The white paper focused on 7 trends we expect to see grow in 2013 and beyond. We’re halfway through the year now, so it’s time to check in with these trends and see how the industry has progressed over the last several months. Based on what we’ve seen through industry conferences (ASTD ICE 2013, Training 2013 anyone?), recent client work and the latest eLearning Guild research reports, Learning Trends, Technologies and Opportunities remains on track with most of its predictions. You can download the white paper here.

Click the image to download the white paper!

Revisiting Sharon’s 2013 Learning Trends

1. Less desktop and more mobile…but not that fast. Clients still want desktop eLearning, but they want it to work on a tablet, too. We’ve been asked to use rapid authoring tools to design iPad friendly courses, for example. Most people who demo Knowledge Guru are quick to make sure it is HTML… and not Flash. Even if companies are not deploying mobile learning solutions now, they hope to be doing so in the next 2 or 3 years. Read more.

2. Fewer full-sized courses. More learning snacks, ePubs, videos, and reference tools. Almost every eLearning project has a performance support component now. For example, one of our largest active projects includes a flashcard app and other mobile performance support component to help sales reps practice what they’ve learned. Learning and development is more aware of the forgetting curve than ever before… and people are motivated to make sure learners do not forget what they’ve learned so quickly. Read more.

3. Less focus on the LMS; More focus on Tin Can API. The survey results in the recent eLearning Guild research report, Evaluating and Selecting a Learning Management System, are telling. While SCORM is still the most important standard for practicioners, over 68% of respondents rated Tin Can API (now called Experience API) as either “Extremely Important” or “Very Important” as an LMS feature. Another 22% rated Experience API “Somewhat important,” meaning 90%of respondents are considering Experience API when selecting an LMS. Experience API just reached version 1.0 in 2013, so most LMS’s are not yet compatible. But with 90% of LMS customers considering Experience API as an important feature, we expect to see a huge spike Experience API-compatible LMS’s as the year progresses. Read more.

4. Less Tell; More Games and Gamification. According to a recent report by global research company Markets and Markets, gamification is a $421 million dollar market today… and it will grow $5.5 billion by 2018. Those of us in the L&D field have been reading bold gamification predictions like this all the time, but how is it translating to true gamification adoption? We have fielded more requests from clients for “gamified eLearning courses” than ever before. Even when traditional eLearning is still the primary delivery method, clients are turning to gamification to make it memorable. The high level of interested we received in the Knowledge Guru Game Creation Wizard at ASTD ICE is also telling. Read more.

5. Less PPT-only; More Cool Interactive Tools within Lectures. We use our weekly #TalkTech chat on Twitter to unearth new trends and tools. One gem we discovered and discussed was Nearpod, a fantastic iPad app for instructor-led courses. Nearpod enhances the classroom experience by allowing the instructor to guide a lesson on the participant’s iPads. Nearpod has primarily been marketed to the K-12 sector, but we have hosted Nearpod training sessions for our corporate clients in 2013. The demand for interactive tools like these continues to grow. Read more.

6. Less Formal Training; More Informal Social Learning. “Social learning” is tough. Of all the trends we predicted in 2013, informal/social learning as a true company initiative is growing the slowest. Interest in fostering informal learning is still strong… but most L&D professionals are still looking to gather more information on how to leverage these tools in a “controlled” way. For more information on how to integrate better social learning into an organization, consider attending the eLearning Guild’s online forum, Collaborative and Social Learning: Best Practices for Learning With Others. Sharon and I will present a session on our #TalkTech social learning chat as part of the virtual event. Read more.

7. Less Trainers; More Community Managers and Curators. Managing a community of learners is still foreign to many trainers. Transitioning from delivering eLearning to creating a portal of resources (which may include eLearning) where learners can take what they need can be difficult. It’s happening, sure… but not in a way that is radically reshaping our work environments. Read more.

ROI has been a buzzword since the 90s. People talk about it all the time… and measuring ROI is cited as a goal for many initiatives across an organization. We’ve been designing learning solutions since 1995, and while we think ROI is really important, we can count the projects on one hand where people actually calculate ROI. Why isn’t it happening?

