One of the most common questions my team and I receive about virtual learning events boils down to technology: how do you make sure glitches don’t cause learners to disconnect?

I love this question! It means that stakeholders, designers, and facilitators care about the experience learners have in a session. Plus, it also speaks to program success – people who want to prevent technology from derailing training from achieving the bigger goal of improving performance and developing participants’ skills.

A recent article by Harvard Business Review explored How Wearable AI Will Amplify Human Intelligence.

Author Lauren Golembiewski explains

“Intelligence amplification is the use of technology to augment human intelligence. And a paradigm shift is on the horizon, where new devices will offer less intrusive, more intuitive ways to amplify our intelligence.”

Have you heard?

Our workplaces face radical, exciting, and innovative change with the emergence of powerful and game-changing technologies. But as Jennifer Hofmann recently highlighted, the purchase of new tools does not sufficiently prepare our organizations to integrate them in day-to-day work.

Adoption requires effort – a purposeful plan, a visionary team, and a strategic goal. Most importantly, stakeholders must consider the employees impacted by the technology change. How will their professional lives change? How arduous will the transition to the new technology be?

This month, guest contributor Jenny Holt explores the helpfulness of technology in supporting both virtual learners and virtual teams.

Studies show that conversation between colleagues boosts performance by 20%, but this can be challenging to make the most of when remote teams are increasingly split across the globe.

Training is an area of business where communication is absolutely key - the prevalence of remote and virtual teams places even more responsibility on the virtual trainer to bring teams together regularly and enable meaningful interaction between members. There are various aspects of technology that can be used effectively to make the training experience more streamlined, while also boosting overall team performance in the process.

Virtually There Session Recap

When thinking about designing or facilitating live online learning, what scares you the most? For many, the technology feels like an intimidating part of the equation.

• What if learners can’t navigate the environment?
• What if we lose audio in the middle of the Subject Matter Expert presenting key information?
• What if the slide deck fails to load within the platform?

In the spirit of sharing tips and tricks for working with video and audio, we reached back into a featured series of InSync blog posts on technology tools for modern blended learning.

From the series Sorting through the Technology Toolbox, here are some of my favorite tips and tools for you to explore so you can be on your way to creating interactive eLearning, audio, video, and screencasting learning assets.

With modern blended learning, we strive to build skills beyond the classroom, and support learners in how they work and live. Guest blogger Jenny Holt explores an exciting aspect of the digital age. It's a helpful starting point for learning and development professionals asking, "How can we increase the impact of EdTech?"

Virtual spaces and video games are more than just a fun way to spend the evening after work or school. In recent years, researchers have been looking into virtual reality as a way for people to cope with a number of problems, both mental and physical, including:

• Overcoming eating disorders, including anorexia, bulimia, and obesity
• Fixing stuttering and speech problems
• Getting over phobias and irrational fears
• Stopping substance abuse
• Controlling negative behaviors associated with autism
• Sensory stimulation and pain relief

T

he future has arrived! Instructional designers and facilitators now have access to Jetsons-like immersive technology as part of their training toolkits. How do we engage learners with these new tools? This blog post provides a helpful introduction to EdTech. For more expert guidance, attend Bobby Carlton's upcoming guest BYTE session to learn more about "Engagement through Immersive Technology." 

Humans, and even animals for that matter, have been using the concept of technology to resolve issues from the very beginning of time.  We are presented with a problem, we hypothesize/explore/test/attempt/fail/repeat - until we come up with an idea for a solution, and then we assess the data from our trial and error process to improve that solution. Over time we then continue to build on the successes and failures of the process, to continually improve the solution. 

In today's modern world, the definition of technology brings thoughts of computers, mobile devices, and robotics.  It’s true that technology can be that, but it’s much more.  The term has a wide definition that will vary from person to person, because it can be a physical product, but it can also be a process, and it always starts from an idea or a problem that needs a solution. Technology is an idea, an approach, and a strategy to resolve a problem.

The last (but not least) compartment in our EdTech toolbox is curation tools. We use these tools and apps to explore the web to find resources related to specific topics that we can save, reference or share out through other channels. In any modern blended learning program, a curation strategy can improve the outcomes for your learners.  

According to Anders Pink, curation for learning means:

• Finding the best content from multiple sources, usually external content.
• Filtering it so only the most relevant content makes it through.
• Sharing it with the right internal audiences, at the right time, in the right places.
• Adding value to that content with commentary, context or organization.

Can we possibly know what the future holds? I don’t think we can, but we can certainly look to the horizon and consider what may be coming. We can use data, history, and recent trends to guide our forecasts. I am not a futurist, but I do see three distinct visions for the future of EdTech swirling around in the haze out there.

The Connected Future

The Internet of Things (IoT) is real. Our homes talk to our phones, and our watches talk to our refrigerators. Our objects (wearable and embedded) are talking to each other – collecting and exchanging data. Machines connected to machines, constantly passing information back and forth. The Gartner Group published a study back in 2015 which estimated that 20 billion devices would be connected to the Internet of Things by 2020. Will we lose our human touch here? I don’t think so.