We’re currently conducting a survey with preK-12 teachers in the US to get a better understanding of their experiences with professional development, especially for re-licensing and salary advancement. We’d be grateful if you could take no more than 10-15 minutes to fill out our survey by Friday November 13, 2015. As a token of our appreciation, we’re giving away five $500 Apple store gift cards. We’ll use the information in an aggregated, anonymous format for internal purposes only. At the end of the survey, provide your email address to be entered in a random drawing to receive one of five $500 Apple gift cards. Only respondents who work in US preK-12 education and have completed the survey in full by November 13, 2015 will be entered.

We’re excited to host happy hour in our office this Thursday 11/12, 4:30-6:30pm with CUE San Francisco! We’ll demo how you can use Wikispaces and Blendspace for blended learning over drinks and appetizers. Meet our team and network with CUE SF members and other educators in the SF area. SFUSD teachers, you can get 1 hour of extended hours pay using the Prop A professional development funds. Sign up now before space runs out! What: Blended learning happy hour with us and CUE SF (event agenda) When: Thursday 11/12, 4:30-6:30pm Where:  165 10th Street, San Francisco, CA 94103 We hope to see you there!    

We’re excited to host happy hour in our office this Thursday 11/12, 4:30-6:30pm with CUE San Francisco! We’ll demo how you can use Wikispaces and Blendspace for blended learning over drinks and appetizers. Meet our team and network with CUE SF members and other educators in the SF area. SFUSD teachers, you can get 1 hour of extended hours pay using the Prop A professional development funds. Sign up now before space runs out! What: Blended learning happy hour with us and CUE SF (event agenda) When: Thursday 11/12, 4:30-6:30pm Where:  165 10th Street, San Francisco, CA 94103 We hope to see you there!    

Have you discovered a creative way to innovate the classroom experience? If so, show us on social media using #TESInnovates and you can win a badge to attend SXSWedu (worth $495), March 7-10, 2016 in Austin, TX! We’re giving away 100 badges to SXSWedu. We encourage educators to be creative and capture your innovative techniques. Photos and videos are highly encouraged. Please share your social media post by December 11th. It must be public and contain the #TESInnovates hashtag to be considered. No purchase necessary to enter or win. TES Innovative Educators Scholarship to SXSWedu Official Rules.  

Have you discovered a creative way to innovate the classroom experience? If so, show us on social media using #TESInnovates and you can win a badge to attend SXSWedu (worth $495), March 7-10, 2016 in Austin, TX! We’re giving away 100 badges to SXSWedu. We encourage educators to be creative and capture your innovative techniques. Photos and videos are highly encouraged. Please share your social media post by December 11th. It must be public and contain the #TESInnovates hashtag to be considered. No purchase necessary to enter or win. TES Innovative Educators Scholarship to SXSWedu Official Rules.  

We’re always looking for new content, but this month we’d love wikis and resources about hands-on projects and innovative classroom. By December 2nd, share your best hands-on project or any innovative classroom resource in the comment section of this blog post. We’ll share your resources with the rest of the Wikispaces and TES community. Check out for anti-bullying and classroom management resource collections on Pinterest you’ve contributed to previously - they’re a hit!

Here’s a news flash: If you want to be really great at eLearning design, you need to know more than how to come up with an attractive look and content that gets attention. What’s the secret? Becoming savvy about psychology and behavior. Why? Psychology plays an important role in creating content because it’s all about your learner’s emotions and perception. Simply put, as designers, we have to build effective eLearning courses based on needs and emotions to instill feelings in eLearners. Knowing a bit about social patterns doesn’t hurt either. Design Based on Psychology The whole point of taking psychology into consideration is the end product: individuals who are happier and who will probably experience effective eLearning. Take a peek at some thoughts on the psychology of design: "Psychology is the science of behaviour and the mind. When design and behaviour match, the design will be superior." Simon Norris, NOMENSA.  "A great-looking design isn’t always a great working design and often design without psychology is a source of dangerously misapplied effort." Paul Davies  "Designers are actually psychologists who can draw." Paul Davies 

Usability applies to any user interface, from a door handle to an airplane cockpit - or an eLearning course. It means, simply, how easy it is for users to get what they need out of the device. How usable your eLearning course is, is one of the most important factors that make or break your entire program. Usability is so  critical in eLearning because every minute students spend learning to use the software is a minute out of their time spent learning the content. If you are in the middle or just starting an eLearning course, before you go any further, ask yourself if you have covered the 5 E's of usability .Use these as guidelines or standars to make sure your course is as usable as you can make it.  

