Insights

The occasional insight into learning and development and whatever sparks our fancy.

Making Your PowerPoint Slides Effective

/ / 1 Comment

I’m not a very good graphic designer, but even I know that PowerPoint slides should look better than this:

Bad Example 1

and this:

Bad Example 2

Knowing the slides should be better than these, and actually being able to put together better slides are two different things.

Over the past year, I’ve written a handful of posts about how to design more effective slide decks, and today I’m putting them all in one place. I invite you to bookmark this page so that you can come back to it each time you’re looking to put together a more effective slide deck of your own. Continue reading →

After certificates have been handed out, how does training continue to live?

/ / 4 Comments

I’m currently working with a client who needs to deliver the same online training program to two different audiences. The first audience is located in their US-based headquarters, the second audience is located in regional offices around the world.

The headquarters has a thriving community of practice for training alumni that meets regularly, in-person. Furthermore, the headquarters has a critical mass of people in this role who can see each other in the break room, daily meetings, the hallway or walking by one another’s desks for informal conversations about challenges and key learnings.

People in regional offices are a little more isolated when it comes to ongoing opportunities for informal learning that can reinforce the initial training. So what are regional and remote staff to do?

Online Communities of Practice

Technology offers a lot of opportunities to shrink the distance between people and allow for greater communication, yet the ability to seed an active online community of practice remains elusive to many organizations. Continue reading →

When a training program is as stuffed as a guest at grandma’s house on Thanksgiving

/ / 2 Comments

Many of us in the United States celebrated Thanksgiving last Thursday. A time for family to gather, give thanks, and eat. A lot.

The American Council on Fitness estimates that the average American takes in 3,000 calories on Thanksgiving… and 229 grams of fat!

Is it possible that there’s a training program or two that we’ve developed that can be equally bloated and gluttonous? Sitting on the couch after Thanksgiving dinner last Thursday, I started wondering this very thought (because I’m apparently always thinking of training). Continue reading →

13 (+1) reasons why this L&D professional is thankful this year

/ / 9 Comments

The holiday season for those of us in the United States is upon us. On Thursday we shall celebrate Thanksgiving, soon many of us will celebrate Christmas and then make a resolution as we head into the new year.

Last year, each member of the Endurance Learning team made a one-word resolution – a commitment to one word that would serve as a guiding principle throughout the year. My word was “joy”. Part of joy is having the opportunity to look around and be thankful.

Here are some things that I’m thankful for over the past year: Continue reading →

When PowerPoint and Adult Learning Collide

/ / Leave a comment

Recently I’ve facilitated several sessions on more effective ways to use PowerPoint in a training setting. The simple truth is that your PowerPoint slides, like any other element of your presentation design, should align with the fundamental principles of adult learning theory.

Adult learners like to have some sort of control over what they’re being asked to learn. So how can PowerPoint possibly support this principle?   Continue reading →

13 Scary Moments in L&D

/ / 6 Comments

Happy Halloween everyone! Learning and development can throw some scary things your way. I recruited the help of a few L&D professionals to come up with a list of 13 scary things you can face as a trainer. Continue reading →

C4LPT’s Top 200 Tools for Learning (2018 Edition)

/ / Leave a comment

I don’t know where my mind has been recently, but I seem to have missed two very important release dates: Daredevil Season 3 was apparently released by Netflix a week or two ago. Perhaps more relevant to this blog, Jane Hart’s annual list of the Top 200 Tools for Learning was released in late September. You can find the list with brief descriptions of each tool here.

I get excited to review this list each year for two reasons: 1) I’m curious how the tools I use rank in popularity across the L&D community (the list was compiled after 2,951 votes were cast from 52 different countries), and 2) I love scanning the list to see if there might be some digital tools I could add to my craft in the coming year.

This year, one thing that jumped out at me was the number of “Audience Response Tools” that are available.  Continue reading →

Making Your LMS More Valuable For Your Employees

/ / Leave a comment

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 →

How can your storytelling be more effective?

/ / Leave a comment

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 →