Being a tenured professor for over 30 years, and a part of the education community for decades, has made one thing perfectly clear to Allison Rossett: It’s time for a change. Allison isn’t the only one who thinks change is overdue in education. The President, Bill Gates, the Lumina Foundation, and others all think so too. They all make a case for WHY change must come to universities, the professoriate, and by extension, corporate education. In this session you will explore the more important question related to educational change: How to do it. You will discuss what we can do to change the future of education and examine technology’s important role in changing the structure and culture of education. You will gain an understanding of the forces that will impact the changes coming to educators, universities, and other learning entities near you.

The “badge movement” is gaining momentum, but many organizations are still unaware of their potential. Organizations are starting to award badges to acknowledge worker competencies built on-the-job, and other organizations are recognizing the badges that employees and job candidates have earned elsewhere as a means of improving hiring and new-hire training. In this example-rich session, you will learn about the power of badges, the ecosystem in which they live, and the role they will play for you and your organization. You will explore examples of badges that provide value in competency-based education programs, job training, professional development, and city-wide learning initiatives. You will learn how badges give prospective employers, schools, collaborators, and other learners a more complete picture of knowledge, skills, and abilities. Badge holders are entering the workforce, and they expect business and industry to accept and issue this new currency. This session will help you be ready for them.

What is the best way to design instruction for today’s technology tools, for stand-up instruction, and for eLearning? Many designers struggle to answer that question because you must match the right learning content with the right instructional strategy and design instruction in a way that ensures it will “stick” with the learner. Often, this matching can be the difference between success and failure of a learning program. In this interactive session you will learn simple techniques instructional designers use to create compelling and meaningful instruction based on applying proper instructional strategies and techniques to specific types of content. You will explore examples demonstrating how to match content with the right learning strategy that range from creating stories to developing analogies to properly chunking factual content. You will discover how to leverage the correct matching of content to your instructional strategy to create effective, engaging learning opportunities.

There are many ways to support learning, including formal, informal, mobile, social, and immersive. Yet, we often look at each approach independently rather than seeing the bigger picture, which limits our thinking of what a truly integrated learning strategy can be. To demystify and manage all this for the highest value, we need more than just a bigger learning toolbox; we need a learning ecosystem—a new organizing framework for what we do. In this session, you’ll examine the characteristics of a learning ecosystem from the perspective of performance and look at the infrastructure, including innovations in technology, needed to support it. You’ll get suggestions on how to identify the strategic drivers and develop the sponsorship needed to grow and sustain a cohesive learning ecosystem in your organization. You’ll explore the future of learning ecosystems—and why this new way of looking at what we do is so important.

Because mobile technologies have changed how we live our daily lives, it is natural to assume that they will also change how we learn. However, some might suggest that mLearning, as a method of supporting learning and performance, is more hype than substance. They built this critique upon a flawed foundation that considers mLearning through the lens of eLearning. mLearning is not eLearning on a mobile device; it is much, much more than that. This panel discussion will explore why mobile technologies are a critical driver for the future of learning and performance, why mobile is critical to the learning conversation, and how mLearning is an entirely new world for learning and performance that we must explore. You will learn how organizations are reinventing learning and performance using mobile technologies, and how you and your organization can utilize mobile in innovative ways. Panelists are members of the advisory group for the mLearnCon Conference and Expo.