Are you born a leader, or is it possible to teach leadership? CarMax has built a program that says, “Yes, you can teach leadership.” The Summit Program gives CarMax the tools to take a high-potential manager and turn him or her into a high-potential leader.

Participants in this case-study session will examine the way CarMax researched and developed the content that is the core of the Summit Program. You’ll learn about the various research and data points used to determine the most important leadership traits that need to be taught and you will focus on how to teach, practice, and observe the execution of these high-level, esoteric leadership traits.

In this session, you will learn:

• How to teach leadership traits and behaviors
• How to assess the mastery of these leadership traits
• The advantages of a blended learning approach
• How to use community service to teach leadership

Audience:
Intermediate professionals who have some instructional design background and who are involved in associate development and leadership training.

An eLearning project is actually two projects: a software project combined with a performance enhancement (“training”) project. That means bigger scope, more stakeholders, bigger risk, longer duration, more budget pressures, and many more opportunities for communication to fail. eLearning projects consist of a whole bunch of different activities, considerations, resources, and people, and all of these cogs need careful alignment. This kind of project management may not be in our toolkit as a learning or education professional.

Participants in this session will examine the whole project process for creating a high-quality “e” program, and share some tips and tricks that will help keep things on track, including the six steps to effective project management for creating these programs. You’ll also explore your specific role as a project manager for “e” as well as the roles of the other team players within the development team. You’ll leave with the tools and checklists needed to manage “e” implementations within your organization.

In this session, you will learn:

• What your specific roles and responsibilities as project manager are
• Who is part of your team for implementation (even if you’re wearing most of the hats!) and how to manage them
• The six steps to effective project management for creating “e” programs
• Your areas of focus as the PM in each of the six steps

Audience:
Novice-to-advanced project managers, managers, directors, and VPs. Knowledge of learning technologies and general eLearning development would be helpful.

American author Bruce Barton once noted, “When you’re through changing, you’re through.” This is certainly true for eLearning strategy. Just when you think you’ve set your direction, things change. What strategic shifts in the eLearning field should we prepare for, even while we maintain our current efforts?

This session will review the major characteristics of a sound—and sustainable—eLearning strategy and then focus on the nine key changes we can expect over the next two to three years. Session participants will get suggestions for incorporating these new initiatives into your evolving strategy with the least amount of organizational pain.

In this session, you will learn:

• What is an eLearning strategy
• What makes a shift in how we approach eLearning "strategic" and not operational or tactical
• The nine key shifts we can expect in the eLearning field over the next two years
• How to transition to a new strategic direction without faltering on your current focus

Audience:
Senior eLearning managers and leaders, including CLOs, training managers, technology managers, instructional design leads, and business leaders, who are implementing eLearning in their organizations.

Project stakeholders and subject matter experts (SMEs) generally communicate in a language that’s very different from the language designers use. Concepts like storyboarding, interactivity, authoring tools, or terms like cognitive dissonance, may mean a lot to designers, but are usually over the heads of results-oriented contributors.

In this session, participants will explore practical communication strategies and language and get tips that can help bridge communication gaps between themselves and business leaders, SMEs, and other key contributors. By dropping design jargon, understanding how to pick your battles, and learning how to tailor communication to a group of non-designers, you’ll be able to conduct more effective project and needs analysis meetings, enhance the quality of communication and collaboration across teams, and pitch more effective learning solutions.

In this session, you will learn:

• How the same “design speak” that supports designer and developer collaboration can impede communications with non-designers
• Practical communication strategies for better project planning
• Pointers for conducting more meaningful, results-oriented needs analysis conversations with SMEs
• Tips for using online tools and resources to ease communications between you and your SMEs

Audience:
Novice and intermediate designers, developers, and project managers who have at least some prior instructional design or development experience in a corporate learning environment or as a freelance consultant working directly with key contributors and subject matter experts.

Organizations of all sizes face myriad challenges connecting workers who are increasingly out from behind their desks and on the move. This session will explore how businesses are leveraging the benefits of next-gen social, mobile, and cloud technologies to connect and inform their workers and drive both collaboration and engagement to accelerate overall performance. Highlights from a dozen different use cases demonstrate how mobile + learning + social + cloud can coalesce to deliver sophisticated, yet easy-to-use, solutions to remote workers wherever they may be.

