From onboarding to ongoing professional development, eLearning Brothers offers many solutions for the human resources industry

American Fork, UT — June 13, 2019 — eLearning Brothers announced today that the company will be exhibiting at the 2019 SHRM Annual Conference & Exposition in Las Vegas, Nevada on June 23-25. SHRM is the premier conference for HR topics, workplace strategy, and professional development.

The theme of this year’s conference is “Creating Better Workplaces.” eLearning Brothers offers a number of solutions that enable HR professionals to do just that, including their innovative Customizable Courseware product, which features topics such as Coaching Others, Workplace Harassment, Meeting Management, and a wide range of sales and safety training courses.

“Training is more important than ever as a retention tool,” said Andrew Scivally, eLearning Brothers Co-founder and CEO. “eLearning is a highly compelling and cost-effective way to deliver training and at eLearning Brothers, we’re committed to providing the most engaging, innovative eLearning solutions—from templates to premade courses to custom content designed just for your organization.”

“Workers who are actively engaged on a learning and development path are less likely to jump at the first opportunity,” said Marty Rosenheck, eLearning Brothers Director of Talent Development Consulting. “Our Custom Solutions team can help you create those learning paths and guide you as you develop a training program that increases speed to proficiency and ensures better talent retention.”

HR professionals looking for training solutions can find the eLearning Brothers at Booth 904 on June 23-25 at the SHRM expo.

Visit the eLearning Brothers website for more information about their products and services.

About eLearning Brothers

eLearning Brothers is on a mission to create “eLearning Rockstars” by providing the planet’s largest and most interactive library of assets for rapid eLearning content development. eLearning Brothers is also creating award-winning custom eLearning and now has the world’s first and only customizable courseware library available.

eLearning Brothers has released the full schedule for their learning tech conference on June 10 in Salt Lake City, Utah. The conference, eLBX Live 2019, is co-located with Learning DevCamp.

“The knowledge and experience this year’s presenters bring to the table is really exciting,” said Andrew Scivally, President and Co-founder, eLearning Brothers. “Every attendee will be able to take away new ideas and strategies for developing the most effective and engaging training possible. It’s truly inspiring and we at eLearning Brothers love having the opportunity to interact with so many amazing eLearning professionals in one place.”

Keynote Presentation: Clint Pulver

The morning begins with a rockin’ keynote presentation by Clint Pulver, President and founder of The Center for Employee Retention. Pulver is an expert on boosting employee engagement and creating lasting loyalty. He’ll be sharing tips on how to inspire a learning movement within an organization, work with subject matter experts, and more. After the keynote, attendees will hear from 3 featured morning speakers, all experts and thought leaders in the fields of eLearning, training, and employee development.

Featured Morning Presentations:

Learning From Learners

• Presented by Michael Noble, Chief Operating Officer & Chief Learning Strategist for The Training Associates

Michael’s session will share research highlights on how learners perceive different modalities, insight into changing learner expectations, and strategies for increasing the efficacy of training solutions.

Look for the Lessons: Selecting and Shaping Powerful Stories

• Presented by Hadiya Nuriddin, CEO, Focus Learning Solutions

In this session, attendees will learn a strategy for mining their lives for lessons, finding the experiences that resulted in those lessons, and transforming those experiences into stories that encourage learning and influence behavior.

Creating Loyalty in Learners

• Presented by Leena Rinne, Vice President of Consulting, FranklinCovey

Hear from one of FranklinCovey’s best-selling authors to learn the principles of true customer loyalty, applied to learners. Loyalty is driven by how people feel when they engage with you, and with your learning. This session will give you actionable ideas that you can put into practice to create loyalty in your learners!

Afternoon Breakout Tracks

After lunch, conference attendees can choose from 4 breakout tracks focusing on different aspects of training. Attendees can mix and match tracks to create their own customized conference experience.