The answer depends on the organization. Here are a few possibilities to consider. Do any of these sound familiar in your organization?

The C-Level cares about ROI… but frontline employees are not as concerned

Company leadership often takes complete ownership of the strategic plan. They set the revenue goals and allocate budgets for each department. The bottom line is, for them, the most important thing. When frontline employees get too disconnected from the company’s strategic goals, ROI will be the last thing on their minds. For example, an L&D department that is allocated a certain budget may only be concerned with spending the entire budget (so they will get the same amount the following year) and showing that everyone completed training. If they have not bought in to the strategic goals of the organization, they will only be focused on convincing leadership that their job is valuable.

ROI is long-term, but we must respond to short term needs in the moment

Some of us are too busy putting out fires to look up at the horizon. We are meeting the needs of today without anticipating the needs of tomorrow and evaluating our past actions. At least, that’s what happens when we don’t think about our organizational investments. It’s not just training, either. In fact, overly worrying about ROI can also be detrimental if it keeps us from taking even the smallest actions. Analysis paralysis is a risk, just as failing to consider ROI is a risk. Since we often need to take an action and move forward quickly in the midst of daily tasks, ROI can get pushed aside entirely.

We lack the necessary tools to accurately calculate ROI

Learning and Development does not get too deep in the analytics department. Most LMS’s are just used as glorified “completion tracking engines.” We want to know whether or not someone took a course or not so we can tell our boss that everyone completed the training. What we don’t also see is how each learner performed on the learning objectives, or how job-related performance indicators changed after completion of the training. Some LMS’s are more full-featured than others, of course. In many cases, it’s just a matter of the L&D department making full use of the tracking capabilities available to them.

Formal training makes up a small part of the learning picture, so it’s hard to track its impact

Sharon Boller’s 2013 Learning Trends, Technologies and Opportunities white paper points out that the average learner spends only 31 hours in formal training during a typical year. Meanwhile, their working life has at least 2049 more hours of activity… and most of the real learning happens on the job. Since formal training is a relatively minor part of our working lives, it sometimes plays a small part in our overall success on the job. It might help us get started, but its impact decreases over time. We need a way to track more of the learning experiences that happen in the flow of work and think of this informal learning as an important part of professional development. Tin Can API (also called Experience API) makes this infinitely easier to do.

We haven’t had to calculate it before… so we don’t now

Many companies have delivered the same type of training for years. It’s already a line item on the annual budget and no one questions it because they don’t remember not doing the training. Instead of re-evaluating the results of the training on a regular basis, it becomes embedded in the company culture and allowed to continue indefinitely. This is why bringing in a third party can be helpful.

We’re shaking things up in 2013 here at #TalkTech! Every couple of weeks, a guest curator will be picking our topics and leading the discussion. Not much will change format-wise… we’ll still publish the weekly post here and the topics will still be tweeted by @BLPIndy, but a guest curator (besides yours truly) will pick the topics and be ready to lead the conversation during the chat. If you are interested in being a guest curator for TalkTech, let me know!

Apple's iOS7 breaks away from skeuomorphic design.

How do you view the “problematic” divide between quantitative and qualitative learning?

In this article, the author makes some great points about the potential of games to really break us out of some of our more limiting educational constructs. He is particularly concerned with the “hold” that binary has on humanity, which stems from our embracing of the computer metaphor. At one point he mentions that he is enamored with the game “because it helps to close the increasingly problematic divide between quantitative and qualitative learning.” Do you feel there is such a divide? How have you experienced this divide? Can games really help bridge the gap between qualitative and quantitative learning?

How Game Based Learning Can Save the Humanities

How can we better influence what happens before and after a training program?

This article makes an awesome point: “What happens before and after a training session, he says, is just as important as the actual instruction itself.” According to some research, “with little practical follow-up or meaningful assessments, some 90% of new skills are lost within a year.” With training being such a crucial part of success, why don’t more companies offer practical follow-ups or meaningful assessments? How can the Instructional Design community better influence this?

