Gamification is the integration of game mechanics, or game dynamics, into a learning experience. Game-based training can be defined as a game designed for the purpose of solving a problem. However, these words are being used in parallel by the industry and it can be quite confusing.

The two goals of any eLearning program are to teach learners new information and then to enable them to transfer their new knowledge into their work. Learning transfer is a complex process, and most eLearning designers do not understand the simple steps that they can take to ensure that knowledge does transfer from the computer where the learners learn it to the work place where they need it.

Flat design seems to be everywhere now. It’s the new look of our computer operating systems, our apps, websites, posters, book covers, and so many other places. Is this just a new fad or is this a fabulous new design trend that we in the eLearning industry need to pay more attention to in order to understand the fine points of flat design?

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.

Technological advances disrupt the status quo. We’ve seen this happen a number of times in the way we address learning and performance interventions. In the last few decades, the emergence of home computers brought us eLearning, and the proliferation of mobile and smartphones have brought us mLearning. Both of these technological advances have fundamentally changed how we look at learning and performance programs. Another technological advance is coming—one that will once again change some of our definitions and how we address performance issues: wearable technology.

eLearning has a broken feedback loop, and it’s holding us back as a field. Because we usually can’t see our products being used, we lack the most basic information necessary to improve what we do. Traditional evaluation at best is costly and difficult to measure, and at worst either ignored all together or implemented in such a superficial way that it’s meaningless. Even good evaluation measures are not granular enough to inform future design decisions.

Learning to leverage the specific tools and capabilities in mobile devices can be challenging for eLearning developers. Effective mLearning goes beyond converting traditional eLearning for use on mobile and actually applies techniques of responsive design and maximizes technologies like geolocation and gestural inputs to become authentic mobile learning.  

Your course users demand more quality and sophistication in the eLearning content they interact with. A growing expectation is for attractive eLearning content that is close to virtual reality with 3-D animated and interactive content. Interactive 3-D content can help teach more effectively, and make the courses more attractive and competitive. But is it worth the effort and the costs?

There’s an increasing awareness of the value of social learning in the workplace. Knowing that it exists is one thing; creating the scaffolding and support that allows people to capture, categorize, retrieve, and share what they learn is something else entirely.

Modern eLearning courses are technology solutions developed and implemented using many of the same techniques and tools that software developers use. Both share similar challenges: subject matter experts to navigate, aggressive deadlines to manage, assorted files and assets to organize, and an integrated approach to delivery, accounting for various hosting and browsing systems plus ongoing user support.

Currently, a lot of eLearning can be defined as a high-level PowerPoint presentation that includes animated text, images, and narration. The problem is that this type of eLearning doesn’t grab and hold the learner’s attention. Many times the learner can’t relate to what is being presented to them, or understand how they can apply it to future situations.

There is no definitive process for instructional design. Regardless of how much research we conduct, we can modify every theory and every process to meet our individual project needs. Modifying these needs and/or techniques becomes much easier when facilitating live, instructor-led training where learners provide both verbal and visual feedback. When it comes to eLearning, there is no facilitator available to modify the experience based on feedback. Therefore, instructional design plays a key role in determining the success of any training experience.

As you start to explore the Experience API (xAPI), it is easy to feel intimidated. If you lack the necessary coding skills to build a solution from the ground up, taking advantage of xAPI might not be possible without outside help since being able to prototype a solution is critical to the success of your project. Successful prototypes can help show what data is important and what changes you could make before creating a final product for release.

We’ve all been there—as a participant in a one-way, presentation-only style webinar. Presenters may know how to click through a series of slides, but that type of session isn’t very engaging to the learner. Also, although Adobe Connect is one of the most popular platforms for live online learning, it’s also one of the more complicated to learn to use its full feature set.

Instructional designers tend to define what is possible by the limitations of our chosen authoring tools. We remove ideas like responsive courses from consideration because our authoring tool does support the capability. Sometimes common modern web practices don’t always transfer over to eLearning authoring tools until it is too late. Why not take control over what you can do in your eLearning authoring by building it yourself?