantastic live streaming system that runs in browsers or on their mobile app. It's similar to Google Hangouts but is far superior in its usability. There are so many use cases for a tool like blab and I want to figure out how we can apply blab, and tools like it, to corporate training and education. Why blab? Didn't we all get excited about WebEx, Connect, and so many other "teleconferencing" tools already? Yes! And when they first launched we were right to be excited about the possibilties. Those tools were cutting edge in their day. But for some reason we saw only slow innovation over the years since their launch. What we are seeing today is a resurgence of innovation by new startups in video streaming. Much of the early buzz came from Google hangouts when it launched. I was a big fan for a long time, but was equally frustrated by the complexity of the interface. Then, more recently, we saw the fast rise of Periscsope and Meerkat. 2 similar tools focused on mobile video streaming only. And that leads us to the last 2 weeks with the launch of blab.im. In short, blab is amazing! It’s amazingly simple yet powerful in it capabilties. And I can’t go on without mentioning the community of early adopters that has formed around the tool. A couple community members took it upon themselves to create a blab.im guide that you can find here. http://www.marc-levy.com/blab-im-tutorial/ Check out the link and learn more about it. Once you get the hang of it, then join me in a blab about how new mobile streaming tools like this can be used in eLearning/education/learning. I have not decided on a schedule yet. But you will find my profile at https://blab.im/bschlenker. And you can catch a replay of my first Learning blab... or maybe we call it blearning. Follow me there or send Litmos a note on twitter @litmos.   The post Blabbing About Blab.im in Learning & Development - Join the Conversation appeared first on Litmos.

Why You Need A Good Microphone Audio is a powerful medium. It's a powerful medium on its own, but also an integral part of video. For many of us that's where the conversation about audio ends. We feel like it's someone else's responsibility because they record the voice overs, or they record the sound. But things have changed. It's easier than ever to engage with others via the internet using audio and video. And so you need to know how to sound good. We have systems like Skype, and Facetime that allow us to communicate with others via audio/video.  And it's important that you sound good. If you are a corporate training producer then you need a good microphone. You can wait on truly understanding how audio works, but you don't need to wait on knowing what microphone to buy. As with most tech products you get what you pay for. But if you don't know anything about audio you can get lost in Amazon trying to find something that will work for you. I've organized by thoughts here based on what you are trying to do, and based on my experience over the years with many different setups. Headset with Microphone USB headsets with builtin microphones are the easiest solution. If you have nothing at all then you should start here. You can use the headset for many different audio related projects, meetings, webinars, recordings, and streaming. I recommend a wired USB connection instead of wireless bluetooth for 2 reasons: 1) Quality 2) Ease of use. In the world of audio anything connected via wires is easier to work with and generally of a higher sound quality. I recommend the Plantronics 655 USB headset mic. You can find it on Amazon for around $35. I still use it's predecessor the 510 which was around $80 a few years ago. My 510 still sounds great and I'm sure the 655 sounds even better. So don't be afraid of the cheap price. While you are shopping on Amazon you may also see the 355 for $16. It looks just like the 655 but don't be fooled. Spend the extra dollars for the 655. USB Desktop Microphone If you are an eLearning developer or a subject matter expert needing to share knowledge via audio on it's own or as part of a video, then you will want to invest in a good USB desktop microphone. Again, a USB connection is best because it just works. It's a computer standard and not an original audio standard. So plugging directly into your computer saves you the headache of adaptors and other audio witchcraft. I recommend the Blue Yeti to everyone I meet that needs a desktop microphone. It's a little over $100 on amazon but well worth the price. Unless you have money to burn I'd avoid the Yeti Pro. It's built for professionals, and this blog post is not for professionals. So the standard Yeti will be great for your needs. Remember that as you step up from a headset/mic to a desktop mic you also need to consider your environment more carefully. Better microphones are better because they are more sensitive and can pick up very subtle sounds. Making your recording sound really good may require some room modifications or at the very least a sound isolation box. There are many DIY solutions on youtube. This is a good one. Or you can just buy one like this. Handheld + Mixer When you're ready to step up your audio there are many directions you could go. But most likely if you need to be at this point you will find many other experts offering their advice. But here is my take on it...if you're interested. One of the reasons you will step up to a setup with a mic + mixer setup is that you've found the other 2 options to be limiting in some way. For most eLearning developers and SMEs, just recording decent audio, the first 2 options are best. But if you've been turned on by podcasting, vlogging, or LiveCasting then I recommend this little audio rig: Sennheiser e835 w/ Alesis Multimix4  You will also want a desktop mic stand or swing arm as well. You can certainly do podcasting, vlogging, and LiveCasting with the yeti or the plantronics 655, but I'm assuming that you know that, but are at the point where you'd like to do more. You'll notice that I haven't provided any audio comparison clips or charts in this blog post. There really is no reason for me to duplicate what the internet has already provided. Jump on YouTube, search for it, and you will find it. I've put in a lot of hours over the years reading blog posts, watching YouTube videos, and testing gear. I am by no means an expert, but love to tinker in audio/video stuff. Are there other good products? Absolutely! However, I'm also a bit of a cheap bugger so I'm pretty sure these options will get you the best results per dollar spent. But, as usual, If I've forgotten something please share it with me. @litmos The post The Best Microphone Options for the Training Professional appeared first on Litmos.