So Much Training, So Little to Show for It

Is skeuomorphic design a bad thing?

Everyone is buzzing about the new Apple iOS 7 reveal, and one of the biggest changes is that they’re starting to ditch skeuomorphic design. “Loosely speaking, skeuomorphism means “making stuff look as if it is made of something else”. In this context, it is the logic that dictates that Apple’s iBooks app resembles a cheap pine bookshelf, for example, and its Notes app resembles a yellow legal pad with lines and a margin – of the type last seen in about 1978.” Currently, it’s become the popular thing to hate with designers and developers. But is it such a bad thing? Surely you can see how useful the practice was in the early days of computing. What are your opinions on ditching this type of design?

Why Apple ditched its skeuomorphic design for iOS7

I want to tell you a story.

Your sales reps are supposed to upload sent proposals to a shared server for future reference or reuse by other team members. One problem: the company firewall restricts access to the portal when reps are not on the company internet network. When they are able to get connected, the portal is painfully slow. IT knows about the issue but has not fixed it. Since the sales reps are busy, they have learned NOT to upload completed proposals to the portal and instead email each-other asking past proposals when they need them. As a result, work gets duplicated and the reps spend lots of unneeded hours working around an inefficient process.

When the VP of Sales notices that a large number of proposals are not ending up in the portal, he pushes for a series of six 20 minute eLearning courses on “Sales Process Awareness.” The company pays an eLearning provider $30,000 to create the courses and organizes an all-day instructor-led training session for sales reps on best practices.

The sales reps take the courses and attend the training… then go back to their regular jobs. Their day-to-day work does not change. In fact, they are even MORE busy playing catch-up from all that time they were taken away from their jobs to complete training. The portal still does not work correctly and proposals are still not getting saved. The problem continues.

That’s right, folks… sometimes training is not the answer. Improving performance is as much about process as it is awareness.

Analyze Until You Find a Root Cause… then take action

While the story above is fictional, I think it is a great example of a situation where training and eLearning is used as the solution to a problem that is much more about process. When we skip past the “A” in ADDIE, forgetting to conduct a thorough and thoughtful analysis, we risk embarking on a fool’s errand with little hope of success.

Training can help accomplish many things…

• Help new hires learn the basics.
• Introduce a new process or procedure.
• Provide opportunities for practice and reinforcement.
• Teach people background information and foundational knowledge.
• Give people a “so what?” or “what’s in it for me?” that motivates them to perform better.

The Role of eLearning Providers

Get a Quick Start Guide for Game Based Learning Design

You’re not going to get from “zero to game designer” in a day. You’re also not going to convince your organization to abandon old mindsets and give a gamified approach a shot in a single meeting. Getting buy-in and understanding the value of a new approach can be tough… and you are going to need all of the information you can get in order to make your case.

This February, we started hosting a free webinar series to teach folks how the “fun” in games maps to learning outcomes. Since then, we have helped hundreds of people get started with game based learning. We have two more sessions planned for the summer, as well as an all-day workshop opportunity at the end of August. Register for one of our upcoming sessions below.

We like to think we’ve learned a thing or two about games over the last several years. Through regular play sessions, creating a board game to spark social change, designing custom learning games for corporate clients and launching our Knowledge Guru® game engine, we are immersed in all things game-related and loving every minute of it. Sharon Boller, president of BLP, is especially passionate about games. Recently, she has partnered with Dr. Karl Kapp to deliver a series of hands-on learning game design workshops. Karl’s work in this field is unmatched… and their partnership is deepening our understanding of what’s possible with game based learning.

That’s all well and good… but what’s in it for you? I’m glad I asked… because Sharon has developed an easy-to-follow road map for getting started with game based learning. We call it our Quick Start Guide for Game Based Learning. Sharon covers this, and more, in our Primer On Play webinar series. Register Now.

