Articles

At the first glance, creating learning simulations seems really appealing: This is about catching most of learners’ attention, this is about interactivity, this is about new trends… Everything is like a fairy tale until… You actually try to make one! Creating the graphical environment (setting up your backgrounds, your characters), as well as creating your pedagogical structure (choosing evaluation criteria and feedbacks), to finally put every single piece of the puzzle altogether, usually asks a lot of effort, whether it is from you web design team, developers team, eLearning trainers, etc. And you end up finishing this tedious task with a lot of pain. And sometimes, the worst case scenario: The outcome isn’t that good! Your learners don’t really identify themselves to the training; there are bugs here and there in the learning simulations. Anyway, if you have always been dreaming about creating engaging learning simulations, but felt overwhelmed with all the technical stuff, you should read this article.

I see articles every week that have “the future of learning” in them. It may be gamification, micro-learning, social learning, device agnostic content, learning paths, etc. I believe that none of these are the future of learning, because within an organizational context, there are really three different goals we are trying to achieve - often simultaneously.

The only way to know if your eLearning strategy is truly effective is identifying whether your learners have actually acquired and retained the necessary skills and knowledge. While interviews and surveys can offer a glimpse into the minds of your audience, an eLearning assessment gives you the complete picture. In this article, I’ll share 5 indications to determine if your eLearning assessments are right on target or missing the mark.

In September 2015, I had released an eBook on Creative Instructional Design Featuring 7 Learning Strategies You Can Use. The eBook has been designed as a job-aid to Instructional Designers and helps them bridge the gap between theory and application. All the learning strategies shown here can be easily applied on their projects. The 7 strategies featured here are from our online suite of 15 courses for Instructional Designers.

Every institution in the world is getting stuck when deciding about the proper Learning Management System (LMS) to be used. With different challenges in education among institutions, as well as with the availability of large number of eLearning solutions, institutions need to choose a Learning Management System that works in and beyond the classroom.

Feedback is a vital component of eLearning experiences, but only if it comes in the form of constructive criticism. In this article, I’ll share 7 tips to give your online learners the constructive feedback they need to succeed.

Sometimes it seems that you cannot go a day without hearing a mention of mLearning (mobile learning) in our little eLearning world. The market opportunity being spoken of is truly huge – a recent report by research firm Markets and Markets pegged the total spend on mobile learning in 2020 at $ 37.6 billion. Pretty much every player in the space has to sit up and take notice of such numbers. There has been a lot written, including by us, about situations where mLearning should become the preferred choice. That being said, though, what are the downsides? What are the situations where you should consider not climbing onto the mLearning bandwagon?

Online training in an asynchronous online environment means that the full responsibility of learning falls on the shoulders of employees; they are the ones who have maximum control over how, when, and where learning happens. But is learning at one’s own pace the ideal online training experience? In this article, I'll share 5 advantages and 5 disadvantages of asynchronous learning so that you will be able to determine whether your audience would benefit from this learning method or not.

Gamification is considered as a silver bullet for all challenges people face. The problem is that there are not so many really good examples of processes which were positively influenced by gamifying them. Piano Staircase, Speed Zone Lottery, Nike, FitBit – you know them all, as for at least two years they have been used as justification of this idea. But even knowing them (plus some more non-standard ones) you usually end up with PBL: Adding to your gamified process points (P), badges (B), and leaderboards (L) hoping that they will influence people. My question is: Do we really have to gamify everything in order to maintain playability?

What are the tips to succeed and the mistakes you absolutely need to avoid when following a blended learning approach? In this article, I’ll share 10 dos and don’ts to keep in mind when designing your blended learning corporate training strategy, so you can make sure that your blended learning course offers the best out of both classroom and online training to your corporate audience.

Looking to capture the energy of a new staff member when they join your team? In this article we will be taking a look at how implementing personalized onboarding gets the most of your new employees during their onboarding experience.

Ahh, human interaction. After thousands of years, we still haven’t quite figured it out. Luckily, some genius –Edison, probably– invented the icebreaker to help us overcome our initial awkwardness and get to business. Here are 4 effective eLearning icebreakers you can implement by using live polling apps.