Most learners and stakeholders want an efficient learning experience that can increase their competency as quickly as possible. Most training teams want a scalable, flexible, and sustainable solution. Yet too often training programs fail to deliver on these expectations because we try to cram too much information into too short a timeframe using the wrong type of solution.

To meet the real needs of an organization’s learning and performance strategy, learning programs have to be designed appropriately. On principle, this means acquiring performance objectives, mapping to meaningful practice, presenting models that guide application, supporting with reasonable examples, and making the experience engaging. In practice, you have subject matter experts who don’t have access to what they do, tools that are aligned with knowledge presentation, pre-existing processes and practices that are hard to change, stakeholders who mistake sizzle for steak, and limits on schedule and budget.

Training demands are greater that any one central training department can meet. Departments are always making their own training despite lacking the skills or tools to make it truly effective. Even if subject-matter experts want to partner with a full instructional-design project team, they rarely have the time to do so. And yet despite these challenges, end users still require and deserve a high level of quality in their training programs.

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.

One of the most challenging aspects of developing learning programs is managing the sheer volume of content generated on a daily basis. There are eLearning modules, demos, simulations, videos, job aides, quick-start guides, webinars, ILT decks, graphs, flowcharts, assessments, animations, podcasts, and the source and media files to go along with each. The most frustrating aspect of all this is the number of times developers are forced to reinvent the wheel because, while the perfect content may already exist in one format it is incompatible with content in another format.

In their clinical training, physicians and other clinicians are not learning the skills they need to lead their organizations through the rapid changes happening in health care. It has become more and more difficult to pull clinicians away from patient care to teach them core leadership skills. As a result, health care organizations are struggling to provide these critical skills with shrinking time and resources.

Instructional designers and eLearning professionals are often faced with the daunting task of designing learning interventions to meet the needs of multiple stakeholders quickly and effectively. Many eLearning solutions are perceived as boring, ineffective, or incapable of meeting learning goals effectively, leaving designers with an uphill battle to sell new ideas and concepts to colleagues. Even strong concepts and well-designed projects face barriers and challenges.

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 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?

At the request of the Quebec Ministry, innovative technology was developed to support a first-of-its-kind distance learning program launched in Quebec to encourage potential immigrants to perfect their knowledge of the French language prior to arriving in Quebec. This was an important goal to help accelerate immigrants’ access to the job market as well as facilitate their integration into their new home.