by Marc Rosenberg
Imagine a world where the tools we use remove complexity rather than add to it, and are so intuitively easy to use that we can operate them—correctly—the first time, precisely when we need to use them, with minimal risk. The possibilities for this are here. Are you ready for them? Marc talks about performance support, training, and saving lives.
by Apostolos Koutropoulos, Rebecca Hogue
Massive online open courses (MOOCs) are attracting a great deal of attention, but they require effort on the part of participants who want to be successful in them. Here is a guide to success in a MOOC. You may find it useful for yourself if you try a MOOC out, or you may want to provide these guidelines to learners if you are using MOOCs as part of your organizational strategy for learning.
by Nic Laycock
The “back channel”—mainly a stream of participant comments on Twitter—has become a mainstay of conferences. The back channel adds value, extends the reach of conferences, builds personal networks, and supports curation—and that’s only the start! The back channel is global, as Nic Laycock reports this month.
by Bill Brandon
In thinking about the future, it often helps to hear the way that someone from outside the eLearning community sees the way ahead. At mLearnCon 2012, we asked angel investor Jason Calacanis some questions about the future of eLearning and recorded his answers in a short video. You’ll find his vision and insights extremely challenging!
by Jane Bozarth
There is no magic formula for assessing the value of social interactions; no formula like “two hours on LinkedIn + four comments in groups = tangible outcomes for the organization.” So how do you know time spent using social media isn’t wasted? Jane has some ideas you can use.
by Julie Dirksen
Do you learn more by interacting with a live person, or by interacting with a computer? Does the belief that you are interacting with another person (as opposed to a computer) affect learning? In this first installment of our new research review series, a study looks beyond the Turing Test. This article summarizes the findings and offers some implications for instructional design.
by Inge de Waard
As more and more training moves into the cloud, enabling mobile access is all the rave. But doing this for a free and open course makes the designer’s life that much more exciting. Make design and development easy for yourself—use what is already out there before starting to develop your own mobile solutions that enable access to your open, online, or cloud course. Here’s how!
by Mark Lassoff
Forms are a critical factor in user interaction design, yet they often fail to provide good data (or even to provide data at all). HTML5 offers new ways to deal with the problems of obtaining clean data. Here is an introduction to the new data types that you can put to work today.
by Bill Brandon
What we really should be concerned about in producing eLearning is “habit formation.” At mLearnCon 2012, Dr. B. J. Fogg challenged us to rethink what we are doing if we are not creating habits in users and learners. He showed how he is using mobile and social technology to create “tiny habits.” In this video interview, Dr. Fogg explains more about the technique.
by Reuben Tozman
When instructional designers plan to develop content for training or education, they typically consider many elements that can affect the learning outcome. However, it is rare to include what it takes to generate specific data that will help determine the business impact. Fortunately, data science can help identify the data to focus on, as you will see in this article.

