The importance of workplace learning is increasing, and knowing how it contributes to organizational strategy is critical for it to deliver real value. Strategy is one of the most poorly understood management areas and little strategic planning occurs in learning; most of it consisting of little more than issuing goals and assigning projects and tasks. However, real strategic planning should begin with the establishment of a theoretical foundation for how to connect learning initiatives and solutions to the organization’s next goal on the road to its visionary future. It should create a cause-and-effect plan for how to achieve that theory’s execution.

Participants will team up to work through a case study of a fictitious company. The teams will complete the learning and growth component of a “balanced scorecard,” ensuring their learning strategy completely aligns with the company’s existing scorecard metrics and established strategic objectives. The teams must help the company develop its learning strategy and metrics in conjunction with the organizational strategy presented to them in the corporate scorecard.

In this session, you will learn:

• How to build a strategy map, starting with top-level goals
• How to craft the essential values, skills, competencies, technologies, and capacities without which the strategy will fail
• How to create metrics that will populate a balanced scorecard, allowing for measurement of the strategy’s execution
• How to map tangible linkages from learning expectations to business objectives

Audience:
Intermediate and advanced project managers, managers, directors, and CLOs with a fundamental understanding of the ADDIE model and a basic comprehension of business and strategic concepts.

We all want the A players, but often end up with the C players. They’re not bad people, just not right for us—an expensive mistake. Businesses everywhere are seeking better ways to secure the talent necessary for the success of their learning organizations. To avoid the cost of lost productivity and re-hiring, learning organizations must leverage the latest technology to drive first-time hiring success. There’s no time or capacity to make hiring mistakes.

It’s easy to figure out the competencies candidates say they have and that a job needs. It’s hard to figure out the motivation, values, and business acumen the job and candidates really have. In this session, you’ll learn to leverage a patented job-benchmarking process and online assessment tools to find the best job fit. You’ll learn to remove common biases often associated with the hiring process and focus instead on factual data based on job requirements for coaching and hiring success.

In this session, you will learn:

• How to identify the job to be benchmarked, including why the job exists and how job success is measured
• How to identify subject matter experts who directly connect to the job and use their expertise to create the job benchmark
• The key accountabilities—critical goals and key business successes the job is accountable for
• How to prioritize and weigh key accountabilities by importance and time requirements
• How to compare talent to the job benchmark to compare individuals to a job

Audience:
Intermediate professionals with experience hiring talent.

All of us believe that training is good for our organizations and that eLearning provides us with a powerful and efficient way to deliver effective training. However, it is challenging to get employees enrolled in the most appropriate training because companies have hundreds of busy employees and thousands of potential courses. Current needs assessment models, developed more than 30 years ago and based on the traditional live training sessions, are no long applicable to current training needs.

Participants in this session will examine research showing how it is now possible for training departments to automate this needs assessment process, and how these auto-evaluations create custom learning paths that map directly into eLearning courses proven to produce more motivated and more engaged learners. You’ll receive essential checklists and tools that will allow you to automate your needs assessment process. You’ll be able to develop automated needs assessment tools that will create custom learning paths that offer your employees the most appropriate training.

In this session, you will learn:

• About traditional means of conducting needs assessment and why we need a new type of needs assessment for eLearning
• How you can automate needs assessment and use it to create custom learning paths that map directly into courseware
• The evidence showing that random or blanket assignment of eLearning courses leads to diminished employee engagement
• How automated personalized learning paths lead to greater engagement and more effective learning transfer.

Audience:
Novice-to-advanced professionals. An understanding of needs assessment and learning paths is helpful, but not required.

e-MDs, a leading electronic medical records software producer, had a challenge: It wanted to improve performance and get users up to speed quickly. Companies typically do this with a training system, but training every user in every feature didn’t make sense. The answer was a competency model. The key was to use the competency model for something … typically development, assessment, sourcing of candidates, or selection.

Participants in this case-study session will learn how to link the competency model to learning content and create a powerful system of learning that improves performance on the job. You’ll see the design of total learning solutions incorporating a data first, then act, paradigm. You will examine the system using data analysis, competency development, job role assessment, personal learning-path generation, and continuous data collection to map to assessment. You’ll learn the key research and successes.

• The value of thinking at a systems level for training
• How to leverage a competency model
• How to use assessment to create a personal learning path
• How to leverage a technology platform to deliver quality training

Is your organization stuck in a learning-as-event mindset? While tradition and logistics has—from time immemorial—prodded us to create training in distinct event chunks, research on learning shows that the event mindset hurts learning results. It glorifies the classroom while ignoring the importance of on-the-job integration. It organizes content for easy dissemination while sidestepping the need to create long-term remembering. In short, the event mindset holds us back from maximizing learning results. By tapping into the wisdom from learning research, subscription learning provides an alternative learning approach.

Participants in this session will learn the research on the power of spaced repetitions and how to best utilize this powerful learning method. You’ll examine different tricks of the subscription-learning trade and look at different technologies—including very simple ones.