1. Play Games; evaluate what you are playing: You read lots of books before you write one. You listen to plenty of music before you compose a symphony. Guess what? The same is true for games! You have to spend time playing (and having fun) with various game mechanics to figure out how you can use them in a learning context.
2. Get familiar with game elements and how to use them: Sharon explores 9 of the most common game types in A Primer On Play… as well as the game mechanics you will encounter most often. You’ll need an effortless understanding of these mechanics in order to incorporate them into your learning games.
3. Think about the learning – and then the game: A Primer On Play identifies the four essential elements needed for people to learn… then shows what game mechanics map to those learning elements. No use using game elements that don’t support the learning.
4. Dump ADDIE and go Agile Instead: A formalized approach to ADDIE is just too rigid. More on the Agile approach to learning design in BLPer Jake Huhn’s recent blog post.
5. Playtest. Playtest. Did I say playtest? You’ll need to playtest learning games and iterate much more than you usually do for an eLearning close. This is why an agile approach is so critical.

Learn about Knowledge Guru

We recently unveiled our Knowledge Guru Game Creation Wizard, which allows users to create their own learning games quickly. We will use the game’s mechanics and design as a case study of how game based learning and gamification work. We will show how every game mechanic is carefully tied to a learning goal, which makes the game effective at helping learners retain fact-based information.

You’ll learn about the product… and how we used game elements to drive specific learning goals. We also use it as a case study for business results you can expect to see from a game-based learning initiative.

Read the full webinar description and register here.

Play to Learn: Designing Effective Learning Games

A Primer On Play will give you a nice overview of game based learning… but there’s no substitute for hands-on practice with experienced instructors. If you are ready to take the next step, consider registering for our learning game design workshop hosted by Sharon Boller and Karl Kapp. It will be held on August 28th in Indianapolis.

Read the full event description and register here.

We’re shaking things up in 2013 here at #TalkTech! Every couple of weeks, a guest curator will be picking our topics and leading the discussion. Not much will change format-wise… we’ll still publish the weekly post here and the topics will still be tweeted by @BLPIndy, but a guest curator (besides yours truly) will pick the topics and be ready to lead the conversation during the chat. This week’s curator is Kendell Lett, Senior Multimedia Developer at BLP. If you are interested in being a guest curator for TalkTech, let me know!

As technology and our bodies start to merge, things can get a little creepy. Hello singularity?

How would you feel about ‘Biostamps’?

Tired of punching in your passcode every time you want to check your email or send a text message on your phone? According to a recent article, “authentication takes approximately 2.3 seconds each time for existing users, some of whom log in to their phones a 100 times a day.” Motorolla may have a solution, but it runs the risk of “creeping out” a fair number of the general population. How would you feel about swallowing your identity in the form of a pill, powered by your stomach acid? How about “tattooing” it to your arm?

Google: Motorola’s tattoos could replace passwords

How can we apply ‘appisodes’ to our elearning?

I can’t count how many times I’ve handed my iPhone to my 3-year-old to occupy him for just a few minutes while I raced to complete my grocery list, waited at the doctor’s office, or fought through a whiney car ride. To many parents’ delight, mobile learning has become an exciting and engaging “treat” for children on the go. They look forward to playing games on Mom’s phone or going though an interactive storybook on Dad’s iPad without even realizing that they’re learning. Now, a new form of childrens’ mobile learning is racking up stars in the app store, and bringing with it a new term – appisode. Kids all over are becoming immersed in these new interactive cartoons. Is there something that we in the training industry can steal from this? Would something similar be as engaging for adults, too?

New ‘Appisodes’ make cartoons interactive

Why can’t learning be all fun and games for adults, too?

They say that kids are sponges – their little minds absorbing everything, even the things we’d rather they overlook. But why? Could it possibly be that the way in which we “teach” kids is naturally more appealing? If you want you your 2-year-old to remember to put his toys away every day, how might you teach him? Perhaps shout at him every day for the next 6 weeks (or 16 years), only to find his room still cluttered with toys when he leaves for college. Or… every day for one week, you play a game with him, seeing who can find the hidden toys, or put them away the quickest while singing a silly song. We naturally try to make learning fun for children, but what about us grownups? How can we take the research proving that games really do teach and transfer that to the world of adult learning?