About Today's Guest Blogger, Mark Sheppard I've known Mark Sheppard for a while via the magic of the internet. I'm honored to call him a colleague and enjoy our conversations immensely. I appreciate his perspective on eLearning and glad he agreed to share some recent thoughts with the Litmos community on our blog. If you do not know Mark, then you should follow him on twitter @marklearns and get to know him better. You'll be glad you did. "When not trying to manage his Twitter feed and ever-growing list of readings, he works for a neat little learning services & innovation firm in the Greater Toronto Area. He also teaches advanced Instructional Design and Adult Learning at the under-grad and graduate levels." You can find out more about Mark on his About.me page. eLearning: It's Bigger on the Inside by Mark Sheppard A couple of unexpected finds in my travels along with a recent exchange on Twitter both got me thinking about the current state of what we colloquially call "e-Learning". Fans of the BBC cultural icon known as 'Doctor Who' will appreciate the title above, but for those who are not as familiar, the eponymous Doctor (a humanoid alien) travels Time and Space in a spacecraft that looks suspiciously like a 1950's vintage British Police Call Box from the outside, but is considerably larger when one steps through the doors and takes a good look around. The Doctor also has the ability to regenerate himself when seriously injured, taking on a new humanoid form, yet retaining all or most of his memories in spite of a new look and new personality. While there were other parts to the exchange, the major assertion I saw on Twitter was that elearning is "dead" and that we must look to new things. I'm afraid that I must disagree and I believe that elearning has indeed been regenerated and already offers many new things. Looking Back My colleague was right in one sense when he indicated that we need to embrace users beyond the laptop or desktop screens. We know that learners (any learner) are increasingly mobile, drawing lessons from sources like YouTube, Vimeo, Vine, Instagram, Periscope, etc. In workplace learning, or even higher ed, we know that the developmental solutions struggle to keep pace in an increasingly connected society.  We tend to be less flexible when it comes to new tools, and in some ways I see why. After all, we make serious investments in learning technologies and we also have to think about lifecycle and updating and long-term management. Think back to some of the early commercial "CBT" CD-ROMs hit the workplace (remember those?) We were living in a world where Netscape was fighting Internet Explorer for dominance, and nobody was quite sure what the Web would mean for everyone. Linear "next ware" caught people’s attention because it was shiny, clicky bling-bling, and it didn’t need instructors.   Or so they thought. Fast-forward 15 years or so and in spite of all the new and exciting things that the Web has become, we still find ourselves dealing with platform wars, competing standards, and more and more players in a crowded market. Instructors are still around, and so is technology-based learning. Regeneration's the Thing   Having worked for a vendor training partner in those early days of CD-based training offerings, I've seen a lot of things happening, and in a lot of ways, elearning is regenerating itself. We see familiar features and functions (not all of them good) but we see glimpses of new thinking. People, users, learners, whatever we want to call them, are living in the Cloud. We also see more vendors looking to the Cloud as their base of operations, opening up a lot of possibilities for collaboration and sharing. There's such a potential for richness and depth that is almost unparalleled, so the solutions we build can truly become "bigger on the inside" and a heck of a lot less than what it appears at first glance. On the flip side, we see some established vendors making little more than incremental improvements to their legacy desktop products, many of which don't take this 'brave new world' into account.  In that respect, another assertion made by one of my colleagues in that Twitter exchange is absolutely spot-on: our solutions need to take into account more than just "sit at a desk", "use a keyboard and mouse" solutions. We must be thinking about solutions that address the "consumer end" of the learning equation just as much as we need to be thinking about the learners themselves. In short, not enough vendors are playing in this "responsive design" space for it to gain momentum.  The platforms I have explored are quite promising, but for the moment, the legacy offerings still have a lot of traction. New Finds, New Thinking The unexpected find was something I think vendors and practitioners alike should pay close attention to; I really think it's a sleeper solution with serious disruptive potential; It's Apple's iTunesU system. Unlike a few of Apple’s goodies, this one is available for Windows PC, Mac, and, of course, iOS.   At first, it was little more than a collection of publicly available readings, videos, and other resources from Universities and other institutions around the world.  For self-confessed learning junkies like me, it was a real treasure trove. Unfortunately, some institutions took iTunes U more seriously than others, and there were lots of "course outlines" kicking around with little-to-no-content behind them. Now, we see a very different iTunes U: It’s functioning like a Virtual Learning Environment, where there are assignment submissions, grading, and discussions. In short, lots of the things that we expect from really high-end platforms. It allows institutions to blur the lines between their enrolled students and others from the outside who may want to partake of the learning for its own sake. Again, institutional choices will determine what is available, but the potential is absolutely massive. I think this is a genuine game-changer for institutions. Yes, dealing with the mighty Apple may seem like the relationship Microsoft has/had with its office software and operating systems, but you have to give them credit for quietly pushing this out and making it available. Regardless of platform, something as simple as an iTunes account could open an entirely new world of learning for those with the right hunger. The downside? It's limited to Educational/Cultural Institution Use at the moment. I am genuinely hoping that restriction comes off, because I could see a real place for this platform, particularly in the maker/user-created-content communities. Because it’s not as platform-limited as it could be, the reach is considerable and may well put some of the proprietary MOOC platforms on the ropes. So, there you have it. One good example of a platform that will respond to the needs at the user end, and all without a lot of customization. Seems like a pretty positive regeneration of what we often call "e-learning". There’s lots of room inside. Come on in. The post Guest Post: eLearning...It's Bigger On The Inside - by Mark Sheppard appeared first on Litmos.

What is eLearning? (Please pardon the gratuitous movie line as a blog title.) Every few years it's important to step back and look at our industry. I've had conversations with colleagues recently covering the state of the industry. And sadly, the conversation ends up feeling more like the state of the industry...according to the gurus, experts, and thought leaders. Instead of the reality of our industry as faced by the other 98% of corporate training professionals. So, I'd like to take a moment and sort out my thoughts on this topic. According to the latest wikipedia entry for eLearning... wait... eLearning forwards to Educational Technology. So, let's try this again... According to the latest wikipedia entry for Educational Technology we see EdTech as "the effective use of technological tools in learning." I only reference the definition in wikipedia as an example of how confusing the term eLearning can be. It's so confusing that wikipedia just stopped trying and decided to forward it to EdTech. Seriously, click the links above and scroll through all of the parts and subparts of EdTech, the "scope" of EdTech, the technologies, the use-cases, and on and on. Let me just be honest and say that I was hoping the wikipedia page would help in writing this blog post easier. No such luck. I'm more confused than ever...and I've been doing this for 20 years. There are 2 ways I'd like to approach this post. First, Let's look at how I see eLearning as the industry seems to have embraced it. Then I'll give you my thoughts on what I feel like it should be. How the Industry Sees eLearning At the risk of complicating things, the industry view is also broken up into 2 parts. Organizations and practicing professionals consider eLearning to be an overarching umbrella term that covers any training solution or learning content delivered via technology. And the other part of the industry that views eLearning through the authoring tool lens. Neither are wrong. It's simply 2 different perspectives mostly based on legacy practices. But it's also one of the many confusing little annoyances in our industry. eLearning as an umbrella term for all technology delivered training/learning is the closest to the EdTech definition as written in wikipedia. And examples are quite diverse. Anything from flight simulators, to social learning, microvideos, webinars, SCORM courses, mobile learning, electronic whiteboards, Khan Academy, and any number of other technology solutions. Maybe it's easier to define eLearning as anything other than people communicating with each other face-2-face. Looking at eLearning through the authoring tool lens is a little more traditional. It's what we learned back in the 80s and 90s during the CBT golden era. Everything you need to learn, about a given topic, is packaged into a self-paced course. The learner engages interactively with the digital content and is guided through the learning experience. That experience explains why you're there, what you will learn, and how you will learn it.  These complete eLearning packages are filled with multimedia. They state the learning objectives, provide digital content, and then assess your knowledge with different sorts of multiple choice interactions. You get the idea. But the key to viewing eLearning through this lens is that the course is self-contained and is designed, developed, and published to be consumed by one learner in isolation. It's also important to note that these courses may or may not be delivered within a learning management system. And so there you have it. eLearning as an umbrella term, and eLearning as a self-contained interactive multimedia experience. I have a slightly different take on our beloved industry term. I don't like it. eLearning isn't a Real Thing One of my favorite phrases is "Learning is done by you. Training is done to you." Or something like that. I think it's arrogant of anyone to think they can force learning to happen because of their knowledge in adult learning theory. Since we need to define what we do with words then the only 2 words we really need are training and learning. And how we use them depends on who's in control. Learning is a Process Owned by the Leaner Learners are in control of their own learning. External forces can influence someone's learning. But the learning occurs inside each individuals brain. It even sounds strange to say it because it's such an obvious statement. I'm certain you've all experienced an "aha" moment naturally with no other person intervening, as well as major aha moments directly related to a teacher's intervention. We are always learning. Learning is a life long process. The trick is to learn to optimize the process. Training is an Event And this is where training comes in. Training is an event. Event if it's a 15min self-paced online course, or a week long classroom course, they are both events. And training events are only 1 small part of the learning process. Training events are the products we create. Learning experiences are training events, sometimes multiple events, combined with practice and feedback, and continual assessment. But the key is that it is the learner that is having the experience and whether they learn or not is still completely dependent on them. No matter how well you design the learning experience you cannot guarantee that learning will occur. Will you continue to see me using the term eLearning? Most likely yes, but I avoid it whenever I can. If you are an instructional designer, you create training products that are optimized for instructional effectiveness, not eLearning. To the best of your ability you have understood the content and the learner well enough to know that your product is the one most likely to achieve learning for the learner. There is training and there is learning. There is no need for eLearning, eTraining, mLearning, mTraining, or any of the other prefixes. Okay maybe blearning, or schlearning. I'm keeping those. But all the others are gone! The post There is no eLearning! Only Zuul! appeared first on Litmos.

