Converting Instructor-Led Training into eLearning

A few years ago there was a project to move thousands of hours of instructor-led training to online “eLearning” in a very short period of time. There was a huge business driver behind this. The company was facing a potential strike in six to nine months and they were preparing a contingency plan in case […]

Centralized or Decentralized Training: Which model is better?

“It takes too long.” This is the single most common complaint from stakeholders with regards to centralized learning organizations who create training content for different business functions. The traditional method of pairing a centralized team of instructional designers with distributed Subject Matter Experts (SME) no longer scales effectively to meet the ever-increasing speed of business (with rare exceptions). […]

Is Your Training Request and Development Process Inefficient?

If you really want to streamline the training development and instructional design process, a good place to start is with the initial training request. Training requests typically list information about the expected productivity improvements or performance goal for the training. Additional information usually includes the department, sponsor, audience, preferred method (Online, face to face, blended, […]

What approach do you apply for Instructional Design: Agile Vs. ADDIE

Many corporate training and development departments find it difficult to meet the increasing volume of training requests. There’s been a great debate for the last few years about whether or not the ADDIE model of instructional design is too slow for today’s speed of business. To refresh your memory, ADDIE stands for analysis, design, development, implementation, and […]

Five tips for crowdsourcing training content

Many corporate training and development departments find it difficult to meet the increasing volume of training requests. With already constrained training resources, innovative organizations are turning to “crowdsourcing and user-generated content” with subject matter experts in order to quickly produce content and meet the growing needs of the business. If this sounds familiar, here are five […]

Using A Learning Design System to Scale Corporate Training Development

While there are many challenges when trying to scale corporate training development, two of the most fundamental problems that must be solved for learning and development (L&D) departments are automating instructional design and streamlining collaboration with subject matter experts. As Josh Bersin stated, “we have entered a new era that is not only a shift […]

Microlearning is the focus this week!

In case you didn’t hear, an educational technology company recently registered the generic term “Microlearning” for a trademark. Industry experts were quite surprised by this announcement, as Cognota was too. There hasn’t been this much controversy about a generic phrase since Pat Riley trademarked Three-peat while coaching the Lakers! When people see the Cognota platform, […]

Instructional Design or no Instructional Design… that is the question!

There have been many articles written about the Death of Instructional Design. Whether you believe Instructional Design is a dying breed or one that is evolving into something new, the question is really “Is instructional design a skill or a job role?” What is clear is that the current model where all training requests are […]

10 Quick Tips For Building Online Training

What should you know before you build online training? In the past, most online training was created by either specialists (instructional designers) using “eLearning authoring tools” or by subject matter experts (SME) using PowerPoint slides (not really online “education”, but rather more like watching a presentation). While there are a lot of specialty eLearning authoring […]

Why You Should Use Employee-Generated Content for Training

As Facebook, Amazon, and Yelp have proven, user-generated content is much more respected by consumers than company promoted content. So, wouldn’t it make sense for training departments to complement the company’s offering with employee produced content? It’s not to say that employees can build all of the content needed for training. Clearly, there is compliance […]