Playing to learn: Panelists at Stanford discussion say using games as an educational tool provides opportunities for deeper learning

If you’re new to Twitter chats, don’t forget about awesome tools such as Tweetchat.com that automatically save the hashtag and help you focus on the conversation!

In a recent post, we talked about compliance training… and the importance of making it memorable. We showed case studies of various approaches to compliance training for topics like avoiding bloodborne pathogens, evacuating a building and washing hands properly. The facts involved in these procedures could be communicated in a bulleted list, yes… but would people actually remember them? And most importantly, will people ultimately choose to comply?

Frontline employees make decisions every day (or perhaps multiple times a day) about whether or not they will comply or not comply with a procedure. Other times, they may forget about the procedure even though they were trained to do it. Since people will forget up to 90% of what they learn after 3-6 days without proper repetition (more on that here), memorable training with proper reinforcement is essential.

Affordable Care Act Challenges and Opportunities

Regulatory compliance recently got even more important for healthcare providers. The Affordable Care Act is reshaping our healthcare system… and recent changes to the way hospitals receive their funding make procedural excellence even more important. In April 2011, the Center for Medicare and  Medicaid Services (CMS) introduced Partnership for Patients. The initiative set a goal of reducing preventable injuries in hospitals by 40% and readmissions by 20% from 2010 – 2013. Reaching this goal would help avoid 1.8 million injuries, save 60,000 lives, and save 1.6 million patients from complications that force them to return to the hospitals.

The Partnership for Patients has identified ten core patient safety areas of focus that include nine hospital-acquired conditions. The Partnership does not limit its work to these areas, but the following areas of focus are important places to begin:

1. Adverse Drug Events
2. Catheter-Associated Urinary Tract Infections
3. Central Line Associated Blood Stream Infections
4. Injuries from Falls and Immobility
5. Obstetrical Adverse Events
6. Pressure Ulcers
7. Surgical Site Infections
8. Venous Thromboembolism
9. Ventilator-Associated Pneumonia
10. Readmissions

Meeting these goals is good for patients… but it now affects the fiscal health of the hospital, too. Medicare funding, once based on the volume of patients seen by the hospital, is now directly tied to how well hospitals reduce the occurrence of hospital-acquired conditions and readmissions. CMS will not reimburse the hospital if a Medicare patient acquires one of these conditions or is readmitted within 30 days.

If hospitals are unable to reduce patient harms and readmissions, they will lose money. In order to reach Partnership for Patients goals, new processes and training programs are needed.

The Challenge of Standardization

The resources available to hospitals that help them reduce patient harms do not always meet their needs. Local factors such as work environment, patient demographics and make-up of current policies make it hard to deliver one-size-fits-all information that is useful to all hospitals. Sometimes, experienced employees are too used to doing a process slightly incorrectly and find it difficult to change. In other instances, the experienced workers are deeply familiar with how to perform a process, but it is not properly documented and therefore difficult to teach new hires. With so many Baby Boomers in the workforce preparing for retirement, hospital executives have a major skills gap for which to prepare.

Training Problem vs Process Problem

A few years ago, we worked with a large pharmaceutical company that needed to implement good research principles across its organization. Their problem was not getting people to know what the principles were. Their biggest challenge was getting people to follow the principles. An eLearning course explaining the research principles was not going to do the trick. Here’s what we did:

Go Beyond the Bulleted List

New generations of workers want to use technology to learn. As Millenials replace Baby Boomers in the workforce, you can expect the following mediums to be in even higher demand:

• Mobile learning
• Interactive eLearning
• Video tutorials
• Social media-enabled learning
• Serious games and simulations
• Gamified experiences

Setting generations aside, we still need to find better ways to communicate information and provide people ways to practice new behaviors. Reading a list of bulleted facts may tell you “what to do,” but it does not help you change your behavior… especially if an unwanted behavior is well worn and deeply ingrained.

