A new year presents new opportunities for modern learning advancements. Undoubtedly, exciting technologies will emerge, and practitioners will identify creative and innovative ways to engage learners while working to reach organizational goals.

What does the next year hold? We don’t have a learning & development crystal ball, but based on some trusted sources, a few predictions give us hope for a productive and successful year.

And it may surprise you to learn that none of them relate directly to technology!

Another year has come and gone. This time of year encourages reflection, both personal and professional, causing the InSync Team to ask questions such as:

• What did I learn this year?
• How did training evolve?
• Which developments resonated with modern learners?
• Where did learning provide innovative value to our companies?

For us, 2018 marked a widespread shift towards truly blended learning. Organizations, learners, and practitioners alike began to embrace the possibility of building skills outside of formal events. Complex, purposeful, and at times frustrating, the evolution to the new blended reality required us all to consider a handful of key elements: modern learners, engaging facilitation, comprehensive instructional design, and planning for the unexpected.

This week, most of us in the United States stop for a single day to eat turkey, watch a famous parade or a football game (or three), and give thanks for the things that make our lives great.

The general feeling of gratefulness got InSync Training’s team thinking: what do we love most about our learning experiences?

When asked, our team of training experts openly and graciously shared the things that bring them joy and gratitude in the modern classroom every day.

ATD Webcast Recap

With all of the options available to accommodate individual learning objectives, many practitioners assume, “Oh! I’m only creating microlearning. I don’t need ADDIE or SAM or any complicated framework.”

However, when thinking about flipping your classroom to a more modern program, our team offers one critical reminder: instructional design becomes more important than ever. Standalone courses do not exist anymore, and neither do standalone training resources. Everything connects to everything else, making thoughtful design a critical piece of your blended learning puzzle.

During her recent ATD Webcast Blended Learning: A Five-Dimensional Puzzle, Jennifer Hofmann shared the factors she considers when embarking on a new design project. Whether you design, facilitate, or manage training programs, these three elements provide a foundation for understanding modern blended learning.

Organizational boundaries keep growing and becoming more fluid, and as our learner base disperses around the globe, training programs have to adapt appropriately. That’s no small feat in the face of multi-cultural classrooms, emerging technologies, and stakeholder expectations of learning success.

Multi-method delivery, or the simultaneous support and instruction of non-co-located learners, provides a popular and effective solution in the modern workplace. Organizations managing remote and in-person learners have had success with this approach, as they’re able to balance the needs of both groups, while successfully engaging all participants.

Ready to incorporate multi-method delivery into your modern blended learning methodology? Make sure you implement the four factors required for success!

Picture this: you’re facilitating a live training session for your organization, and it comes time to ask for learner input. You open the floor for contributions with the common phrase, “A penny for your thoughts?”

And you get crickets. Your previously lively cohort goes silent. Some participants look utterly confused.

What happened? Your figure of speech may have confused your global learners.

Here's a radical idea: maybe we've been thinking too small when it comes to instructional design.

Relying on proven principles while purposefully expanding the scope of our vision can help us accomplish organizational goals and empower learners to better navigate their modern workplaces. We believe in a more thorough model so much that we practice and preach perpetual learning design.

Our new video explains the concept in under three minutes - click here to view. 

When designing and delivering content, we need to balance five elements of the learner experience: technology, design, people, place, and time.

In order to achieve this balance, we need to focus on the learner experience. We need to define and leverage how learning is structured, including when it is taking place, where it is taking place, and how it is being delivered.

Are your organization's programs ready for the future? Has the instructional design approach you use evolved to support and actively engage modern learners? What implementation process works best when introducing this innovative, flexible methodology? 

Ultimately, effective blends rely on addressing all moments of learning need and modeling the way work happens today. And while learning professionals and researchers alike have identified proven benefits, stakeholders correctly point out that risks logically follow widespread change.

I'm pleased to collaborate with eLearning Guild to answer these questions and address these realities in my new report, Blended Learning in Practice.

Do you remember the first time you experienced a non-traditional approach to learning? For most of us, we didn’t learn important life-lessons inside a classroom. For Jennifer Hofmann, classic Saturday morning programming introduced her to self-paced learning, and the rest, as they say, was history.

Jennifer recently shared the surprising connection she made between her love of popular Schoolhouse Rock episodes and modern blended learning in this short (but insightful) video: https://youtu.be/Hd-ITHrroXc