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Enhancing Your E-Learning Visual Design on a Budget

May 15, 2013

By Trina Rimmer

We’ve all been there. You’re pulling an eLearning course together with limited time and budget. You want the visual design to be clean, cohesive, and professional looking. Yet if you’re not a graphic designer with access to top tools and resources, it’s hard to justify the design time and expense for scouring image websites and agonizing over pixels when it’s really the content that everyone needs.

As most of us know, there’s abundant research pointing to the importance of strong visual design in communications – particularly those that are designed to instruct. So I doubt that most of our challenges with visual design can be chalked up to a lack of understanding or appreciation. More often it’s a lack of time, skill, and resources that gets in the way of our best intentions. [Read more...]

Leadership Essentials – The Extra Mile

April 29, 2013

“It’s never crowded along the extra mile.”

That quote on leadership comes from best-selling author and speaker Wayne Dyer. And if you stop to think about it, it’s probably pretty darn quiet along that extra mile. It’s often the distance where the qualities and actions of leaders are set apart from the rest of the pack.

Leadership development continues to be a hot topic across industries. In my experience the focus is typically on how to become an effective leader of others, which is extremely important. But when considering all the aspects of leadership, there’s more to it.

[Read more...]

Take Our Onboarding Trends Survey & Receive the Exclusive Report

April 23, 2013

Onboarding has become a strategic priority for a growing number of companies in 2013. Impact Instruction is seeing a number of factors driving companies to update their programs, including technology advances, and changes in the employment landscape. To delve deeper into current trends in onboarding programs and the role of L&D in those programs, we’re conducting a short survey (https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/onboardingtrends). If you’re familiar with your company’s onboarding strategies, your input is important to us!

This brief survey will take less than 3 minutes to complete.
https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/onboardingtrends

 

 

 

 

 

 

(Please forward this survey on to others in your network who are familiar with their company’s onboarding program and would like to learn more about the topic.)

By participating in our survey, you’ll receive an exclusive copy of the full report, with detailed results and actionable strategies. Your responses will be kept anonymous. The deadline for survey completion is Wednesday, May 1, 2013 at 5:00 pm EST.

Thank you for your participation!

The Impact Instruction Team

 

eLearning and Visual Design: An Interview with Kevin Thorn

April 16, 2013

By Trina Rimmer

What does this image communicate? An apple, an icon for the letter 'A', a symbol for New York City? When designing, ask, without text, does this image communicate the key message?

Have you ever longed to use more visuals and less text in your eLearning designs, but couldn’t quite articulate a good case for changing the text-heavy ways of your project SMEs and stakeholders? You’re not alone. If you’re like me, you may have little formal training in visual design and tend to “go with our gut”. And while designing visuals by instinct works in many cases, there are those times when the needs are complex, or when you really need to make a good case for slashing entire screens of text or depicting a multi-step process with one simple graphic. That’s where having a few words of wisdom from a visual design expert in your back pocket can come in handy!

I sat down with just such an expert. Kevin Thorn (better known throughout the Twitterverse as @LearnNuggets) is an illustrator, animator and fellow eLearning practitioner. From one practitioner to another, we discussed the important role of visual design in enhancing eLearning – and how to talk about visual design with clients. [Read more...]

Highlights and Trends from the ASTD State of the Industry Report

April 4, 2013


The ASTD State of the Industry report is an annual review of workplace learning and development trends.  It reviews how the profession performed as a whole, how companies are investing in T&D resources, as well as content and delivery trends.

This article highlights the major trends and investments from the current state of the industry and compares them with previous years.

Download the full article here

Your Path to the Inner Circles of Influence

April 3, 2013

If you spend enough time with me, you’ll hear a couple of my mantras when it comes to women emerging into higher levels of leadership.  First, each of us owns our leadership identity, and second, it’s our responsibility to take action to develop the skills and behaviors necessary to grow on our leadership journey.

Building strategic relationships is one of the best skills you can develop in creating your leadership identity.  And if part of your leadership journey is a C-level or board-level position within an organization, I would take that a step further into developing the skills required to access the inner circles of influence.

[Read more...]