What do executives expect from their training departments? They know each of their departments are spending their money and so they expect something in return for that investment. The training department is no different. As the leader/manager/director you've got a responsibility to not only make sure training is happening, but reporting the financial and productivity impacts to the business. Therein lies the key to your success: "Business Impact". This is quite obvious for most readers of this blog. Defining business impact is the real issue. And it becomes problematic when expectations around priorities are not aligned. Traditional training professionals believe in their ability to create the "best" training to improve performance, but often do so with long time lines, requests for increased development budgets, and little care for how their training events impact the business. The frustration executives feel towards this approach is often misunderstood by training professionals, and dismissed as "they just don't understand learning". The reality is that it's not their job to understand learning. It's your job to understand the business. Management & Leadership Development Management & leadership development consistently ranks high in the minds of execs. I have no data to quote for you, but I've seen enough data over the years to know it's important. Not only is it important, but more established, mature, businesses have enough legacy having experienced first hand what happens when leadership is under prepared, or under skilled in their role. Most training professionals, even CLOs, are not capable of running these programs on their own when they are also responsible for the other items listed below. If management/leadership development is important enough, then it's worth spending budget on experts in this realm. It's important to remember that there should be very little training involved in this type of program. Young leaders may still require training in certain areas, but your senior leaders should not require training. Development. Absolutely. But not training. There are plenty of executive development firms to choose from. And in my experience I've seen leadership teams completely transformed from fully dysfunctional to fully successful over time. This is not an easy accomplishment. It requires long term commitment which is why it's called development and not training. Compliance Training There really isn't much to say here. Executives need you to make sure this is covered because it's a liability to the business. Purchasing pre-developed compliance courses is without question the most effective solution. It's fast to implement because it requires no development resources and keeps the business running. Be sure to understand the compliance needs in all areas of the business. Don't expect high level management to know everything that requires compliance. It's your responsibility to meet with sales, manufacturing, HR, IT, legal, and any other departments to understand their compliance requirements. When the regulatory agencies come knocking, it's your neck that's on the line. New Hire On-boarding This is probably one of the most misunderstood and frustrating elements for your new employees. All they want to do is get to work, and yet they end up sitting in meetings for days and even weeks before actually starting their jobs. In some cases this is made clear to everyone. In others, management will get around it and so certain hires will not attend because it is seen as a waste of time. You can hire a management/leadership consultant. You can buy pre-development compliance training programs. But this program is unique. There is no off-the-shelf, turn-key solution. It's yours to create, design, develop, and deliver with your own personal touch. It should be your foundational, crowning achievement. This is where you have the most influence to apply your knowledge of adult learning theory, and instructional design skills. All other training events and online learning experiences will be extensions of this foundational program. It's the first impression new hires have of their new company. Whether or not employees stay with your company can often be traced back to how well you on-boarded them. So don't take this lightly. The ideal on-boarding program is customized for all levels of the company. One size does not fit all. Some content is required by all employees. But don't waste people's time just because it's easier on you and your team. Know what is required at each level and develop the program accordingly. Everyone in the company will thank you! Continuing Professional Development Professional Development (PD) comes in all shapes and sizes. Some of it is specific to an employee's role. Other training programs are specific to the business and help develop an employees skills related to the company culture. And other PD programs simply give employees the ability to explore other skills that may interest them. Enterprise licenses to online training like Lynda.com are popular for many employees. Free access to their extensive library of videos for learning new topics is seen as a valuable benefit. Buying library bundles of PD content is an easy way to provide value to your employees. However, there are other PD opportunities you can create that are unique to the business. Your company will have a few highly experienced professionals on staff. Some of them are even rockstars in their respective fields. Capturing their knowledge and experience is an extremely valuable project that should be part of any training department strategy. Executives know these experts are valuable and often worry about what will happen when they leave the company. Give them comfort in knowing you've got a plan to ease their troubled minds. Do you have any thoughts on a 5th training topic important to your company's executives? Tell us about it with the hashtag #TellLitmos @Litmos. The post The Top 4 Training & Development Programs Your Business Needs appeared first on Litmos.

