Let us count the ways!

Valentine’s Day encourages us to fill our hearts with love and our bellies with chocolates. Not a team to ignore tradition, InSync, hit by cupid’s arrow, considered all the reasons we adore the modern blended classroom.

Whether a learner or learning industry leader, a facilitator or designer, manager or new practitioner, we can all find something that gives us training butterflies.

Behavior change is the holy grail of training. Learning and Development practitioners strive to impact business outcomes by improving the skills of our audience. Performance improvement grows out of learners truly understanding content and successfully applying it back on the job.

To achieve this goal, expert Oded Ilan believes, “we need a paradigm shift in the way that we perceive teaching and supporting people.” And that paradigm shift starts with our understanding of how our brains function in the modern workplace environment.

Global organizations are the norm now. The boundaries constraining corporate success and competition no longer fall along state, national, or continental borders. Growth, as demonstrated by companies like Amazon, Apple, and more, has no limit.

Education serves as the true competitive differentiator. Can your learning function adapt to more diverse and international workforces faster than the competition? For this reason, Diversity & Inclusion, also known as D&I, has quickly become a priority for just about every organization.

Virtually There Session recap

Have you heard? Modern learners love games. In fact, with the right design, these games have the power to increase learner engagement and boost retention.

Our organizations and stakeholders, though, often struggle to understand the value of games. “Having fun doesn’t equal skill building,” is a common refrain. How do we prove them wrong if they won’t buy in?

Take the first step by walking them through “Serious Games 101.” Andrew Hughes, President of Designing Digitally, graciously shared his serious game secrets with our Virtually There learners. This blog details the basics of serious games and game-based learning, allowing you to apply his model to your own corporate L&D.

We’ve been using virtual classroom technologies for close to 20 years now. Unfortunately, we are still holding on to a content model that insists the most important outcome is getting through all of the slides.

This webinar approach to content delivery is perhaps the most ineffective way to get information out to the world. Few of us have the motivation or concentration to focus on 60 minutes of lecture.

And, most importantly, we know that learning only "sticks" after learners have a chance to apply what they’ve learned and then reflect on the experience.

Metrics! Learning ecosystems! Informal learning! Oh my. It seems that the modern learning landscape gets more complicated by the day.

In fact, to keep up with the break-neck pace of change happening in our world, learning faces a unique challenge: practitioners need to operate and succeed in three places at one time. Our strategies, visions, and methods all need to simultaneously consider the past, present, and future.

All instructional designers have a toolkit: a set of processes, applications, and approaches they use to create modern learning programs. High-tech, low-tech, paid, or free, they rely on a myriad of sources to design training that sticks.

While toolkits may vary, many instructional designers face a common obstacle: communication. How do we make sure that our stakeholders and teams understand the design vision, execution plan, and associated benefits? More often than not, designers spend a majority of their time in meetings, talking about the nitty gritty details and the high-level overview of programs. Every element discussed and revisited. Designers, by default, can’t extract themselves from their work.

Virtually There Session Recap

The last ten years brought us a digital revolution. New technologies and applications changed the way we live our lives. More interestingly, perhaps, is the impact this decade has had on how we behave. As consumers, we are radically different than previous generations. We want effective solutions to our problems immediately, and thanks to platforms like Amazon, that’s not an unreasonable request.

Did you know that this consumerism has spilled into how we learn? In fact, as guest Virtually There speaker Treion Muller recently pointed out, seven consumer realities specifically impact learning and development, creating challenges for L&D professionals in this space.

What pain points are we experiencing? Treion posed this exact question to his learners and shared his expertise for overcoming them. Two questions in particular caught my attention, and Treion’s answers may help you improve the functionality of learning within your organization.

We’ve been hearing a lot lately about the modern classroom. What makes it different? How is it the same?

There’s also been discussion about the fact that the way people learn in this modern classroom has not actually changed at all. Learners still need relevant, timely, and well-designed content. The foundational concepts behind adult learning principles still apply.

I happen to agree with that. There’s a reason everything old is new again. What we used to call performance support, many now call microlearning. Reusable learning objects are also now microlearning. What we used to call “chunking” is now spaced learning. Case studies and role-plays now fall under the umbrella of simulations.

Research and experience have taught us a lot about how people learn, and what strategies in instructional techniques best enable that learning.

In early 1999, Sugata Mitra and some colleagues sunk a computer into the opening of a wall in New Delhi, India. In the nearby slum poor people were desperately struggling to survive. The screen was visible from the street, and the PC was available to anyone who passed by. The computer had internet access and a number of programs available, but no instructions were given for its use.

What followed was astonishing: children from the slum were glued to the computer. They couldn't get enough – they explored and learned.