The process of creating or buying a mobile LMS to support learning for your organization can appear to be an overly complex task. However, a mobile site can still be an obtainable goal. With proper planning, a mobile training site can help improve training within an organization.

Participants in this session will explore both the challenges and rewards of properly developing a mobile training site. You’ll discover how to sort through the many options available and see how the right combination of technology and user focus can provide an effective method of improving access to a training site.

In this session, you will learn:

• The differences between web-based mobile sites and mobile apps
• How to plan for a mobile training site based upon your users’ needs
• How to measure the success of a mobile training site
• How to promote the mobile training site

Audience:
Novice and intermediate developers, project managers, and managers. Participants need only a basic understanding of web development and how their users utilize training within their organization.

Good learning includes practical, hands-on experience, particularly when the subject matter is software. But the logistics of providing such practice environments can be complex, especially when you need to support many different classes and technologies from day to day. Perhaps you’ve heard that the cloud can help, but feel overwhelmed by the ever-growing number of options.

Participants in this session will learn how the concept of virtualization applies not only to classrooms, but to your classroom IT infrastructure as well. Cloud platforms allow you to quickly create practice environments for a training engagement while at the same time pooling and making the most efficient use of expensive hardware resources. You’ll explore various public cloud platforms on the Internet, as well as techniques for implementing your own.

In this session, you will learn:

• About cloud computing and hardware virtualization concepts
• How to classify different types of cloud services
• About the costs and benefits of cloud-based training
• How to quickly provision environments for new training events
• How learners access the cloud
• About various cloud products and technologies

Audience:
Novice developers, project managers, and managers who are familiar with basic computer and virtual classroom concepts.

The Experience API specification introduces new concepts and technologies that differ vastly from SCORM-style content and systems. The concept of a Learner Record Store (LRS) is one of the major differences and central concepts of the new Experience API. Understanding the Learning Record Store, and how to effectively use one, is necessary for any developer or ISD planning on using the new Experience API.

This session will familiarize participants with this new concept and how it fits into the Experience API. It will discuss a central topic in the new Experience API specification currently under development by many key organizations within the eLearning community. Participants in this session will learn what information the LRS reports, stores, and returns, and, since that information is retrievable, you’ll discuss ideas about how to work with it.

In this session, you will learn:

• What the Experience API is
• What the Learning Record Store is
• How the Experience API uses the Learning Record Store
• What information you can send and retrieve from the LRS
• What you could do with the information from the LRS

Audience:
Novice designers, developers, project managers, and managers with eLearning content development or ISD experience, experience with eLearning reporting tools, and experience with SCORM and other eLearning standards.

How can a company or LMS team decide whether it has the proper platform in place to offer online courses or if it should move to a different provider? What essential metrics, parameters, and elements should such a team evaluate? This session will outline steps to take when deciding to move from one LMS to another.

Session participants will learn how to use end-of-course feedback from users to identify missing features, user errors that occur often, and technological issues that cannot be resolved in their current LMS. You’ll also learn how to assess troubleshooting requests from employees in all aspects of their companies, including manufacturing, dealer development, and the general employee population, to isolate recurring problems related to navigation, features and options, information management, etc.

In this session, you will learn:

• How to upgrade your current LMS
• What to look for when considering an upgrade
• Whether to change vendors or not
• How to manage and service several difference audiences with one LMS

Audience:
Intermediate and advanced professionals who are familiar with an LMS, understand its basic functions, and are currently thinking about upgrading or changing their current LMS.

More and more frequently, we hear people asking whether the LMS is dead. Learning has finally burst out of the classroom and become informal, social, and mobile. How can learning be “managed” when there are no registrations, rosters, and completions to count? Of course, formal instruction is still important for things like compliance, safety, onboarding, and baseline skills. But to many organizations, the future of learning management systems seems unclear.

Participants in this session will explore the role of learning management in informal, social, and mobile learning. You will examine current features and capabilities addressed by the LMS market and get a forecast of future trends. Most importantly, you will learn a set of LMS evaluation criteria that will position your organization to make LMS purchase and upgrade decisions that ensure it is equipped to take full advantage of emerging learning models.

In this session, you will learn:

• How today’s leading LMS products handle social and mobile learning
• How tomorrow’s LMS products will handle informal learning
• How learning management will transform over the coming years
• How to weigh options for managing learning in the cloud
• How to define forward-looking criteria for evaluating and selecting an LMS

Audience:
Intermediate and advanced professionals with experience in LMS selection, implementation, and/or operation.

Are you considering a learning management system (LMS), and do you find yourself overwhelmed with all the possibilities? This session will show you how to determine whether an LMS is the right alternative for you, along with the key factors that can help you choose the right one.

In this session, interactive discussion and engaging activities will assist you with defining your current and future needs, as well as analyzing and evaluating your options. You’ll learn the top-10 things you need to consider in order to make an informed decision and avoid buying the wrong product. Together, participants will construct a list of best practices.

In this session, you will learn:

• How to construct a list of minimum standards needed for your LMS
• How to analyze and evaluate LMS options to determine the best fit for your company
• How to make an informed decision on the optimal LMS solution
• How to sidestep some of the biggest mistakes made by those seeking an LMS

Audience:
Novice designers, developers, and project managers.

In 2010, Aristocrat Technologies embarked on a journey to migrate from its antiquated, homegrown LMS to a robust, hosted LMS. It’s faced the issues that come with any SaaS product: two mergers, server migrations, monthly upgrades, and integration with an internal site that gets upgraded … in addition to the standard LMS implementation and administration decisions that must be made on how to serve customers.