Introduction Today's guest post is written by Tom Spiglanin. He was one of the first in my network to identify, and embrace, the trend of micro videos for learning...or microlearning. He's a regular speaker and advocate for the production of shorter learning content. I'm very pleased he agreed to share his tips on producing microlearning.   Guest Post by @TomSpiglanin Video is widely used for educational content and it can be highly effective. It’s also becoming increasingly easy to produce, with well over a billion smartphones in the world with both video and editing capability. And video is also inherently mobile - YouTube reports that fully half of all its views are mobile, and the format transitions almost seamlessly to desktop computers, tablets,and dedicated media players - all without special software or plug-ins.   Short form video for learning (becoming known as microlearning video), is increasingly popular. While the duration of microlearning videos alone makes them more easily consumed by our learners, that alone is not enough to retain our viewers’ interest. This is particularly true when a number of short videos together make up a larger program of instruction.   But there’s hope! I’ve assembled here five tips to get started producing microlearning videos. These tips have nothing to do with cinematography or how to use our video cameras, so each of them applies as much to narrated animation as they do full motion video. And while following these tips may not bring out the Spielberg in each of us, they will certainly make using our videos more enjoyable for our viewers.         Focus on one objective per microlearning video.   Not that long ago I used YouTube to learn how to replace the drive belt in my washing machine. It was only a few minutes long and focused exclusively on the shortest path to repair, including identifying the correct replacement belt and demonstrations of what to watch for while making the repair.   Indeed, the most effective short videos often address one and only one objective, just as my drive belt repair video did. Remember that our target audience members are largely just-in-time or time-crunched individuals. By putting our objective up front, even in the title, we can more easily stay focused on that to the exclusion of irrelevant details. It may seem easy, but many have a difficult time doing just this and fall to the temptation of explaining everything they feel needs explaining. We need to make a note to create another video or two for those important details that are not pertinent to the objective at hand, just as the washer belt replacement video referenced other videos for removing the front panel or troubleshooting odd noises.         Show, don’t tell   Those new to the video medium often forget that video targets not one sense but two senses at once. When scripting, we need to spend time describing what's being seen, not just heard in the narration or soundtrack. This is easily seen in the traditional screenplay format, which is designed to approximate one script page per minute of video by restricting dialogue to a narrow column down the middle of the page. In contrast, the description of what's being seen runs the full width of the page. Why? Because visuals convey much more information than words in the same amount of time.   In the washer repair video, the sound track generally told me what I needed to do, but what I was watching was showing me how I needed to do it. We need to take that time to describe the action being seen on-screen, even when using sophisticated animation to convey our lessons.         Use scripts   Even the most talented video producers take the time to write scripts. This keeps our focus on our objective, but also gives us insight into how well we're pacing our video. Will it be three informative minutes or ten drawn-out ones?   While we’re at it, we also need to edit our dialogue ruthlessly. We can’t waste afford to waste words that may not be heard anyway, just as we can’t afford rambling, monotonous dialogue that bores our viewers. Our dialogue needs to supplement and enhance our video, and that only happens well though the script-writing process.         Avoid details and distracting content   We need to keep in mind that we’re making short videos, not writing detailed training manuals. If some details are important - as often they are - we need to put them in a reference document and not in our videos.   In the washing machine drive belt video, the parts breakdown and assembly schematics were referenced, but not described in the video. When I needed those additional details, which I did for accurate identification of the part number for the drive belt for my particular washer, I looked them up and studied them offline. I would not want them read to me, nor would that be a good use of my time as a video developer.         Don’t repeat   In instructor-led training, good practice often follows the rule, "Tell them what you're going to tell them, tell them, then tell them what you told them." That doesn't work in short video, nor is there the need. Viewers can, and will, back up to watch again and again as needed if our videos are focused and meets their needs.   I watched the washer belt replacement video several times to make sure I understood what was involved in my repair before I ordered the replacement belt. When it arrived, I watched the video again using my mobile phone next to the washer as I started the repair. I paused frequently or backed up to make sure I was doing things correctly. In essence, I used the video in a performance support mode - learning just-in-time at the precise place of need - and we must keep the inherently mobile and easily replayed nature of short form video when crafting learning solutions. We often can’t control when, where, or how viewers will use our videos.   So those are my top five tips for short video. For an example, and a few additional tips, check out my YouTube video in this very topic. Or check out my tips on the screenplay format.   Thanks for reading! @tomspiglanin The post Top 5 Tips for Producing Microlearning Videos appeared first on Litmos.

Since 2009 Jane Hart (@c4lpt) has been curating a list of the Top 100 Tools for Learning. She is asking training professionals, and learning professionals, to submit their Top 10 Tools. From that she creates the list of 100. If you're a learning professional, then submit your list here. My list has consistently included the tools I use for personal learning and knowledge sharing, not professional tools for authoring or publishing courses. So, here is my top 10 list for 2015. 1. Evernote I put everything into Evernote. As their marketing states, it truly is an extension of my brain. I save articles, tweets, posts, as resources for future reference. I also save pictures of where I park my car in airport parking lots. There are so many little life hacks and learning hacks that Evernote supports. It has become my goto app for just about everything. 2. Twitter If blogging launched my career then twitter definitely extended it. Twitter has become the social glue that holds all the other content together. Nobody publishes anything without sharing it to twitter. And twitter is a great place to ask for help, meet new people, and share your knowledge. There are many power users in our industry, and I don't claim to be one.  But find one and ask them about how they use twitter. It's a powerful tool for both learning and teaching/sharing. 3. Google Search There really isn't much more to say about search. It so ubiquitous in our lives today. Just about anything you want to know is only a search away. But like twitter there are tricks to automating search and using it to be smarter...faster. Learn how to be a power search user and people will think you were born a genius. 4. YouTube You can learn how to do anything from videos on YouTube. They might as well just call it "The People's University". I've learned how to fix my car, improve my guitar and drum skills, hack electronics, create craft projects with my kids, and so much more. Video is truly the strongest of all media for learning. And YouTubers will continue to drive the format and master the production techniques that are the most effective. Instructional Design theories are one thing, but nothing beats learning from those who are delivering learning content on a daily basis. The future of "what works" best for learning will be found on YouTube. 5. Kindle App And for those of you who still enjoy a good book, the Kindle app is amazing. I can learn a lot from reading a book. But I can learn even more by sharing my notes and reading other's notes about the same book. It's an interactive experience that you must experience to truly appreciate. I've only recently begun using it interactively, but it's changed my view of reading completely. 6. blab.im I know the app is only a few weeks old. But it's already proven to be a powerful learning tool in much the same as twitter...except with video. Anyone can start a blab conversation, and anyone can join a blab conversation. So the serendipitous learning possibilities will be fantastic. The value of seeing someone's face and hearing their voice is powerful. So while you may get excited about conversing with people on twitter, blab extends that experience to something very personal and much more powerful. But again, you won't understand unless you experience it for yourself. 7. canva.com Canva is one of the few creation tools I've added to my list. I've added it because I use it just about every day to create images. It's a fabulous learning tool because it has guided my design sensibilities. I will never be a great graphic designer but canva helps me express my message visually in ways I had not thought of.  I'm constantly learning and perfecting the images I create. I do believe images are far more powerful than words and so learning to create them is as important as learning how to write. 8. Feedly I've been a big proponent of RSS feeds and feed readers since RSS was first created. I still believe it to be one of the most underutilized technologies in EdTech. Feedly is one of the few remaining RSS aggregators that is a stand alone product. RSS is incorporated into other apps and browsers, but I still prefer the format of the old fashioned RSS feed reader. It's the fastest and easiest way to consume massive amounts of news, and information. 9. ItunesU I've only recently begun subscribing to ITunesU courses again because a colleague told me about the improvements that have been made. Imagine being able to attend classes at major Universities without actually having to be there... or pay the tuition. With a little bit of motivation there is no reason why anyone can't get a world class education. ItunesU is just one of many apps making it happen, but it's my favorite right now. 10. Hootsuite Managing your social media experience can be a daunting task. Many don't care about "managing social media". I do. I learned very quickly in the early years of Web2.0 that engaging with others, via this "new internet", would pay off. Hootsuite can do a lot. There are many other social media tools for managing your personal brand and personal social learning experience. Hootsuite handles most of what I need accomplished in social media and since much of learning occurs because of social media, Hootsuite is the tool that rounds out my top 10. There are many many tools that I engage with through out any given week. Compiling this list was NOT easy. There are many others that I use as much as these tools. Narrowing it down to 10 was a matter of reviewing the past few months of productivity and understanding what tools apps were used the most. These are not the BEST...just the ones I currently use the most. The post Brent Schlenker's Top 10 Tools for Learning ... Not Training appeared first on Litmos.