In this session, you will learn:

• How learning research supports a subscription-learning approach
• How spaced repetitions can be used to the greatest effect
• Different methods for use in subscription learning
• Different technology platforms for providing subscription learning

Target:
Novice–to-advanced professionals.

Interpersonal skills often take a back seat to more focused business-process training in eLearning. Can eLearning help produce measurable improvement in interpersonal skills without a large investment in classroom time?

Participants in this case-study session will learn how a two-day ILT course was transformed into a blended learning curriculum using highly interactive, scenario-based eLearning modules that reduced classroom time by 50 percent. Using the successive approximation model (SAM) process for development, the company created customer negotiation simulations for sales associates, allowing them the opportunity to practice techniques in a safe environment as often as they needed. You’ll learn how the company piloted and measured specific business-performance metric outcomes and how they compared with a control group, as well as learning about the adoption of the new learning methods by the sales team.

In this session, you will learn:

• The SAM development process 
• How to effectively use eLearning for soft-skill development
• How to overcome skepticism from leadership, trainers, and learners
• How to measure business outcomes from soft-skill training
• How the SAM process iterative approach for development helped produce these results

Audience:
Novice-to-advanced designers, developers, and project managers with knowledge of basic instructional design.

While rapid creation of online learning is a well-defined process, there are few standards for assessing the large quantities of data generated for continuous quality improvement. Even where you can collect some data there is significant ambiguity surrounding ways to apply these findings in a manner that helps target instructional design and pedagogical issues. While we frequently use web analytics tools to assess visitor actions on commercial websites, there are no significant use cases that demonstrate how we can use these robust tools in online learning environments.

Participants in this session will focus on methodologies for applying web analytics tools, commonly used in the commercial space, to online learning. You’ll learn strategies for tagging, categorizing, and optimization. You’ll cover interpretation of generated data and application to improving instructional design to ensure you develop an understanding of practical applications. You’ll also examine means of leveraging data streams for predictive content provisioning.

In this session, you will learn:

• How to use web analytics tools to measure learning asset utilization
• Principles of web analytics configuration and optimization
• How to conceptualize tagging strategies that are appropriate to various content classes
• Techniques for disseminating data in an actionable format

Audience:
Novice-to-advanced professionals who understand basic web design terminology. Some degree of awareness around fundamental web analytics concepts such as hits, abandonment, path, etc., is desirable to optimize the session’s value. However, all levels of participants will benefit.

Have you ever passed a quiz with 80 percent, but wondered about the 20 percent you got wrong? In some eLearning courses, as soon as a learner passes a quiz, the course ends and the learner may never find out what the right answers were—a missed learning opportunity for the curious and the conscientious. Adobe’s Advanced Actions feature can solve this challenge.

Participants in this session will learn how to quickly and elegantly create a feedback mechanism that provides the learner with a summary of which questions were answered incorrectly, along with the correct answers. As you go over the feedback mechanism, you’ll learn techniques that will help increase your efficiency in any Captivate project that uses Advanced Actions. You will see a clear roadmap for systematically planning out a project ahead of time. You’ll also learn some of the most common skills associated with Advanced Actions, such as hiding and showing objects, creating variables, deciding if an action is a standard or conditional action, and assigning values to variables.

In this session, you will learn:

• The difference between conditional and standard Advanced Actions
• How to find or create the variables needed for your project
• To identify where a project should trigger an Advanced Action
• How to name an object in Captivate
• How to show and hide objects using Advanced Actions instead of the Timeline

Audience:
Intermediate designers and developers, preferably with a basic working knowledge of Adobe Captivate, including familiarity with the Timeline, how to create slides and quizzes, and how to add objects (such as text, images, and buttons) to a slide.

Multiple-choice questions in courses don’t typically give learners the kind of realistic practice that leads to them discovering possible solutions on their own. An alternative to multiple-choice questions is scenario-based questions, which can be almost as potent as simulations, yet are much less time consuming and less costly to develop. Unfortunately, most scenario writers do not fully reinforce the cognitive pathways learners will need to retrieve the learned information from memory.

 By using the research-inspired SEDA (situation, evaluation, decision, action) model, scenario writers can avoid the two biggest shortfalls in scenario-based questions: the closing of the problem space and the lack of processing devoted to examining the answer choices. You will learn how questions using the model prompt learners to look beyond a limited number of answer choices and to think of the situation more like a real-world situation. Participants will also look at how to increase the amount of attentional capacity learners devote to analyzing the answer choices, thus increasing learning outcomes.

 In this session, you will learn:

• How you can use the SEDA model to diagnose poor training and simulation design
• The three learning methods that are most effective in minimizing forgetting and supporting long-term remembering
• How to create branching questions that open up the problem space, and hence improve learning results
• How to create branching questions that learners process more fully, and hence improve learning results

 Audience:

Courseware developers and subject matter expects strive to produce the highest-quality training product they can deliver, and that often takes a considerable amount of time. With the days of long development cycles over, we need to look at what quality level is acceptable to deliver a product that achieves our goals.

