Making Your LMS More Valuable For Your Employees

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If you’re anything like I am, you’ve tried to bring people to your LMS on several occasions, adding courses that your data suggests are needs for your organization. For all the promise that online learning holds – with its 24/7 access, no-need-to-travel-for-training – many organizations continue to struggle to bring their employees to their online learning platform.

Having worked with several organizations that have invested significantly in online learning, there seem to be three letters often missing from resources uploaded to an LMS.

Those three letters are: Continue reading →

The Rules of Writing Training

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I love math. The square root of 9 is always 3. Prime numbers are only divisible by 1 and themselves, and circumference is equal to 2π r. For similar reasons I love chemistry, music, and various other disciplines that have rules that are consistent and repeatable. Continue reading →

How can your storytelling be more effective?

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On Saturday, I attended a memorial service for my 101-year-old grandfather. The stories that my aunts and uncles and cousins shared were phenomenal. Storytelling is such a powerful means of communication, especially when you can picture what’s happening in the story.

But what happens when you aren’t quite as familiar with the subject matter or situation in the story?

In his book Brain Rules, John Medina writes: “Vision trumps all other senses… we learn and remember best through pictures, not through written or spoken words.” So how do we add the sense of sight to our storytelling?   Continue reading →

Integrity of Interactions

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It’s my favorite time of year! Let’s kick it off with another scary story.

You wake up confused. The sliver of twilight through the window indicates it could be early morning or late evening. How long have you been asleep? Continue reading →

If the words we use matter so much, perhaps we need to be bilingual.

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Is it a “learning experience” or a “training session”? Are they “goals” or “learning objectives”?

A few days ago, a non-L&D friend of mine was telling me about a company newsletter she had to release and an internal L&D person insisted that she use the term “learning” instead of “training”.

“What does the even mean? People understand ‘training’.”

She was right. This whole idea that we want learning to be a lifelong experience and that “training” represents an event, is a concept that gets a lot of mileage within L&D circles, but there are very few other people who actually care about this.  Continue reading →

Interactive Lectures using Google Docs

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Technology has come a long way since I was in college. When I attended class, I scribbled poorly written notes in my spiral notebook which I later compared with classmates in a study group while we crammed for tests. Study groups were vital for me to discover anything I missed and an opportunity to ask clarifying questions. It wasn’t that long ago, but times have changed. Continue reading →

Mixing Up Interactions

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My youngest is learning to read. She is in a stage that Montessori teachers call the sensitive period which involves concentration, a need for accomplishment, and tear-filled breakdowns – sometimes by both of us. When my oldest was learning to read, we ran through our nightly sight-word drills exactly as the syllabus outlined. It was the exact same routine every night, and now my oldest is an excellent independent reader at 7 years old. However, I have three more years of instructional design experience since teaching my oldest to read, and I realized there is something missing in the way I ran site word drills the first time. Continue reading →

5 Ideas to Get Participants Exploring Your Content Before You Begin Speaking

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Over the weekend I walked to the playground with my children and as they charged toward the play structures, I noticed that they suddenly stopped before they could reach the monkey bars and the slides. As I caught up with them, this is what I saw:

ASL

They had both found this board with instructions on how to sign each letter of the alphabet using American Sign Language, and they were trying to spell their names.

They had the entire playground to themselves and they stopped to interact with this board. It made me start to wonder: how can we capture our own learners’ curiosity in order to get them to want to interact with our content even before we begin our presentations?

Here are five ideas:  Continue reading →