Participants in this session will learn what it is like to live with a SaaS LMS as it goes through multiple mergers in two years. You’ll discover the best practices for using the LMS to deliver compliance and required annual training, as well as new hire orientation, professional development, and new product training. You’ll also learn their plans for the LMS, how the company is setting itself up to become a revenue center, and the use of the LMS for performance support.

In this session, you will learn:

• About the administration of a SaaS LMS
• How best practices can be applied to your organization
• How to build an LMS to meet needs of internal and external learners and a global audience
• How to use learning plans to deliver required training
• About LMS features that did not work and why
• About metrics used to select the LMS and ones used now to measure success

Audience:
Novice and intermediate designers, developers, managers, and directors who are familiar with LMS functionality.

As corporate organizations move to more “tribal” learning, there is a huge opportunity for learners to contribute learning assets via mobile devices. This includes geo-tagged images, videos, text, and audio recordings. By allowing learners to contribute and share knowledge there is a sense of ownership and inclusion in the process of knowledge transfer. But how do we organize all these assets, and should they be included in today’s current LMS architecture? Mobile learning asset ingestion goes beyond the capabilities of today’s LMS and begins to take on the characteristics of a digital asset management system. How do we combine a learning asset management system and a learner-driven digital asset management system? How can learners catalog content quickly and efficiently? What is the value proposition by having such a system in place, and what is the cost of implementation?

Participants in this session will learn about creating digital assets from mobile devices, metadata, tagging, and asset search and retrieval for learning purposes. You’ll also discover the cost and benefit of having such a system. You’ll leave knowing in detail what is required for learner content creation and management.

In this session, you will learn:

• What a digital asset management (DAM) system is
• Why metadata is important
• How to empower employees to create learning content
• How to search and retrieve media assets for training
• How the combination of a DAM and LMS would work today

Audience:
Novice and intermediate professionals. Knowledge of LMS systems and how they function will be beneficial.

During down economies, training and technology investments are often the first budgets cut, especially in small to mid-sized organizations. How can learning professionals secure investment for LMS projects in this environment? Using the principles of Lean Sigma, Rho’s learning professionals were able to prove that investment in an LMS would reduce costs and increase training compliance over three years, thus securing funding.

Participants in this case-study session will examine the principles, obstacles, and process involved in securing investment for various technical projects. You’ll get examples and ideas for successfully getting your projects funded.

In this session, you will learn:

• How to analyze cost drivers using Lean Sigma tools
• How to communicate findings
• How to overcome resistance to your proposals
• How to continually evaluate results

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

This session is an interactive case study that highlights one organization’s successes and lessons learned when they decided to refresh their current LMS. It will address the issue of companies and organizations having limited budgets when it comes to overhauling an LMS. It will also focus on how simple it can be to utilize current assets and infrastructure when attempting to refresh your LMS.

This session will inspire and teach participants how to do more with less when trying to update their LMS systems and how to be creative when leveraging their existing infrastructure.

In this session, you will learn:

• How to utilize and leverage your current LMS for a fresh new design
• How to use creative graphics to increase the user-navigation experience
• How to work effectively through little or no budget
• How to effectively project-plan the launch of your new LMS

Audience:
Novice-to-advanced professionals.

It used to take the USDA 68 days from the time an author created a course to the time it was tested, fixed, re-tested, and ready for deployment across the LMS. This significant delay caused many courses to miss their effective training window or simply remain unpublished. This challenge became even greater throughout 2012 due to the proliferation of mobile devices across the agency. The overall “lead time” issue and need to support large-scale development and deployment of mobile learning needed remedying—and the USDA was able to reduce the time and cost associated with large-scale eLearning development on both fronts.

 In this session you will learn the Lean 6 Sigma project that the USDA underwent to identify their underlying process problem, what they did to fix the problem (both process and technology changes), and the statistical results of their efforts. Participants will discover, from a very large-scale organization, why these failures happen and what they can do about it through a statistically measured review, process adjustments, and correct application of technology.

 In this session, you will learn:

• How, by reviewing the process by which content is created, you will have an opportunity to reduce the cost and time required
• What a large-scale learning development process analysis looks like
• Where common bottlenecks in enterprise-level eLearning development can occur
• How the USDA used technology to augment the updated process, and how much time and money were saved
• How to produce mobile, Section 508, or ADA compliant, eLearning on a large scale

 Audience: Intermediate managers, directors, VPs, CLOs, and executives. Experience with implementing process change across an organization or department would be helpful, but is not required.

Learners often shift through multiple sites to learn what they need in order to do their job well. But the model of distributed resources and information doesn’t readily allow learners to take advantage of informal or formal learning, nor does it promote ease of collaboration with their peers around their newfound knowledge. LMS and CMS interfaces are not keeping pace with how learners navigate and stay engaged on consumer websites. This lack of “stickiness” means that we must drive learners to these training sites rather than them going willingly. To solve this problem, Parallels created an online knowledge management and community-learning portal where learners choose their learning track. It includes easy access to organized collateral material and resources, punchy eLearning modules that mimic YouTube videos, and Flash games that reinforce learning.

Participants in this session will learn some of the key ideas to creating an edutainment portal that is both effective and engaging. You’ll learn why edutainment, coupled with sound learning and design theory, works well and why stakeholders and learners like this model.

In this session, you will learn:

• How to borrow and repurpose elements from online destination portals
• How content management systems and learning management systems can work together to create an engaging portal
• Several options for developing online learning portals
• Why knowledge management and formal training should be married and accessible from one location

Audience:
Intermediate and advanced professionals who understand the fundamentals of LMSs and CMSs, have a basic knowledge of web development technologies and terminology, and are familiar with instructional design principles and applications such as Articulate and Captivate.