When you plan your live face-to-face training events, do you put much thought into it's location? And when you finally decide on a location how much attention do you pay to the space? We're all busy professionals and sometimes we feel lucky to even find an available room in our busy office spaces. We spend our valuable time on instructional design, content creation, and course administration. Because that is in our immediate control. The environment is often an afterthought and more out of our control. But in our constant drive to create better learning experiences, and in light of recent neuroscience findings, perhaps training locations should be as important to learning as stating learning objectives. Learner Control vs. Designer Control Sadly, the thoughtful design of a learning environment is no longer our responsibility. The continual growth of eLearning has shifted control of environment from the designer to the learner. When we design and deliver a completely online experience we willingly give up control of the physical learning space to our audience. We willingly accept that our designs will be as successful from a computer at home, or within an office cubical. Or on a laptop in bed, or lounging poolside.  Because in many cases you simply don't know where or when people are engaging in your learning content. And that is the beauty of online learning, right? Or is it? I believe in technology as a powerful learning tool. But the more we move towards digital learning experiences, the more I realize the power of the analog experience. Human to human interactions, and the real world spaces and places where they occur. I don't believe one is more powerful than the other. But I do believe that in some instances we've tossed out the baby with the bath water.  It's so easy to move content to a self-paced online format, and doing so no doubt saves money, time, and resources. But perhaps our industry should be having more conversations about real life, human to human, training formats...instead of less. Neuroscience Changes Everything Neuroscience is exposing more and more about how our brains work. I find it fascinating, and exciting, because most of the theories our industry follows are based on the softer behavioral sciences. We now have researchers in the hard sciences uncovering the wonders of our neuroanatomy. Some of these discoveries will confirm what we are doing, while others will require us to stop and rethink our approach. But in either case we see a combined better understanding of how the digital and analog worlds together will impact our brains. You can learn a lot about the basic science of learning from Dr. Medina's books and videos about Brain Rules. He has uncovered the strongest scientific evidence for how to improve the function of our brains. And yet, most of it goes unnoticed, or unimplemented, in our institutions of education. In this video Dr. Medina gets right to the point within the first minute exposing the "almost perfect ANTI-brain learning environment." As his videos tend to get me rethinking a lot of things in my life, this time around I was struck by his comments on "environment". That got me thinking about other professions that deal with creating environments. Neuroscience, Architecture, and Learning Environments And that led me to the Academy of Neuroscience for Architecture. And it was an article in the Pacific Standard titled Could Neuroscientists be the next Great Architects? that took me there. This article struck me with a few great lines... "Today, the near 10-year-old Academy of Neuroscience for Architecture believes that neuroscience could make science’s greatest contribution to the field of architecture since physics informed fundamental structural methods, acoustic designs, and lighting calculations in the late 19th century." "When Gage introduced these findings to architects at the American Institute of Architects’ 2003 convention, he pronounced an idea that is still sinking in: "Changes in the environment change the brain, and therefore they change our behavior."" "Neuroscientists are also gaining an increasingly better understanding of how our brains analyze, interpret, and reconstruct place and space." And my personal favorite... "We are now really beginning to understand better how to measure the responses to the built environment," says Eduardo Macagno, professor of biological sciences at the University of California, San Diego, "without relying on psychology, social science, observational behavior." Those studies, he explains, "don’t have the quantitative and objective experimental approach that we believe neuroscience brings to the interface with architecture." In all honesty, there are far too many great lines in this article. It's a short, but fantastic, read. Neuroscience Supports Human to Human Learning I've given up on seeing any significant change occurring in our public school systems based on neuroscience any time soon. However, I do believe that as corporate training professionals we are in a unique position to lead the way in applying neuroscience to our training programs. Most training departments and Corporate Universities were built from academic models. Those models are steeped in bureaucracy and red tape. You, however, have the power to take control of your training environment and apply neuroscience in the controlled environment of your workforce. No, I'm not recommending that you add jogging to the course agenda. It could be something as simple as choosing a different classroom location. I'm hoping that you begin to pay closer attention to the little things when designing, developing, and implementing your face-to-face training events. The environment you choose for your face-to-face events is becoming more and more important as those human to human interactions occur less often. Have you ever tried holding a classroom event outside? Perhaps in a nearby park? Or maybe in a rented movie theater? As we begin to approach Q4 2015, many of you will be looking forward and planning your training strategy for 2016. Will you be moving more, or less content online? This is a good time for you to reflect on your currently training programs and look at trying something new. Something based on neuroscience.   The post Environmental Factors of Learning to Consider Before Designing Your Next Course appeared first on Litmos.

One simple way to amplify and extend classroom training, or SME presentations, is to record the live event. Many will baulk at this suggestion for one of two reasons: We don't have the budget. We don't have anyone on the team that knows how to do it. There is nothing I can do about excuse #1. However, I can help you with DIY solutions that require little or no budget. Many of you in management positions will consider this work as being beneath you. You can delegate this work, or better yet, why not roll up your sleeves and show your team that you're willing get work done? I'll save that rant for another day, but think about it. DIY Recordings as Part of Your Design/Development Process There are basically two options: Use a video camera and capture both audio and video. Use an audio field recorder to capture audio only. Audio Only is a Great Place to Start Audio only is the perfect DIY solution to get started with because it's less distracting for your SME, and you will not look like the high school A/V guy standing behind a video camera. Because I know that's what you're thinking. There are many technical solutions for recording your presenter. If you have NO budget at all, you can simply use the built in mic on the presenter's laptop. Open up a free audio recording app and click record. You could even record directly into Powerpoint. It won't be very good quality, but it will capture the event in a format better than any notes you might be taking. So don't use quality as an excuse not to capture the event. Even a bad audio file can be used to review the event and make improved design decisions. If you have a little budget to spend you can get a very good recording with a recording device and a clip-on mic. You can use your own mobile device as the recording device, or you can purchase a dedicated small audio field recorder like the ZoomH1 or TASCAM DR05. Both can usually be found on Amazon for at or under $100. They each have built in microphones allowing you to just set it and forget it. However, they both also have a mic/line input for plugging in other microphones. In this case I would recommend the Audio-Technica ATR-3350 Lavalier Omnidirectional clip-on mic. Have your SME clip on the mic and put the recorder in his/her pocket. If they don't have pockets then you'll need to get creative. Remember you can always ditch the clip-on mic and just set the recorder on the podium. Successful Recording... Now What? After recording the audio you now have a wonderful audio file. You can simply use the recording device to listen to the audio and review the session. Or you can download the file to your computer and get even more value. One of the first things you can do is transcribe the audio file into text. There are several services online that will do this at a reasonable rate. Rev.com will do it for $1/minute. An hour long presentation transcribed for only $60 is pretty good. You might wonder why this might be important. You can use the text version to begin highlighting the high points and notating the sections you think should be deleted in later releases. You should also combine the audio file with the powerpoint slides and export as a video. You should absolutely publish the entire video. But you should also begin reviewing the video and defining how to cut it down into multiple shorter videos. Since you have released the entire video you can review comments and viewing data to help you make decisions around what is important to your audience. These are technical solutions that have business value. All content is valuable when it is accessible and needed. Is it perfect? No. But making it available NOW, is better than only waiting until it is perfect. Some will wait until you "clean it up", others will be grateful to have the raw content in it's entirety. Your audience is not filled with robots. They are individuals with differing needs at differing times. Making multiple versions of learning content available as soon as you have them will be valuable to someone.  You should be willing to put your ego aside and make that happen. Your subject matter experts are a limited resource. They can only do a limited number of training sessions. Before you attempt to apply instructional design to the content, it is more valuable to the business if you utilize technology to scale up the presentations given by the SMEs. This makes the content available to more people more quickly. It's quick and easy to create, and those that need/want the content will appreciate it. Once you have published the transcript as text, and released the audio only as a podcast, and the audio with slides as a video, then you can begin to look more closely at optimizing the design and adding your instructional design magic. The post The Easiest and Fastest Method for Creating Learning Content appeared first on Litmos.