The Learning Strategies afternoon breakout track

Design Thinking Meets Instructional Design

• Chris Willis

Becoming a Learning Experience Designer

• Marty Rosenheck

From Order Taker to Trusted Advisor: Winning Over Stakeholders

• Misty Harding

The Learning Technologies afternoon breakout track

Making xAPI Work

• Bill Milstid

Gamification

• James Kingsley

Tool Tips & Tricks for Templates

• Bill Milstid

The Interactivity and Engagement afternoon breakout track

Getting Started: Creating Training with Course Starters

• Andrew Vass

Using Storytelling Strategies to Write Compelling Scenarios

• Hadiya Nuriddin

Social Learning Strategies for Leveling Up Engagement & Interactivity in eLearning

• Brandie Jenkins

Learning Showcase afternoon breakout track

Our Custom Designs: The Stuff We Love the Most

• Misty Harding

Fun & Creative Ways to Use Video Effectively in eLearning

• Andrè Chatelain & Brigham Sunday

Client Spotlight

• Rich Vass

Evening Entertainment

The day will wrap up with dinner and a trivia night experience. Attendees can relax and have more time to make connections while enjoying a little friendly competition. Team up with fellow conference attendees to show off your trivia knowledge and win prizes!

“I can’t wait to see our clients and fellow eLearning designers and developers in person,” said Richard Vass, Studio Director, eLearning Brothers. “There’s nothing like the energy you get from being surrounded by other people equally passionate about producing great eLearning. We look forward to showing off some of the work our Custom Solutions team has created during the Learning Showcase track, and hearing what others in the industry are doing.”

eLBX Live and Learning DevCamp 2019 are located at the University of Utah Guest House Hotel & Conference Center. eLBX kicks off the conference week on June 10, 2019 and Learning DevCamp continues June 11-13, 2019. Both events are packed with breakout sessions, panel presentations, hands-on learning, and more. View the eLBX Live schedule here.

More information about eLBX Live and registration can be found at the eLBX Live page.

About eLearning Brothers
eLearning Brothers is on a mission to create “eLearning Rockstars” by providing the planet’s largest and most interactive library of assets for rapid eLearning content development. eLearning Brothers is also creating award-winning custom eLearning and now has the world’s first and only customizable courseware library available.

About Learning DevCamp
Learning DevCamp is an event dedicated to teaching, discussing and collaborating about how to create learning solutions from content to tools to platforms. We understand that today’s design and development revolves around instructor-led, online delivery, mobile and performance support tools.

Horizon Interactive Awards recognized the eLearning Brothers for their excellence in custom eLearning development and instructional video

The eLearning Brothers custom development team announced it has received three gold awards from Horizon Interactive Awards, an international competition recognizing the best interactive media, web sites, videos, online advertising, print media and mobile applications.

eLearning Brothers custom team has amassed an impressive list of awards over six years of providing custom eLearning solutions to clients across the globe. The just-announced results of the Horizon Interactive 2018 competition saw the eLearning Brothers taking home two gold awards in the Training/E-Learning category and one gold award in the Instructional Video category. The projects included work for clients including a major auto financing company, PayPal, and Sigma-Chi Fraternity.

“We have been proud and honored to stand with our clients as our award-winning work has been recognized over and over again by industry-known bodies such as The Brandon Hall Group, the eLearning Guild, Horizon Interactive, and many more,” said Richard Vass, Custom Studio Director. “It’s thrilling to see our work recognized by Horizon Interactive Awards again this year.”

The eLearning Brothers custom team has also been recognized as a Top 20 Custom Development firm by TrainingIndustry.com for the last 3 years. Training Industry’s annual list recognizes the top companies in the industry and is based on factors including industry visibility, innovation and impact, capability to develop and deliver multiple types of content, company size and growth potential, and depth of subject matter expertise.

In addition, the custom development team achieved recognition as an International Learning Technology Company of the Year by the Learning Technologies Group based in London. The judges stated that eLearning Brothers “ticked boxes in terms of growth, innovation and customer service…the company also has a reputation for high standards of production, ethics, integrity and culture.”

“Our team has been fortunate enough to create innovative training solutions for companies like Coca-Cola, PayPal, and more,” said Todd Cummings, Custom General Manager. “We’ve built everything from virtual reality simulations to comprehensive learning strategies and learning experience platforms. Nothing excites our team more than meeting with potential new clients and discussing how we can meet their training needs with immersive, visually stunning, effective eLearning content.”