The Affordable Care Act is still new… and healthcare systems will be working on meeting and exceeding these new standards for years. When the time comes to deliver new training and process-improvement initiatives, consider using cross-functional teams, auditing and action plans to achieve the desired results. And you need to produce eLearning, make sure you make it memorable.

We’re shaking things up in 2013 here at #TalkTech! Every couple of weeks, a guest curator will be picking our topics and leading the discussion. Not much will change format-wise… we’ll still publish the weekly post here and the topics will still be tweeted by @BLPIndy, but a guest curator (besides yours truly) will pick the topics and be ready to lead the conversation during the chat. If you are interested in being a guest curator for TalkTech, let me know!

Duolingo helps you learn a language while simultaneously translating the web.

Can recorded lectures replace university professors?

In this article, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales makes the bold claim that university lectures “are doomed.” His solution? Recorded lectures. Mr Wales suggests the future model of higher education will be to allow students to use recordings of lectures—and to use the teaching time to discuss and develop what students have been watching. From my own experiences, I’d have to say his idea has some serious merit. I have learned so much in the past few years from YouTube channels like The Big Think, SciShow, Crash Course, and more. The Minute Physics channel finally got me to understand some extremely advanced physics concepts—in under 5 minutes. Will this be the education method of the future? Will professors morph into TA’s for the videos?

Jimmy Wales: Boring university lectures ‘are doomed’

What ideas can instructional designers take from Duolingo?

Ever since I heard of Duolingo a few months back I’ve been completely fascinated by it. It uses gamification to teach languages, and it works really well. I am well on my way to becoming conversational in a new language; it’s honestly hard to believe how fast it’s working. But what really fascinates me about Duolingo, besides its effectiveness, is the reason for its creation. The goal is not only to learn a language, but to translate the web. Chances are you’ve used Captcha before to prove you were a human. Well, when you fill out a Captcha you are also helping Google digitize books by confirming specific word that have been scanned but were unable to be recognized by the computer. The same principle works in duo lingo. As you work through the ramified lessons, your answers help translate the web. By crowdsourcing this work, a seemingly impossible task becomes very doable. Can you think of any other tasks that could be crowdsourced like this? How do you feel about blending the learning process into productive work like this? Can novice contribute to goals while training?

Duolingo Teaches Foreign Languages with Gamification

Can games help us get our “common sense” back? 

“Scientists and educators have long been puzzled by the steady worldwide rise of about three points per decade in average IQ, first discovered by James Flynn and commonly called the Flynn Effect. But the puzzle is now more acute and urgent: Longitudinal studies of IQ test results show that the IQ rise has slowed to almost zero in Norway and Denmark. In the U.K., Flynn himself found the effect to be reversing since the early 1990s. A century of people growing smarter seems to be ending.” The argument is that our education system’s emphasis on abstract thinking has allowed our application skills to atrophy. For example, if an IQ test asks, “What do dogs have in common with rabbits?” answering with, “They are both animals” will score higher than, “People use dogs to hunt rabbits.” Flynn points out that this favors minds that categorize reality over those who work with it. Could game based learning help with this problem? With games, you can build in simulation and real world problem solving, which could help stress application skills over abstract skills. Yet another reason games are great in the workplace, too.

As IQs Fall, Can Gamification Help?

If you’re new to Twitter chats, don’t forget about awesome tools such as Tweetchat.com that automatically save the hashtag and help you focus on the conversation!

While OSHA, HIPAA and FDA regulations do a great job of setting standards and auditing organizations when a problem is perceived, it’s still way too easy for people to slip up on a daily basis. Minor compliance violations go unreported in almost every workplace… and it never seems like a big deal until it is a big deal. Just because you made someone “aware” of a procedure does not mean they are actually following it.

The challenge of compliance is getting more serious for Hospital Networks. The Affordable Care Act has introduced a set of 10 new Partnership for Patients standards hospitals must measure. Medicare funding for hospitals is no longer tied to the volume of patients they see – it’s based off of the hospital’s ability to reduce its number of readmissions and various hospital acquired infections. Now, a failure to comply with standards is directly related to funding.