We're headed back to DreamForce, and we want to see you there!  The Litmos team will have a strong presence with many opportunities to interact and learn more about the powerful Litmos LMS with SalesForce integration. Drop by our booth at W138 in Moscone West and enter to win a trip to New York, Hawaii, or Paris! If you have a busy schedule while attending DreamForce then I suggest scheduling a meeting with us ahead of time. Fill out this short form to guarantee time with the Litmos team. You will learn first hand how Litmos with Salesforce integration can take your training to new heights. While you're at the booth be sure to take a selfie with Lenny. Use the hashtags #LoveYourLMS and #DF15 to be eligible to win the dream prize. We are also giving away a pair of tickets for VIP Box seating at a Warriors game. And let's not forget the epic parties! Litmos will be throwing some great parties at Dreamforce and we'd love to see you there as well. Please RSVP and join us for a Pre-Gala Happy Hour Thursday night at the W Hotel from 5:30pm to 7:30pm. Stop by booth W138 and say hi!   The post Litmos will be at DreamForce 2015 - Meet Lenny and Win the Dream Prize! appeared first on Litmos.

Putting sales training into the context of sales work is your golden ticket to success. With your Litmos LMS integrated with Salesforce your sales team can work and learn within one platform while reducing expenses and positively impacting the bottom line. 56% reduction in travel costs when using eLearning to present materials. - Litmos Stats Your sales team values their time to sell more than they value your training. This means sales enablement, and training teams, need to make every minute count. Sales teams are motivated to learn, but don't appreciate having their time wasted with long traditional training sessions, or jumping around from one application to the next. There's a better way. It's about putting dynamic, digital, self-paced, learning content into the context of their workflow. The Litmos with Salesforce integration gives you the capability to get it done. 85% of sales reps employ skills learned in a dynamic training environment. - CSO Insights Sales Effectiveness Series Not only is training integrated with workflow the best solution for learners, but training administrators appreciate the workflow integration as well. Litmos and Salesforce have combined their innovative strengths to provide you with a true learn-as-you-work training process for all levels of the organization. Litmos is the only agile learning and training software application featured on the Salesforce Appexchange. Some Litmos LMS benefits include: Native learning tabs allowing instant access to all courses Assign training to contacts, partners, and communities Create reports and dashboards that integrate sales performance and training completions Track course completions and certification in one place Flag users and contacts for user creation and assignment of courses in Litmos Create rules that govern the assignment of training to employees based on Salesforce roles Climate Corp. Case Study After looking at several LMS options, the team chose to go with Litmos because of its attractive UI and the ability to integrate with Salesforce so the sales team can easily assign and manage trainings for the Climate Corporation’s network of over 1600 dealers. Since Climate Pro is an advanced product, it’s crucial that dealers have training materials at their fingertips and available when it’s most needed. Litmos was also able to help customize the LMS integration with Salesforce so contact records of all Salesforce contacts were correctly synced up within Litmos. This enables data for transfer to and from both applications. Read more about Climate Corp's use of Litmos with Salesforce integration. The post Litmos with SalesForce Integration Puts Training Into Context appeared first on Litmos.

[View the story "Litmos DAY 1 at #DreamForce #DF15 #LoveYourLMS" on Storify] The post Day 1 at Dreamforce 2015: The Future of Learning is Loving Your LMS! appeared first on Litmos.

Elearning courses are becoming more popular every day. They are a great, cost effective way to deliver messages to an internal or external audience; improving their skills and aligning them to core brand ideas. However, there is one question that is often on the lips of many who are looking to develop elearning courses - should I include a voice-over / narration of the material or not? (For more info on what else to think about before recruiting an elearning designer click here). There are several arguments for and against this and it truly depends on your brand’s strategic positioning, the intended audience and objectives of the course as to whether you want to include audio. So what are the important considerations and how can you determine what is best for your courses? Learner Engagement Not everyone has the same learning style (and some even question the importance of learning styles at all). But some of your learners will respond better to visual cues while others will respond better to audio. By having narration as well as visual points implanted within your courses you can satisfy both learning styles and improve their basic acceptance. At the same time, even if your learners aren’t audio centric, adding narration onto your courses can help to reinforce certain key points and improve recall rates. Research has found that when mixing audio and visual information there is a 50% increase in information recall. This is important if you have specific key messages that you want the audience to remember. Brand Image Another important consideration is that your business’ brand image can be improved by using voice within your elearning material. It adds personality and authenticity, which can gain you significant connection with your target audience and instil a sense of what your brand is about. This will lower resistance to your key messages and learning material and increase recall. File Size One of the negatives of voice-overs in elearning material is the size of the files. Audio information is rather data rich and therefore takes up a lot of memory. This can significantly increase the time it takes for the audience to load the course in their browsers. This is also not consistent for every user; it all depends on their bandwidth and what other processes they have running concurrently. This can cause problems if your audience becomes impatient while your course loads because they have a slow internet connection or it holds too much data for them. Customers expect your website and everything on there to be loaded quickly. Therefore, you must ensure that data is as streamlined as possible. Cost And Time For Delivery The biggest consideration for using narration in your elearning courses is that it does add on significant cost and time to the elearning development. This is because there are several steps required in order to develop a courses audio element: Step One: A script will need to be written by the elearning designer or by someone internal to the organisation. This can be the trickiest stage and takes time to complete. Step Two: An appropriate voice artist must be found either internally or externally. Getting the right voice is hugely important as it can determine how your audience will react. Without a good voice artist onboard, the audience can be left confused or disillusioned by the message you are trying to convey. Step Three: The audio needs to be synced to the visual aspects of the elearning course. Usually the audio is recorded first and then the visual elements are matched, but this isn’t always the case. Other Considerations The style of voice-over makes a huge difference. Do you want to have an in-depth narration with the text being a summary of what you are saying? You could have it the other way around; with more in-depth text on the page than that spoken by the voice-over. Another option could be to have just a voice with no text on screen. The transcription can then be made available to the audience as a downloadable PDF. One more point I should mention here - please don’t force your learners to read the text on screen with the same audio playing in the background? It looks terrible and will frustrate the learner! Consider the cost of a voice-over and if you have adequate financial resources. Will it provide you with a real return compared with producing the course in another way? Another consideration is whether or not the learning environment is suitable for audio - in a busy office will the background noise be so distracting that the audio will effectively be mute? This can be offset by the use of headphones but not all offices allow their use. Conclusion There is a trade-off when it comes to building an elearning course with voiceover in it. It will take more time and money to build but the benefits in audience reception and information recall can be more than enough of a reason to add it. While we highly recommend building an elearning course with narration, the choice should be based on your current circumstances. Consider the pros and cons before deciding if audio will be a useful addition to your otherwise quality course. What are your opinions about voiceovers? Are they important for the elearning experience? Let us know in the comments below. You can also see some examples of elearning with and without audio by checking out our previous work - which do you prefer? The British Land and Unreal Ltd examples show elearning with narration, but the IsatPhone and Medical demos have no narration. If you enjoyed this blog post, please subscribe to hear more useful like this! The post To Narrate or Not To Narrate - eLearning Question 101! appeared first on Litmos.