Participants in this session will see solutions from leading organizations for typical remote-worker use cases spanning pure training, facilitator support, event augmentation, compliance and regulatory support, performance support, on-the-go performance appraisals, knowledge management, product launch, collaboration, sales enablement, and engagement and gamification. You’ll see live demonstrations of proven solutions from leading enterprise organizations that are providing improved levels of support and engagement for their remote staff working with the tools and devices every remote knowledge worker uses.

In this session, you will learn:

• How to measure the impact of remote workers on our training needs
• How leading organizations are using mobile devices, tablets, and laptops to extend line-of-business application access
• Which technologies are easy to implement to support remote workers (and which are challenging)
• How access to learning and performance support tools is integral to supporting remote teams

Audience:
Novice-to-advanced professionals.

Nestlé Purina PetCare created a top-manager think-tank to redesign their future by asking, “What could the business look like?” and “How could it expand into the next millennium?” Employees needed to learn how and when to question the processes, products, or people procedures that they were a part of, which led to a two-day training session that not only had to integrate into the current activities of the organization, but had to change mindset and behavior. Designing the right intervention in an already innovative and successful organization required partnering with an external learning provider to undertake this complex company-wide initiative, but partnering with an outside learning provider for a long time brings about its own challenges. Learn how partner successfully while still remaining partners.

In this case-study session, you’ll learn how Nestlé Purina PetCare partnered with Eagle’s Flight Creative Training Excellence to design, develop, and facilitate a company- and nation-wide training program for 7,000 employees in headquarters, field, and factory environments. You’ll learn the process for discovering the organizational learning barriers and enablers, and how to use this information to create a learning solution that fits your organization’s needs and addresses your corporate mandate. This program won the 2011 Stevie Award for Eagle’s Flight.

In this session, you will learn:

• How to understand and address your executives’ corporate mandate for learning needs
• How to identify the barriers and enablers to learning within your organization as they directly relate to the learning initiative
• How to address these barriers and enablers to overcome perceptions and create a successful learning solution
• How to effectively partner with a learning provider

Gone are the days when eLearning designers and developers were only responsible for envisioning and creating solutions. On the one hand, software has enabled SMEs to assume these roles to some degree in nearly every organization. On the other hand, expanding needs and shrinking workforces, budgets, and timelines have converged to force designers and developers to take on additional responsibilities far outside their expertise and comfort zones. Even the best designer or developer can be ill prepared to deal with issues that often arise as they try to keep projects and people moving toward a solution.

This session features tips and tactics for dealing with common issues encountered in situations where repeated failure can mean the difference between being viewed as a respected colleague or an expendable order-taker. Participants will explore several eLearning project experiences, both good and bad, and distill from them tips anyone can use to keep even the most difficult eLearning projects on track. In addition, you will have opportunities to share your own wisdom from similar situations.

In this session, you will learn:

• Tips for nipping potential solution disagreements in the bud
• How to make a collapsing deadline work for you
• Ways to make your project team mutiny proof
• Best practices to gain support for your design

Audience:
Novice-to-advanced designers, developers, managers, and directors. Some project experience is helpful, but not required.

It’s a daunting task to step into an unfamiliar subject area and write an eLearning course. You might have access to an SME, but one with limited availability. When you do get an SME’s time, you need to build credibility for your own skillset and maximize the information you get. Where do you start? What questions do you ask? Too many eLearning professionals fumble and stumble their way through SME interviews and don’t get the information they need before their time is up. An unstructured approach rarely works.

Participants in this session will learn about a proven methodology they can use before, during, and after SME interviews. Using this methodology, and the forms that come with it, helps ensure you get all the content you need in an efficient manner, avoids the need to go back to SMEs again and again, and earns you credibility and buy-in from your SMEs and their managers. This session provides a proven method for quickly getting a complete content set from an SME.

In this session, you will learn:

• The steps to take before you interview an SME
• How to use a template to conduct an efficient and successful SME interview
• A method for documenting and verifying the content you’ve obtained from SMEs
• Tips for building your credibility when working with SMEs

Audience:
Novice designers, developers, and managers. Participants should be familiar with a systematic design methodology, such as ADDIE, and have worked with a subject matter expert to develop an eLearning course.

Many practitioners think that learning “research” is pie-in-the-sky information that is of value for academics but of little value for practitioners. Good practitioner research is practical research that points practitioners and their managers towards better practice and helps them make the important decisions.