For more information about eLearning Brothers Custom Solutions or to schedule a free consultation, visit the eLearning Brothers site. The eLearning Brothers Custom team will also be available for in-person meetings at eLBX Live 2019, the eLearning Brothers user conference extravaganza on June 10, 2019 in Salt Lake City, Utah.

About eLearning Brothers 
eLearning Brothers is on a mission to create “eLearning Rockstars” by providing the planet’s largest and most interactive library of assets for rapid eLearning content development. eLearning Brothers is also creating award-winning custom eLearning and now has the world’s first and only customizable courseware library available.

Instructional Design expert Misty Harding joined us today to close out eLBX Online.

A mere mortal might have been intimidated being the grand finale of 6 weeks of amazing eLearning webinars, but Misty is no mere mortal. She showed up with her game face on and an ambitious 101 slides of interactive eLearning examples and tips.

In one info-packed hour, Misty covered examples of eLearning interactions from courses covering:

• Compliance
• Systems
• Policy/Procedure
• Other miscellaneous training categories

The Interactivity Family Tree

Before Misty got into her interactivity examples, she explained 4 different levels of interactions that you might consider building. In order of complexity:

Exploratory Interaction

User explores the screen to learn more about something. Not very cognitive, but do add an element of engagement beyond just reading. Examples: click-to-reveal, drag-to-reveal, slide-to-reveal.

Single Response Interaction

Learner thinks about something and gives a single response/answer. He or she receives immediate feedback and course moves on.

Cognitive Interaction

Come in a variety of formats and ensure the learner is able to apply the concept through an activity complex enough to challenge their understanding of the finer points of application.

Enhanced Cognitive Interaction

These build on cognitive interactions and have an extra bit of “pizazz”—that might be through an animation, gamification, or exceptional visual creativity.

Wrapping Up

Misty showed a TON of examples of interactions that eLearning Brothers custom team has created for different clients. Keep an eye out for the recording so you can see them too.

That concludes eLBX Online. We hope that you loved it, and if you did love it, we hope you join us in-person this June at eLBX Live 2019.

Senior Developer Bill Milstid joined us today for an eye-opening look at how you can take simple actions and variables in Storyline and create really unique interactivity. Today was less of a step-by-step and more of a conceptual, inspiration-sparking look at ways to combine actions you already know to create awesomeness.

Bill’s first interactivity example showcased a very cool play on the Viewmaster toy.

Those of us at a certain age will remember having these as children! In Bill’s “Bro-Master” the background image changes every time you click the button.

But, guess what? Behind the scenes, this is all built with a slider!

Bill also showed how to use a slider to make something shakeable. Sounds cool, right?

Basically, sliders work off of variables. You can add all the values of those variables together to get a total.
You can add triggers to your game based on a top end variable that isn’t hit until the slider is slid a few times.

It works like this…

We’ve got an etch-a-sketch here. It features a drawing on it that we want to erase.

How do you erase an etch-a-sketch?

Shake it.

Luckily, the etch-a-sketch is set up as a slider.

That slider is set up with a variable called shakenSketch, that, when slid, can range from 0-5.

So, at the right end of the slider, the value will be 5, and at the left, it will be 0.

This value will update in real time, as the slider is dragged.

But I want the user to have to shake the etch-a-sketch a few times to get it to clear.

There are a few ways I could go about this with a slider, but the simplest is to add another variable called sketchClear, with an initial value of 0.

Then, add some triggers to update that value.

Whenever the shakenSketch variable updates, we add that value to the sketch.

Clear value.

Then, we trigger something to happen—in this case, change the state—whenever the sketchClear value reaches or exceeds 30…which I picked randomly because it’s a multiple of 5 that would take the user a few slides to hit.

I use this trick in the Eibhlin’s Quest game to prompt the user to shake some bushes and get some berries…but it could be applied in any number of ways.