Participants in this case-study session will look at the impact of lower production values and tighter development timelines on the end products in order to address the questions, “Is this good enough to meet our goals? Is a lower production value acceptable? Does it impact lesson or course integrity?” You’ll learn how JetBlue is developing curriculum and meeting a baseline set of training content standards, and examine a feature analysis on audience expectations in the age of YouTube and Twitter.

In this session, you will learn:

• Different audiences’ expectations of quality
• The importance of setting and upholding standards
• A baseline quality of content
• How to get the team on board
• How to lower quality when required to achieve goals

Audience:
Novice and intermediate designers, developers, and project managers.

The proliferation of open educational resources has sparked a renewed interest in informal learning and self-directed learning. Furthermore, stakeholders are increasingly scrutinizing the relevance of formal learning experiences in postsecondary education to skills that employers actually need from knowledge workers. Given the increasing reliance upon and importance of learners’ self-directed, informal learning experiences, we need more research to shed light on the nexus between formal and informal learning. This session highlights research in which the informal learning nexus scale (ILNS) assesses the extent to which formal learning experiences in blended environments impact learners’ informal learning experiences.

Participants in this session will explore research about the relationship between formal and informal learning and learn conceptual frameworks for designing instruction to capitalize on the rich experiences learners bring to the classroom. The ILNS, whether used as an assessment instrument, as a curricular design model, or both, will provide you with a valuable tool for continuous quality improvement that responds directly to the calls for improved changes in postsecondary pedagogy.

In this session, you will learn:

• How to analyze the role of informal learning in contemporary postsecondary education
• How to review factor-validation analyses used for the informal learning nexus scale
• How to incorporate learners’ informal learning into eLearning
• How to use informal learning to better design, facilitate, and evaluate eLearning

Audience:
Novice-to-advanced professionals.

Your stakeholders care about results. And as a professional it’s up to you to show them your results. You’ve collected and analyzed your evaluation data. You know why you got the results you did. You’ve developed action items and recommendations to address any shortcomings and improve future sessions. To reap the rewards of your hard work, you need to invest a little time in a thoughtful and strategic communication plan. Communication is the least understood and the most neglected part of training project planning. It’s also arguably the most important part.

Session participants will learn why it’s so critical to consider communication in a systematic way and how to create a communication plan that meets the needs of all your training stakeholders. You’ll see examples of and receive such tools as a stakeholder information needs analysis, a communication plan that details who gets what information when, and a training impact report that highlights your program’s accomplishments.

In this session, you will learn:

• The fundamentals of communicating training evaluation results
• What stakeholders need and want to know about training
• How to create an evaluation report that gets read

 Audience:
Intermediate professionals.

One of the biggest issues in the learning and development field is transference after the students leave the class … and trying to measure that transference in a Level 3 (or higher) evaluation. Is the learner using the new skill, knowledge, or attitude they learned in class? In this session, learners will learn how Volvo Group Trucks Sales & Marketing Americas incorporated techniques into their advanced warranty-administration course in order to increase engagement before, during, and after the class as well as introduce “mini” Level 3 evaluations.

Participants in this session will learn the steps taken to design and develop an instructor-led class that encompassed personal development and insight, collaboration, and a bit of action learning. You’ll develop your own action plan to implement “mini” Level 3 evaluations and brainstorm strategies to increase engagement before, during, and after class.

In this session, you will learn:

• How to increase engagement through design and content
• How to incorporate collaboration with peers and managers
• The lessons learned through this process

Audience:

Novice-to-advanced designers, developers, managers, and directors. Participants should be in the L&D field and understand the aspects of designing and developing a course as well as the associated challenges.

In traditional brick-and-mortar higher education institutions, online learning presents a conundrum. Typically, strapped budgets cannot afford dedicated course designers and must rely on faculty course developers to create academic eCurriculum. Consistency and quality of eInstruction is a very challenging issue for colleges and universities developing their own curriculum.

Session participants will learn a course certification system that operates smoothly and efficiently with minimal human and digital resources. The course development uses a system of self- and peer-assessment that streamlines the process while enhancing course quality and supporting online collaboration between educational professionals. You’ll see a logistical operational plan demonstrated that will enable participants from educational settings to develop, certify, and bring to registration-readiness potentially dozens of courses concurrently throughout an academic year. The plan makes maximum benefit of free and low-cost web resources, as well as providing an excellent participatory model for faculty to use in their own courses for assessment strategies.

In this session, you will learn:

• The basics of setting up a self- and peer-assessment system for course certifications
• The value of free and low-cost web tools (cost, flexibility, interoperability, etc.)
• Where to find resources to support your new eLearning program
• How to engage technophobic and resistant faculty course developers in your process

Audience:
Novice-to-advanced professionals with a basic understanding of web technologies and their value in education.