Employers must also be aware of the various parts of OSHA. While training is not always a requirement to meet OSHA standards, over 100 of OSHA’s standards require some sort of training to stay in compliance. Even if a particular OSHA standard does not require training, an organization struggling to stay in compliance may turn to training as part of their solution.

The US Department of Labor Website has an entire section on Training Requirements for OSHA standards and guidelines. OSHA encourages a personalized approach to compliance training so it reflects the local work environment. A one-size fits all, cookie cutter approach to compliance training may check the box, but will it really motivate learners to change their behavior? Probably not.

Motivating behavior change is the secret to true compliance… but most compliance training is just designed to list facts and make people “aware” of procedures. And while delivering generic awareness training that is legally sufficient may solve the short term need, it leads to big problems in the future. When a dangerous situation arises and your workforce has no idea how to handle it… you’ll realize the compliance training didn’t really work.

Custom eLearning is usually part of the learning solution when training for compliance. BLP works extensively with organizations in highly regulated industries to help them comply with government mandated policies and procedures. We design compliance-driven learning solutions to motivate behavior change, not just drive awareness. We want people to know what they are supposed to do AND do it… not just vaguely remember they took some required training and hated it.

If you have to deliver compliance training, you need to make it memorable. Here’s how:

Some examples of Compliance Training

Building Evacuation		Taking a course about Building Evacuation is not most people’s idea of an exciting day at the office. But what if the course is an illustrated scenario where you must successfully evacuate three types of buildings or risk you or a coworker becoming incapacitated or worse? We took this approach in a course for Hoffman La-Roche and got rave reviews from learners. Believe it or not, this course was one of the least expensive to produce! Try the course here.
Proper Handwashing Techniques		We wash our hands all the time, but are we doing it right? One of our compliance courses included videos on handwashing and aseptic technique with a “CSI” theme. Instead of just watching an instructional video, learners became Germ Scene Investigators at a crime scene. In the process, they learned memorable tips, such as singing “Happy Birthday” two times while washing hands to measure the amount of time spent. Proper hand washing is at the root of many hygiene issues… so it’s important to get it right.
Bloodeborne Pathogens		Organizations that handle Bloodeborne Pathogens must deliver annual training to workers that makes them aware of the risk. Longtime employees often receive the same training over and over for years… so a new approach is essential from time to time to keep them engaged in the training. Our BBP Course for Roche Diagnostics takes a gamified approach with multiple levels to complete and BBPs to “defeat.” Oh, and they will laugh at you and animate across the screen!

None of these examples are at the high end of the price range, but all of them were rated as highly effective and fun by our clients. When you need to develop compliance training, take it as an opportunity to make it memorable and give learners something that will really, truly help them change their  behavior.

Otherwise, you’re just checking the box.

Need to create compliance training? Contact us.

Not familiar with Knowledge Guru? Knowledge Guru is a game engine that lets you create quiz-style games that leverage the principles of repetition and spaced learning to help people learn facts fast – and remember them over time. It’s an ideal tool for reinforcing training that has already been delivered – or for offering content that would be brutal if presented as a set of PowerPoints or Click NEXT to Continue training.

 What We’ll Cover

If you are curious as to how quickly you can put together an engaging game for learners, join us for this Quick Start webinar. Here’s what we’ll share:

• The basics of the tool – how to create a game with up to four topics, learning objectives and questions.
• How to design a game that actually helps people learn (amazing concept, we know!)
• The do’s and don’ts of writing game questions – what question styles most engage people and what kinds of question writing techniques to avoid (like the plague, avoid).
• How to test your game (nothing more embarrassing than launching – and discovering you have a question that reads, “Placeholder text for question here” instead of a bona fide question).
• How to launch a game to your players.
• How to assess player performance – and identify possible areas where they need more help.
• How to encourage spaced learning via the Guru Grab Bag competition.

If you want to dip a toe into game-based learning – and need a tool that can help you rapidly create an engaging, social game – join us. We’ll show you how simply and quickly you can create a compelling learning game that gets measurable results.

You can register for the webinar on the Knowledge Guru website.