Wrapping Up

Bill shared some other cool examples during the webinar. Come back Friday for this week’s recordings and any handouts. In the meantime, register for more upcoming webinars below or check out last week’s archive on using eLearning templates and assets.

You don’t need us to tell you that the eLearning industry changes nearly every day. But now, there’s a big shift on the horizon that has the potential to impact nearly any LMS—and thus, your learners.

Let’s rewind back to when the change began…

2010: Apple® decides not to support Adobe® Flash on the iPhone.

2017: Adobe announces its intent to stop updating and distributing the Flash Player.

2020: Flash will officially become unsupported.

Most people are pretty excited about this. Some headlines from when the news broke included:

“ADOBE FINALLY KILLS FLASH DEAD” (Wired.com)

“So long, Flash: Adobe will kill plug-in by 2020” (CNN.com)

Flash Is Dead (Thank God) – What’s Next? (AndPlus.com)

However, as you can see from that last headline, the death of Flash has generated a few questions. 

Specifically for our industry, this shift has many eLearning professionals wondering: “Where will that leave my eLearning curriculum when Adobe Flash burns out?”

And that, my friends, is why we created Flash Finder.

Flash Finder acts as your own personal assistant by scouring the files on your LMS, crawling through years and years of courses to locate any Flash-related files. Our solution can save you hours and hours of tedious searching, allowing you to focus on more important things—like figuring out who keeps stealing your yogurt from the office fridge.

This nifty tool generates detailed reports with the info you need to create a fact-based action plan to tackle any Flash files lurking in your LMS. Flash Finder provides an indispensable way to quickly catalog any Flash files doomed to irrelevance.

Depending on your LMS, Flash Finder reports can include:

• Data on when the Flash files were uploaded,
• who uploaded them,
• course ID numbers,
• the last time courses were accessed,
• the authoring tool they were created with,
• and more!

Sounds like magic, right?

Alas, we are not wizards. But we ARE dedicated to helping you become eLearning Rockstars in every way. Don’t let obsolete software catch you or your learners by surprise next year. Flash Finder is here to save the day.

Contact our Custom Solutions team to learn more about Flash Finder.

eLearning developer Dan Frazee joined us today to share some step-by-step methods essential to developing accessible courses. In the webinar, he demonstrated where to find the accessibility settings in each of the top three authoring tools—Adobe Captivate, Articulate Storyline, and Lectora.

Dan showed how to:

• set tab order,
• create alt tags,
• add closed captions,
• and more!

Know Your Audit

In addition, one big tip Dan shared with the audience was to “know your audit.” This was a bit of a play on Nancy’s tip “know your audience” from yesterday. Dan highly recommends figuring out early on—if you can—who will be auditing your content, how strict they are, and what tools they’ll be using to test your content.

Here at eLearning Brothers, we try to test our custom development projects as early on in the process as we can, so we aren’t blindsided at the final audit by content that isn’t accessible. Dan shared that pretty much everyone we’ve been audited by has used a paid version of JAWS screen reader. Don’t despair—there is a free version available! However, the free version does have a time limit to how long you can use it. Therefore, it’s good to make sure all your content is ready before you start. The free JAWS download provides a great way to test your own accessible courses.

Wrapping Up

Today’s webinar was a great way to finish up our series on developing accessible courses. Tomorrow we dive into Unique Ways to Create Interactivity in Storyline.

Come back Friday for this week’s recordings and any handouts. In the meantime, register for more upcoming webinars below or check out last week’s archive on using eLearning templates and assets.

Are you committed to delivering accessible eLearning, but not sure where or how to start? You might be surprised by how many others are in that same boat!

In this webinar, Instructional Designer Nancy Reyes walked attendees through the essentials of designing accessible eLearning courses including:

• Who is your audience?
• What does “accessible” mean to your organization or client?
• Navigation considerations
• What is alt text and how should you use it?
• Should you use images and when?
• Transcripts and closed captioning

During the webinar, Nancy showed examples from real courses of each of these accessible design elements. Her examples showed that just because a course is accessible, doesn’t mean it has to boring.