The Learning and Development World of Tomorrow

March 22, 2013

By Joseph Suarez

It’s entertaining to see footage from an old World’s Fair. We can look back in hind sight at people’s expectations of the future and chuckle. It all seems like an episode of The Jetsons by today’s standards.

At the risk of someday sounding like an old World Fair film reel, lets peer into the learning and development world of tomorrow. Perhaps it looks something like this:

Learners engage in informal learning activities, all of which are captured:

  • Lisa reads a book.
  • Jeff interacts on a social network.
  • Alexis attends a conference.
  • Susan mentors Darius.
  • Madison views a video on workplace safety.
  • As their manager, Megan can view an analytic dashboard displaying real-time activity on all of the interesting learning activities her direct reports have done or are currently doing.

[Read more...]

Go Fast or Go Far? Building Strong Teams

March 21, 2013

This article is part of our women’s leadership series on the 8 skills you need to transform your leadership presence. Several concepts are adapted from See Jane Lead, by Lois Frankel, Ph.D.

By Amy Franko

I recently began a volunteer experience entirely out of my comfort zone, as an assistant coach to 20 third- and fourth- grade girls in an after school program called Girls on the Run.

Girls on the Run teaches life and leadership skills within the context of a running program.  At the end of 10 weeks, several hundred girls from programs all over the region celebrate their accomplishments by participating in a 5K.

As you can imagine there are all types of backgrounds, abilities, personalities, and emerging leadership styles.  We have outgoing and shy, talkative and quiet, those comfortable out front, and those who prefer the middle of the pack.

While running is sport that hones individual mental and physical skills, these girls are also experiencing what it means to be supportive and encouraging in an inclusive, collaborative environment.  They’re learning the power of success through teamwork.

Teamwork is important in every aspect of our lives. Behind nearly every success are both individual contributions and those of the greater team.  This article shares some specific actions you can take in building a high-performance team. [Read more...]

Trend-spotting: 3 Learning & Development Movements You Need to Watch

March 6, 2013

By Trina Rimmer

"With more access to social learning platforms from mobile devices, we may see the L&D trendulum swing back to center."

As most of you were busy putting away holiday decorations and making New Year’s resolutions, I was polishing up PowerPoint slides, booking hotels, and prepping for full-on L&D immersion. With nearly back-to-back conferences and professional development events scheduled for January and February, I went into 2013 armed with curiosity, caffeine, and a whole lot of Airborne!

If the downside of a packed schedule was the hectic pace, the up side was certainly all of the amazing conversations I’ve had with new and experienced learning practitioners. It’s always rejuvenating to talk with peers, but I had assumed that different events and venues would bring vastly different people and conversations. I’m surprised that most of my conversations were variations on the theme of creating more user-oriented learning experiences and less content-driven courses.

Here are some of the learning & development sub-themes I found to be particularly on-trend: [Read more...]

Learning and Big Data

February 20, 2013

By Joseph Suarez

Recently there’s been a lot of hype surrounding the concept known as “big data.” Gartner even ranked it on its 2012 Emerging Technologies Hype Cycle, creeping towards the “peak of inflated expectations.” Hype aside, big data is still becoming a big deal. So what exactly is it and why should the learning and development world be watching?

In general, big data refers to the recent increase in data from numerous sources that constantly generate various data types (text, files, videos, tweets, etc.). The end result is a quickly growing mountain of data on all kinds of different things such as social media interactions, patient monitoring, customer purchases, and much more. In other words, it’s a whole lot of data. Big data.

For example, look at Google Maps’ ability to display real time traffic conditions. Google pulls together data from different sources, many of which didn’t even exist a few years ago (like thousands of smart phones generating GPS locations), to calculate which roads are flowing normally and which are at a standstill.

Facebook’s billion plus users also quickly generate vast amounts of data. Every time we “like” something, add a comment, or upload a photo, we’re contributing to Facebook’s own big data. They in turn parse all that data in an attempt to serve us targeted ads.

While that’s great for tech giants like Google and Facebook, what does big data mean for the rest of us? What, if anything, can the learning and development world use big data for? [Read more...]

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