In this session, participants will have the chance to see data and charts and hear panel members’ main conclusions from Guild research. You will also learn how this information is valuable for your day-to-day practice. As panel members are genuine experts, participants will also be able to ask questions and engage in a dialog with them.

• Interesting data and charts you can use from Guild research reports
• The main conclusions from recent Guild research reports
• How Guild research helps you improve your practice and make better decisions
• What experts in the field are thinking and doing

Creative and talented eLearning people often aren’t comfortable with project management, setting expectations, and pushing back or saying “No” to clients. Having a consistent process for every new project helps you appear as the expert and helps your clients feel comfortable coming to you for project assistance.

Session participants will learn how to conduct the initial client meeting—for either internal or external clients—and return with a simple-to-use, sleek, and effective project initiation document (PID) that will act as a proposal, outline, and project plan all in one. The PID will be the initial high-level document to share with all stakeholders to obtain their approval and buy-in. You’ll learn how to become an effective champion of the PID, which serves as your proposal to your client, and is a template-like document in a simple table format you can complete during or after an initial client meeting.

In this session, you will learn:

• What a PID is, and how it works
• How a PID can save time and money on project re-dos and eliminate the fallout from unhappy clients and management
• How to effectively scope and launch a new project
• How to position yourself as an expert in your field
• How to manage client expectations (even unrealistic ones)
• How to gain buy-in from clients and stakeholders
• How to build an entire project management cycle around a PID

Audience:
Novice and intermediate professionals, especially those who work directly with internal or external clients and/or SMEs, and who want to learn more about setting expectations, managing their projects, and proposing learning solutions to meet needs.

What will the next-generation learning organization need? The keys to the learning organization of 2018 are its employees. What skill, attributes, and competencies they will need in order to solve the problems of the businesses the next learning organization will support?

In this session, participants will get an outline of current skills and competencies and then, working in groups, you’ll build out the elements you think the employee of 2018 will need. Afterward the groups will share their results to develop a complete picture.

In this session, you will learn:

• The desired technical skills of the 2018 learning professional
• Their desired interpersonal skills and attributes
• Their desired collaboration skills and attributes
• Their desired social intelligence skills and attributes

Audience:
Intermediate professionals involved in hiring and evaluating employees and/or developing training or courses that will develop learning professionals.

Are you overwhelmed by your to-do list and horrified by your in-box? Does your inbox have more than a dozen emails in it? Are you able to stay on top on the competing projects you are managing? Have you ever missed a milestone or a deadline? If you answered yes to any of the above, this session is for you.

Participants in this session will learn a tickler and functional folder system that assures consistent follow-up and prevents items from slipping through the cracks. The system uses Outlook and OneNote to organize the mechanics of managing those details and allows you to focus on your real work. You’ll be able to locate needed information in seconds versus hours; you won’t miss deadlines, and you will have a toolkit to successfully manage multiple and competing priorities.

In this session, you will learn:

• How to set up a tickler Outlook folder system
• How to set up an organized Outlook storage folder system
• How to use OneNote to track projects, people, and ideas
• How to use OneNote to manage work and personal projects and plans
• How to use Sticky Notes to ensure a brilliant idea is never lost

Audience:
Novice-to-advanced professionals with familiarity and access to Windows Outlook and OneNote.

In 2011, Darla Fisher attended her first Learning Solutions conference. She was recently hired to develop online curriculum for law enforcement officers; legislative action opened the door for online compliance training, so the Kansas Law Enforcement Training Center team had to quickly learn how to do curriculum development and create online training. The conference left Darla with many questions, but also a new network of professionals to call upon. She shares stories from her first year—the struggles, the challenges, and the celebrations. This session will focus on foundational issues of eLearning.

Participants in this case-study session will learn one team’s solutions to building an eLearning course, hear lessons learned, and discover practices that they can apply to online development projects. You’ll see the process of storyboarding and how spending more time at the beginning will save development time in the long run.  

In this session, you will learn:

• The importance of keeping the project simple and focused
• How storyboarding can be valuable for the team
• The basics of online curriculum development
• What we wish we knew before we started
• How to understand the jargon used in curriculum development (SME, ID, CD, LMS, etc.)
• How to find answers to questions like “What are the copyright laws of using videos?” and “Are the laws different in online training than they are in face-to-face training?”

Audience:
Novice designer and developers who are new to online curriculum development. No particular knowledge or skills are required.