Nancy recommended the WebAIM Contrast Checker for eLearning developers wanting to make sure their courses have enough color contrast to be accessible to learners with visual impairments. She also talked about how to write a good alt tag, the importance of tab order, and keeping links and hotspots big enough for learners using assistive devices instead of a computer mouse or their hands.

Recordings and any handouts will be posted on Friday. In the meantime, register for more upcoming webinars below or check out last week’s archive on using eLearning templates and assets.

We are in the final week of eLBX Online! Today we kicked things off with a bang with guest Laura Silver, Chief Operating Officer at Trivantis. This session studied the goals and results of designing and developing eLearning for usability versus accessibility. Laura covered the basics of Accessibility, Section 508 compliance, and WCAG.

What Is Accessibility?

Accessibility means that people with disabilities can equally perceive, understand, navigate, and interact with websites and tools. It also means they can contribute equally without barriers.

WCAG

Web Content Accessibility Guidelines state that content should be:

• Perceivable
• Operable
• Understandable
• Robust

Section 508 Compliance

Section 508 is a US federal law that requires “information and communication technology” to be accessible to employees with disabilities. In January 2018 these rules were updated to more closely align with the aforementioned WCAG guidelines.

Usability

Usability is about designing products to be effective, efficient, and satisfactory to use. When we combine accessibility and usability, we arrive at the concept of universal design, which is the design of products and environments to be usable by all people, to the greatest extent possible, without the need for adaptation or specialized design. Universal design is all about inclusion for everyone.

Laura shared 10 practical approaches to designing for accessibility and usability.

1. Consistent Navigation
2. Transcripts & Captions
3. Keyboard Only Support
4. Form Labels
5. Color Contrast
6. Straightforward Language
7. Chunk Content with Markup
8. Descriptive Links
9. Focus States
10. Color Isn’t Used Alone

The best way to test accessibility in your eLearning is to unplug your mouse and see if you can navigate through your entire course with your keyboard only.

-Laura Silver

Here are some additional 508 compliance and accessibility resources:

• Section 508
• Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI)
• Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) Overview
• Usability
• Center for Applied Special Technology (CAST)
• Web Accessibility In Mind (WebAIM)

Recordings and any handouts will be posted on Friday. In the meantime, register for more upcoming webinars below or check out last week’s archive on using eLearning templates and assets.

As instructional designers, we talk a lot about adding the “human element” to our training, but what does it really mean? Is it more than just having an image of our narrator on the screen? Yes, it is! There’s a lot more to the human element than you might think.

In this webinar, Dr. David Christiansen walked attendees through sample courses that don’t quite implement the human element and together they brainstormed ways to effectively add a human element.

Dave shared 7 specific approaches to adding the human element.

1. Aesthetics
2. “Why I Should Care”
3. Leveling
4. “Learner-centric”
5. Gamification/Competition
6. Humor
7. “What Do You Think?”

Let’s dive into each approach.

Aesthetics

Dave was careful to remind attendees that aesthetics is more than just imagery. When considering aesthetics, consider how narration, audio effects, and images work together to create that truly human element of your course.

“Why I Should Care”

For this one, really think about what’s the best way to get learners to care about the training topic.

Leveling

While this isn’t feasible for all training programs, factoring in your learners’ previous experience and knowledge is a great way to customize your content. Allowing learners to test out of training they already know can really increase morale.

“Learner-centric”

This approach lets learners control which sections they take in what order and opt out of sections they might know already. It can increase engagement and learner appreciation.

Gamification/Competition

People inherently like to be challenged, which makes gamification a great way to add in a human element and motivate learners.

Humor

If your company culture allows it, adding relevant humor to a slide here and there can lighten up your learning and boost engagement. Make sure you don’t stray into sarcasm, however, or make light of serious situations.

“What Do You Think?”

Add opportunities for the learner to share their input or think critically about a topic.

And now you’re ready to add a human element to your next eLearning course!

This week of eLBX Online is all about using eLearning assets to speed up your development. Recordings will be posted on Friday. In the meantime, register for more upcoming webinars below or check out last week’s archive.