Recently, we found some powerful words by Carrie Cousins which made us think on how they apply to eLearning: "Design for readability or don’t bother using text at all. If you want your content to be effective, it must be readable."  As a learning professional, your responsibility is not just to deliver eLearning content to your students - it’s to make sure that it’s engaging and readable. What that means, is that you’re going to have to learn about design, especially typography. At its essence, eLearning is mostly about reading, and if what you’re offering is visually confusing or hard to read, your then your material simply fails to deliver. And since readability is an essential aspect of comprehension, it's necessary to consider the ease with which students can read the text.

Persuasion is an art. Try too hard, and you might be branded as being aggressive. Be gentle, and your message will probably be brushed aside. At the end, the ultimate goal of persuasion is to get a person to change. Persuading someone to come round to your point of view is especially challenging in a virtual learning environment that lacks the intimacy of a face-to-face interaction. What is more, your learner has a choice to go or not go through your course. Thankfully, researchers have figured out how the learner's mind works and how to "persuade" it to fall in line with your content. Monroe's Motivated Sequence lists a proven process—Hook, Need, Solution, Visualization, and Action—to convert a reluctant learner into an enthusiastic participant who readily absorbs the learning and willingly agrees to change his behavior. In eLearning, "telling isn't teaching," and you cannot persuade if you just state the facts. Facts alone won’t significantly change the way people think, do, and feel. You have to carefully choose every element on the screen to do all the coaxing, cajoling, imploring, and pleading to engage and persuade your learners to do something new. Follow this no-fail process for creating eLearning that persuades and changes behaviors. 

Is it possible to make people respect speed limits just for fun? This was the question posed by Kevin Richardson, winner of Volkswagen’s Fun Theory Award. In Stockholm, the Swedish National Society for Road Safety, together with Volkswagen, made Richardson's idea a reality. They installed a lottery radar speed camera which has two functions: Penalizing drivers who exceed speed limits. Giving a lottery ticket to those who drive below the limits, for a prize consisting of the money raised by the penalties. Result: More people respected speed limits. By turning the goal of lowering speed levels into a competitive game, people are more inclined to do it - increased responsibility through gaming.

You have to schedule meetings with the SME. You have to speak with the business executives to figure out the learning objectives. You have to know the target audience. It seems you have your hands full. Why should you bother to rack your brains and think of a story? Why would you need to tell a story in an eLearning course? Stories hold enormous power over our minds and hearts for a reason. They are how we think, how we make sense of information, how we define ourselves, and how we persuade others. According to a recent article in Psychology Today, stories continue to hold power in this digital age because the human brain hasn't evolved as fast as technology and it's only through stories that we can connect to the various digital platforms and media messages out there today.  Stories can improve your eLearning courses, not only making then more instructionally effective but also more engaging.

The need to disseminate education efficiently imposed that classrooms should no longer be confined within four walls. So distance learning came into being. Then as technology evolved, lessons were not only delivered to mailboxes (the ones on the curb) but also reached learners on their computers. Thus eLearning developed. And now, because learners are no longer tethered to their desks (the rise of the remote and mobile workforce), learning is being delivered to their hand-held devices where they can consume it on the go. Although e-Learning and m-Learning are used synonymously in many quarters, the two modes of learning differ in many aspects. As a learning designer, you must know all about the two formats so that you can create effective instructional content for each. We've gone over tons of articles that talk about the differences between eLearning and mLearning, so we've created this blog post to save you time doing your research. Here, we list down four of the main differences between both terms.  You might want to check out these articles: Is M-learning versus E-learning or are they supporting each other?  Mobile Learning versus E-Learning - Is There a Difference? mLearning: The Way of Learning Tomorrow The Different Uses of E-learning and M-learning Desktop Versus Mobile Learning mLearning Is Not eLearning on A Mobile Device From E-Learning to M-Learning: A Different Beast Right Time and Place: mLearning Use Cases

What is Gamification? Most people describe Gamification as "the application of game elements to non-game contexts to increase user engagement". But we especially like Karl Kapp's definition: "Gamification is the cover to add the interactivity, engagement and immersion that leads to good learning". 

"Responsive" is IN. It is the buzzword amongst web designers, website developers, and content creators. And it is time eLearning professionals learned it as well. Your learners have access to a host of devices with different display capabilities. After working hard to design and develop a course, you will want it to show up in all its glory and fidelity whatever the device it runs on.  But wait… What is Responsive Design? In Responsive Web Design (RWD), the on-screen content realigns itself automatically depending on the size and resolution of the screen it is being displayed on. This ensures optimal viewing performance irrespective of the nature of the device.  For instance, if you are viewing a course that features a Responsive Design, be assured that you won’t be made to pan endlessly or squint to read the text even if you choose to access it on your hand-held mobile device whose screen is smaller than that of your PC. The various graphical and textual elements will size and orient themselves automatically to match the dimensions of the screen. Similarly, you won’t have to resize the various on-screen elements if you choose to view the course on your laptop. See: 50 Examples of Responsive Web Design