Video, Video Everywhere Video is popping up everywhere. Everyone that carries a smartphone carries a good quality video camera. And like all technologies video cameras keep getting smaller and cheaper. And with increasing bandwidth and more powerful cloud technologies, the uses become endless. We are only seeing the beginning of the age of video. Size matters! Video cameras are small enough to wear and small enough to connect to remote control flying drones. We use them in our cars to see what’s behind us, and we use them in our homes for security or to monitor babies, and pets. The rise of the citizen journalist is all part of this wave of uses of small, low cost, simple to produce video tech. User-generated Video Content User-generated content is nothing new. In my view the late ‘90s and the rise of blogging was the beginning. It was only a matter of time before producing a video became as simple as writing text. And that time is now. What has slowed the growth has been extended experience with the tools. But even that’s changing. Kids in elementary school today are learning to produce videos the way I was learning to produce hand crafted reports in the ‘70s and ‘80s. Even high school, and college, kids are unafraid of hitting the record button and publishing raw or highly edited videos. The technology is no longer a barrier to video production, and opening up an entirely new world of user-generated video content. Producing Training Videos There are many trends currently pointing to the rise of video content. I have no doubt in my mind that the future of training is video. You know all the big stories showcasing video online. I don’t need to recap them all for you, but think about Khan Academy, Lynda.com, and any of the thousands of YouTubers vlogging their way to successful media careers. As you watch the entire landscape of modern media change, you’ll begin to see why I so firmly embrace video. What’s the Big Deal? Yea, but Brent, people said that about education in the early days of television and VCRs. Sure they did. And quite frankly they were all right even back then. The part they got wrong was thinking that television would completely replace schools. I’ve seen enough new tech in my career to know that one innovation does not immediately displace the other. How many of you have gone 100% paperless in your daily life? The big deal is seeing the trend and starting to prepare yourself and your team for what is coming. Most video production work has been, and still is, outsourced for training projects. Just like television and schools, that is unlikely to change. What’s new is the addition of non-broadcast quality, user-generated video content. This doesn’t completely replace a highly polished and well produced video, but it does offer a fast and easy knowledge sharing and THAT’s a big deal! Our purpose within our companies is to provide value to the business. We do that by ensuring employees have the knowledge and skills they need to get the job done. And seeing video differently can help you get there. Yes, some video will require costly budgets for outsourcing, but if you can learn to put aside the quality of a video and embrace it’s content as a vehicle for learning you will begin to see the amazing value of non-broadcast quality video as part of the training content within your learning management system. The post Rethinking Video in Your Training Strategy appeared first on Litmos.

  One of the great failures of today’s L&D is a fundamental lack of meaningful measurement. The data reported too often is about efficiencies, and too seldom does it report on effectiveness. And often the claim is that it’s too hard.   But measurement is not, and should not be, too difficult. Further and most importantly, measuring is a key element of playing a strategic role in the organization. In theory, our learning interventions are supposed to have an impact. If we run sales training, sales outputs should improve; time to close should go down, or closure rates should go up. If we run customer service training, customer satisfaction should go up or complaints go down. If we do internal compliance training, the incidents of things like sexual harassment and workplace bullying should go down. Ok, I live in the real world too, and we know that by and large compliance training is CYA, but it could actually be impactful if we cared. And we definitely should care about whether our training is worth the dollars invested. Learning and Development Framework The basic framework is simple: there is some metric that is below what we expect or need it to be. Critically, we should be addressing some core business metrics. If someone comes to us saying "we need a course on X", we should be sure we’ll know how we’ve successfully addressed it. If the requester can’t answer that question, you both need to do some work. Ultimately, you should have a real metric that the business unit tracks. And I realize this is challenging, because it means you need to start talking business with them. They own the metric, and you’ll have to work with them on this. This is as it should be! Doing training in a vacuum is not a viable business approach. The notion that ‘if we build it, it is good’ is not a sound basis for expenditures. Once you know what the problem is, it’s time to figure out what might lead to a fix. What should people be doing differently that would lead to an improvement? On principle, you should be doing performance consulting (topic of a previous post in this series); matching the problem to a suite of known causes, and applying the appropriate approach. So, if it’s a knowledge problem, create a resource; if it’s a skill problem, create training, and so on. Determine what will lead to that changed behavior.   And is the cost of the change going to lead to a greater savings or revenue increase than that cost? There are several ways to track this. You can ask the supervisors and fellow workers whether it’s being exhibited by survey tools. If you host the resource on a website, you can use web tracking tools. Similarly, mobile access should be trackable. If the resources are hosted in your LMS, you can use the internal reporting to see if they are being accessed. Or you can use the emerging Experience API (xAPI) standard and aggregate the data. Finally, we develop the intervention that will lead to that changed behavior. Whether it’s a job aid or a course, we need to introduce the solution and prepare people to adopt it, including helping employees understand the rationale for the introduction and the appropriate ways to incorporate the change into their repertoire. And we evaluate the learning with post-course assessments, whether it’s about decisions to be made or how to use the resource. The essential element here is to ascertain the necessary change and then evaluate the impact. If you develop a solution, is it being adopted, and is it having sufficient impact? If not, you need to tweak and tune. Ultimately, of course, you’re going to want to validate that the cost of your efforts are worth the benefit. This is how business should work. The approach detailed is, in fact, the core of the Kirkpatrick method (Levels 2-4, but note you start at level 4 and work backwards, as identified here). Others complain that the Kirkpatrick doesn’t directly evaluate the learning (correct), or is too linear or implying a causal relationship (depends on how you implement it). There are other methods that use more qualitative data to determine the impact. I’m relatively ecumenical on the methods you use, but not about the importance of documenting the impact you are having. Frankly, too much of what is done under the banner of Learning & Development is being done on inappropriate metrics. We’ll see measures of cost per hour of seat time, without knowing whether that time is leading to any change. Or we’ll find out how many people are being trained relative to the number of training staff, without knowing whether that training is having an impact. And people will benchmark these against industry averages. These data aren’t important! These numbers only become important once you document that the seat time or the training is actually improving business outcomes. Then, and only then, can you worry about how efficient you are being. Until then, you’re merely showing that you are wasting no more money than the average company. That’s not a particularly good place to be. As a side note, one of the measures often used is user satisfaction (Level 1 in Kirkpatrick), e.g. did the trainees like the training, and do they think it’s valuable. This isn’t helpful. Empirically, there’s essentially zero correlation between what trainees think and the actual impact. Having only this data may be more misleading than having nothing at all! You could penalize some and reward others on a basis that has no impact on the outcomes! Good Example of Learning Measurement So how would this play out in a case study? For training, let’s say that we’ve determined that our performance isn’t up to snuff (whether customer satisfaction, sales, operations errors, whatever. So we should figure out how much change we need (e.g. a delta on a metric) and what behavior should lead to that delta. Let’s assume a new process will be used. Then we develop training for that process, and evaluate that after the learning experience, learners can indeed perform the task. Next we identify whether they are, indeed, performing as desired in the workplace. Finally we evaluate the metric, and compare it to a baseline, or do an A/B test (comparing a trained group against an untrained one) to see if we’ve achieved our goals. It’s fair to expect that we won’t get it the first time around. People and workplaces are complex. If we’re not achieving the desired impact, we need to determine why, and perhaps address workplace barriers, improve the training, or lower our expectations (doing the latter consciously is better than not evaluating at all). The point being we should be measuring and tuning to achieve our goals. This plays out for other interventions than training. So, for performance support, we could determine that using a particular resource would reduce errors or increase success (see the earlier post on performance support). We can again determine a delta, figure out how people should use support, and make sure that they’re aware of the resource and when and how to use it, and then see if they are actually using it. This likely involves both some training and resource design. Even social media, the building of community may be measured this way. As a previous post discussed, we should be looking at social resources too. Many people argue that just having activity in a social network is good, and that’s possible. But if we put it in a particular business unit, such as operations or even our own L&D, we should expect some improvements, and we should be able to identify the metrics we’re being evaluated on and look for the desired improvements, and tune if we aren’t achieving it. Are people not sharing, or are they even not using the system? If so, why? Measurement is a tool to use both formatively and summatively. If we are having an impact, we should be able to document it and take credit. And to do that successfully, we need to create a pilot, test it, and use data to improve it. The sad state of affairs is that L&D too often is taking orders for courses and building them, with an implicit assumption that if you follow instructional design processes it will yield success. This is a faulty assumption. We know that most learning experiences will yield a successful pass of a summative test, but not persist into ongoing behavior. Yet this seems to be the predominant learning approach. There are many things wrong with the instructional design we see, and we can easily fall prey to approaches that will not have the necessary persistence in change. We won’t know, however, unless we measure. Please, measure. The post How Meaningful Measurement Leads to L&D Success appeared first on Litmos.

