The promise of MOOCs is appealing … massive to scale an organization’s limited resources, online on any device, open to people who wouldn’t otherwise have access, but that course part? It gets boring fast. Courses can be too linear, too logical, and too long for digital learners. It’s time to face up to the fact that courses are an artificial way to learn, invented 150 years ago to make farmers into obedient assembly line workers.

If you talk to game developers most will agree that building a functional artificial intelligence (AI) for a game engine is usually the most time-consuming part of development. Are there tools that we can use to rapidly develop the look and feel of AI without the resource drain of full AI development? Despite the fact that our development tools have greatly enhanced our abilities to create compelling, engaging content, adding AI elements to our courses can seem like a “bridge too far” for many developers.

You’ve created a video, and visually it looks great. At the same time, something about it feels flat to you. You’ve shared the video with others and it seems sort of flat to them as well. The problem is often not with the visuals; it’s with the audio. Video often needs more than just voices to be engaging.

Management often views training efforts as a line expense for a specific period. Rarely is any type of training activity considered an investment apart from specific tangible elements. eLearning and mLearning initiatives are considered investments since they require tangible financial requirements, including technology and supporting infrastructure viewed as capital expenditures.

It is increasingly challenging for designers and developers to create content that works well across an ever-increasing number of devices. Screen sizes and aspect ratios vary tremendously, and instructional designers and developers do not have the resources to create multiple versions of each project for each type of potential device.  Responsive design has allowed learning content to be flexibly displayed across the diversity of devices while maintaining a single content source.

Many training professionals find it challenging to know if training was effective on the job or if part of the organizational system is not supporting the training delivered. While many training departments collect data under Kirkpatrick’s levels one or two, few are able to track data beyond that. Training departments need a methodology for finding out training needs without on the job observation or having trainees return for a test.

As training professionals we know that practice and repetition builds skills, reinforces knowledge, and aids information retention and recall. However our traditional learning solutions and tools often struggle to provide practice opportunities that allow learners to apply knowledge and build skills in realistic, risk free environments. Even when we have practice opportunities in our curriculum, they may often lack the engagement that motivates learners to repeat and build proficiency and/or mastery over time, and they are difficult to scale to larger audiences.

As valuable as courses are, there will always be times when performance support is more appropriate. But in order to have really effective just-in-time learning support, people need to be able find and use it quickly and effortlessly. Performance support needs to be available wherever you are and whenever you need it. More importantly, the performance-support tools of the future are hands free.

Changing technologies, changing learner behaviors and characteristics, and the way that content is delivered today all impact how learning should be architected. As learning professionals, what are we to make of the explosion of new technologies and their promise to transform how we learn?

Technology has completely changed the way we live, work, and learn. Technology has brought us the Internet, smartphones, tablets, and many more tools that have changed our lives forever. Of course, these same technologies have also brought us memes like Socially Awkward Penguin, Success Kid, and yes, Grumpy Cat.

On the job performance support is often a key area of professional development that may not always be adequately addressed or sustainable, particularly in instances where workers are part of a mobile/virtual workforce. Traditional forms of training are often leveraged to bridge performance gaps and provide ongoing development opportunities. However, the methods often fail to deliver on the performance support needs of today’s mobile worker.

eLearning is often viewed as a brain dump of knowledge and there is far too little examination of how to motivate the learner. Engaging design elements and interactivity can inspire the learner to complete the module, but it doesn’t necessarily inspire the learner to keep learning and growing. There is a huge opportunity to incorporate motivational strategies from educational psychology in a practical way in eLearning.

Learning professionals have long battled what is allowable from an organization’s IT group. Understanding why IT has these issues is the best method of lowering these barriers. In today’s world, data theft has become big business. The IT group sees allowing personal laptops and mobile devices onto organizational networks as a surefire method to data disaster. As such, IT groups often shut all the doors to minimize risks. Opening those doors can yield huge benefits and can be relatively easy—if you know how.

The tools and technologies that exist today in large learning and development organizations are complex, and they don’t always play nice with each other. This makes it very difficult to build useful reports from the results of learning experiences in multiple systems. One of the new tools that is available that can address this problem is the Experience API (xAPI).

Lectora is a popular development tool that is more powerful than most instructional designers realize. Lectora is extremely malleable, making it possible to do almost anything you can design. However, some users are unaware of how to get the most out of the authoring tool.

As eLearning developers we often get caught up in designing only what we know from experience. The same holds true with eLearning developers using Articulate Storyline. The more you know, the more options and ideas become evident to solving instructional design challenges. The more you know about variable programming in Storyline, the more the world opens up to unlimited design possibilities.