With the rapid rise of smartphone and tablet penetration across the globe, high-resolution screens and improvements in broadbands speeds and connectivity, online video consumption continues to grow. According to Cisco's 2014 Report, Mobile video accounts for 55 percent of all data traffic. The same trend is visible in eLearning.  For instance, Video was ranked 3rd on the list of top formats for mLearning (ASTD 2012).  But why? This is mainly because the human brain is hardwired to engage better with real conversations (where the tone of voice and moving images/gestures create a multi-dimensional experience). And that's what video is all about: it combine texts, images and sounds to create an immersive learning environment. Adding video to eLearning courses is a sure way of increasing engagement. Additionally, creating videos has become easier for the eLearning designers, whereas it is fast becoming the de facto’ choice for learners. 

So you're going to start a new eLearning program? Are you apprehensive about getting buy-in from the stakeholders, developing the team, communicating and leading the program? Then here are some time-tested tips to significantly reduce the time you get your project onboard, minimizing risky surprises, and successfully closing the project.

A sudden cut on eLearning budget can generate a panic storm for the project lead. It bars access to choices — tools, resources, the types of content that can be created, and the work that can be outsourced to speed up the process. And hence, the actual time available for completing it. If you are in such a pinch, then know this: IT IS POSSIBLE to create quality eLearning courses on a shoe-string budget.  It’s a matter of prioritizing your efforts, focusing the core learning objectives and deliverables, planning ahead, using toolkits, and reusing content. Here is a five-step process for delivering quality eLearning courses on a shoe-string budget.

The best eLearning designers are the ones that consistently hone their style and look to make their skills even tighter. Fortunately, this doesn’t require a drastic overhaul of your existing knowledge base nor does it mean taking time-consuming classes that reteach things you might already know. In this blog  post, we will show you some handy exercises to keep your eLearning course design skills sharp as a jungle cat’s reflexes. A jungle cat sitting at a computer desk anyway, but I digress. With these easy exercises, you will see your eLearning courses begin to improve quickly and continuously. Read on to find out how a single month of simple tasks can make you a better designer.

As an eLearning course designer, you will often encounter clients who don’t have the time or budget to do an assessment before beginning training. Some clients may simply feel they already know what their employees need.  However, like with many scenarios, a skipped step today ends up costing way more in the long run. Training without asking the right questions is prone to give too much training, too little or just completely wrong training.  While there is a variety of constraints pushing clients and you to rush the process, there are three much worse things that can happen when you skip the training needs analysis. 

Finding a tool that makes your job as an instructional designer even a little easier is kind of like finding fairy dust to sprinkle over your projects. Bibbity bobbity done! That’s how it feels, so why is it so hard to remember to save these tools for future use? I cannot count how many times I have found a great app only to draw a blank as to what was it called or how to found it when I need it again. Here I present to you some of our favorite bookmarked websites and tools to make our eLearning design job easier.  Save them all or just bookmark this article for all future eLearning design magic.

As eLearning designers, we have to understand adult learning psychology to create courses that appeal to them and make them want to learn what you want to teach. But there is a challenge. Most adult learners are anxious about being able to adapt to and perform in a virtual learning environment. They also harbor negative attitudes about eLearning (due to bad courses they’ve taken in the past).  We have to overcome these obstacles by giving the learner compelling reasons to take our courses. We have to get inside their minds and break the code: What motivates them to learn and what holds them back?  

You know something’s wrong with the eLearning courses that you are offering if: The reports are dripping in bad news. The results are screaming "drop-outs" and "low retention." Your employees are not showing significant improvement in the performance that was expected of them. Their morale is down.  The negative stats are congealing like clots in your revenue stream. It’s "Death by PowerPoint presentation" all over again. You know you have your scapegoats: Tight deadlines, the shoestring budgets, highly technical content that needed to be communicated, and even the bad managers who had not properly bought into the eLearning strategy and were forcing the employees to take up the courses. Buy you know that it was more than that.  Your course failed to engage the audience. Hence, they have gained a bad reputation.  In this post, we'll go over the main reasons that have given your eLearning courses a bad reputation. 

This article by Doug Howard in Training Industry Magazine aptly sums up the hot trends that have dominated the HR industry this year. We believe that some of these trends should also be picked up and implemented by learning and development professionals next year too. After all, we design for employees; it helps if we know what motivates them to perform better at the workplace and how we can keep them hooked to the courses that training managers and the C-suite commission spend thousands of dollars on to create. Here are 3 growing HR trends training managers and L&D professionals can't ignore next year. By following these, you are addressing these needs of the modern learner.