This week San Francisco is buzzing about Boxworks. The fabulous Litmos team is at the annual Box event ready to answer all of your questions and demo the exciting the new features and benefits of the best cloud-based Litmos learning management system (LMS). There are many reasons to choose Litmos for your training needs. Among them is the integration with Box.  Box integration enables Litmos users to easily share, access, and manage files within Litmos.  They can also take advantage of BOX’s Filepicker technology to quickly upload content directly into their Litmos account. Litmos customers also take advantage of other integrations like Saleforce, Shopify, TribeHR, and others in the Litmos Marketplace. Earlier this year Box recognized Litmos as an Elite Partner at their BoxDev event. Stop by our booth at Boxworks and learn how Box integration can improve and enhance your eLearning development. It's possible to #LoveYourLMS! Let us show you how. Start a FREE Trial or Schedule a DEMO today!   The post Boxworks 2015 - Litmos Exhibits Integration with Box appeared first on Litmos.

It's that time of year again! It's the fall event season and DevLearn is one of the best. The fabulous Litmos team will be there ready to answer all of your questions and demo the exciting the new features and benefits of the cloud-based Litmos learning management system. Stop by our booth at DevLearn and get all your questions answered. It's possible to #LoveYourLMS! Let us show you how. You may already know Litmos as the leading cloud-based LMS. But did you know we also offer professional services, and a growing library of content? Litmos Healthcare Litmos Healthcare is the newest addition to the growing family of Litmos products. If you're in the massive healthcare industry then you know how important it is to support your most valuable asset...and largest budget line item...your employees. They help improve processes and patient care, maintain confidentiality, and keep your finances in order. Litmos Healthcare gives you everything you need to: take standard courses as-is customize standard courses upload your SCORM courses build courses from scratch track, report, and monitor with robust dashboards The robust course catalogue will get you up and running quickly, and user-friendly Litmos LMS gives you the flexibility to expand the library further to support your growing needs. Litmos Features Watch the following video for a brief introduction to the most user-friendly LMS you are certain to LOVE! The post Litmos at DevLearn 2015 - Learn to Love Your LMS! appeared first on Litmos.

As I work with training professionals, I often hear of the difficulty in taking various training assets used in a classroom setting (presentations, technical documents, scripts, etc…) and converting them into a comprehensive e-learning course. This process can prove especially tricky when the individual doing the converting is the in-house expert on the subject. Every organization has their "go-to" person for the product, process, or technology. Since they are the expert, it seems natural to have that individual create the training. However, having the expert create the training can bring its own set of issues. Here are three challenges typically faced by subject matter experts (SMEs): "I’m not familiar with proven, effective learning theories and models" Although an SME knows their material forward and back, they don’t necessarily have a clear idea of how to properly present it. A typical SME has presented the material in a classroom or meeting environment dozens of times but is often unclear on how best to capture the effectiveness of that experience. A common fallback is to just use the PowerPoint presentation from the meeting but this generally yields poor results. I recommend taking some time to storyboard the course to determine the flow of the training and to cover all of the items from the live session. Many resources are also available online that give basic information on learning models like ADDIE. Learning online is different from being in a classroom so it’s important to know what type of exercise is effective when the learner is sitting at a computer or using a tablet.   "I’m too close to the material/audience" By definition, an SME is immersed in their content. That level of immersion sometimes makes it difficult to prioritize the most important items to teach the learner. What is important to an expert may not be as important for an entry-level or mid-level employee to know. This creates a situation where the training may go over the heads of the intended audience or the SME may over-correct and "dumb down" the course. Either way, if the training doesn’t hit the mark, the desired outcomes won’t be achieved. A good approach is for the SME to simply step back and try to put themselves in the position of the intended audience. A fresh set of eyes is also extremely helpful in this situation. Someone from outside the department or even the organization is in a better position to quickly identify deficiencies and spot lessons that don’t match the learner.   "I don’t have clear learning objectives" Knowing only that your audience needs to be trained on a subject is never enough. Although it seems intuitive, there are some specific questions that need to be asked. These include: What specifically does the learner need to know and at what level? Why do they need to know it? And, what are they actually supposed to do with this knowledge? It’s always important to document your objectives for the course first, and then build the training around them. It seems like a no-brainer but it’s surprising how easily it is to forget this basic rule when you are in the midst of putting a course together. Also, the objectives should come from someone other than the SME. Make sure all stake-holders document and submit their desired outcomes for the training so the course can be tailored to meet those objectives. These 3 challenges are common but all of them can be overcome with some planning and outside input. A final recommendation is to consult a qualified instructional designer. Whether the ID is an in-house resource or a contractor, someone trained to create quality instructional experiences can be invaluable in the process. Even a few hours spent consulting with an ID can help insure that the considerable time dedicated to development will result in an effective course that meets training objectives. The post 3 Challenges Faced by Subject Matter Experts creating e-Learning appeared first on Litmos.