Learning professionals have a number of difficult goals to achieve relative to the creation and management of online learning. We need to ensure consistent quality, visual identity, and education outcomes of effective learning objects that are reusable between programs and delivery methods. As many challenges as we face, sometimes the solution itself presents its own new set of issues. In the case of the Johns Hopkins School of Nursing, massive open online courses (MOOCs) were both a challenge and a solution.

As learning and development professionals, we often spend a significant amount of our time trying to put together the pieces of a giant organizational puzzle so we can do our jobs. We are, in many ways, the middlemen between those who know and those who need to learn. L&D must reposition itself away from its current role as an information conveyor and leverage its unique skills to help people find and use information to improve their performance.

Learning professionals are increasingly losing a battle against short attention spans and increased competition for learners’ attention. We need to adapt our approaches to accommodate the changing needs and desires of our audiences that want training in highly visually formats, and in short doses.

Your course looks fantastic, but how does it sound? Learning is most effective when it takes advantage of both audio and visual pathways into the brain. Adding quality voiceovers to your eLearning program can greatly enhance knowledge transfer. But hiring professional voiceover talent can be expensive, and subject-matter experts may not always be available. That leaves just one person: you!

Narrating our work—also known in some circles as “working out loud”—is getting a lot of attention lately as it offers great potential for connecting talent pools and capturing tacit knowledge, reducing rework and duplication of effort and maybe even meetings. While there is a lot of discussion around the value showing your work provides in the context of learning, there’s less clarity around how showing your work provides value to a business or organization.

Everyone’s talking about Big Data, but learning systems already generate piles of data and it’s a mess. How can we move on to a more in-depth analysis of learner behavior if we can’t even straighten out the basics? Our technicians roll their eyes and complain about poor data quality in the upstream feeds. The report designers complain that the stakeholders keep changing their requirements, and our teams are burning precious hours managing unwieldy Excel spreadsheets. We don’t need a new technology. We need a new approach.

Learning has been and always will be social. However, in a world of increasing use of eLearning and mobile-learning courses, we run the risk of coming full circle back to stale, unengaging “click-here”-based learning. People naturally collect in communities of practice outside of work (Facebook, Google+, reddit, Tumblr, etc.) to share and collaborate. How do we create an ecosystem of learning that engages learners both within and outside our eLearning content?

Organizations often need to communicate critical knowledge and motivate learners of varying proficiency to achieve specific performance levels. This commonly requires delivering a range of content across disciplines. It can be challenging to design impactful learning that goes beyond transmitting information that results in consistent performance.  

Many organizations have significant investments in SharePoint. If you are already using SharePoint as a corporate intranet portal, it makes sense to consider an LMS with strong integration points with SharePoint. CorVel has a well-developed intranet portal in SharePoint and had previously implemented a home-grown LMS. However, after a few years, some additional requirements led the company to evaluate the LMS market for SharePoint.

Salespeople make up 70 to 80 percent of Hilti’s 21,000 team members worldwide. Those employees only make money if they are closing sales. Training is an important support tool for salespeople, but it is often looked at as an interruption of the sales process by both the salespeople and organizational management. Trainers needed to find a way to motivate salespeople to complete training.

Technology is constantly evolving and changing the ways we live, work, and learn. The ways we approach learning are very different than they were even a decade ago. In order to keep our practices current, we must stay ahead of this technological evolution—and that starts with getting the most out of today’s technology.

When learners are geographically dispersed, and the training is completed, it is difficult to know if the skills were transferred back on the job. In addition, it is difficult to observe the learner performing a new task, and to provide feedback for improvement and/or reinforcement of what was done well. We need to find ways to use technology to enable us to effectively evaluate learners’ ability to apply what they learn in training.

The Experience API is still an emerging technology. While the specification has matured over the last few years, most organizations approach xAPI conversation with more questions than answers.

Complex online learning platforms usually mean complex visual styles. Maybe your platform has different skins for different groups of learners. Or maybe the styles change depending on the learning context, e.g., in a practice exercise versus a learning evaluation. All that visual complexity transfers to complex, often messy, stylesheet code.

Scenario-based eLearning is a proven effective method for learning using complex real-life situations. All too often, designers and developers shy away from this effective method because it seems too complex, expensive, and time-consuming. Because of improvements to authoring tools this is no longer the case.