A quick search of the almighty Internet reveals that there is no end to the amount of advice on how to do just about any job better. ELearning is no different. While plowing through dozens of blogs, articles, and how-to sites will likely garner you quite a bit of good information, it will also take up valuable time you could use actually to design and improve your craft. So, because a big part of our job is to make you better and more successful at your job, we’ve compiled a list of top elearning blogs for 2016 to ramp up your design skills and stay on top of the industry. Quick tip: use the handy Feedly app to organize the blog content you want to read.

“Tweet tweet.” Do you hear that? That’s the sound of knowledge. Twitter is one of the richest resources for networking and seeking out the number one professionals in any industry. You can even directly communicate with them, and more often than not, you’ll get a reply too. What’s more, because eLearners are well…technologically inclined by nature, this means that Twitter is especially important in our industry. If you’re not involved, you could be missing out on essential information. So whether you’re a Twitter fiend, or you’re just getting started, this is a guide to the big names in eLearning that you need to follow.

Just the other day, it seems like I held a huge Nokia phone in my hand, telling my friends how amazing it was to be able to play Snake, message my friends, and call anyone in the world. How things have changed. Just a few years on, the whole world is in our pocket, access to anything and everything, on demand, just as Tesla predicted. By 2018, more than fifty percent of users will use a tablet or smartphone first for all online activities [1]. Also, its predicted that by this time there will be more than one billion users of wireless Internet. The field of education and corporate training has a responsibility to stay on the cutting edge of these changes in technology. So far, the evidence suggests that we’re moving forward. 85% of organizations now identify just how important mobile is to learning, and are either implementing or planning to implement a mobile training strategy.[2] Clearly, mLearning is changing the game. So now we’re going to look at a few ways that mobile is already transforming the world of corporate learning.

You remember how words make you feel, not the words themselves. Maybe that doesn’t sound right to you but think of the first time you met your significant other. Do you remember what you said? What your significant other said? Probably not, but you do likely remember, in detail, how it made you feel. Now, consider what you could do if you could harness the power of that emotion and apply it to helping your eLearning audience remember and connect with facts. Facts may be more consistently accurate, but emotions are what our brains filter our experiences through and what we can recall most readily. Taking your audience’s emotions into consideration is especially helpful when dealing with subject matter that is dry but important. For example, with corporate training, you might need to write up a section on which documents need to be filed for a new employee. Things don’t get much drier than talking about filing papers, but think of the massive headache new employees might have if their tax information isn’t filed and their paycheck is held up because of it. Telling your learners about the human side of what they’re learning and how it affects real people can make the difference between someone remembering long enough to apply the knowledge and someone just remembering for the length of the course.

How would you like it if vegetables at the supermarket were stocked with meat or milk? You wouldn’t find the produce in the first place. There’s a reason why the Table of Contents is placed within the first few pages of every book. There’s a reason why the streetlights are not tucked away amidst a maze of store signs. The reason is usability or how easy or difficult it is to find your way through a user interface. And judging by how difficult it is to find houses in certain streets or make your way through software, it seems that it is easy to goof up UX design. Bad usability can inhibit your learners from learning what they need from a course. So, to avoid this, here are 3 tips you can use to create killer eLearning designs:

Pretty much anyone can present information, but an honestly good eLearning course designer knows how to make that information stick with learners even when that audience isn’t interested. Because that’s the nature of an eLearning course: sometimes your audience is enthralled with the subject and sometimes they’re just being pushed to learn because of a job or class. It should be your goal to make content memorable no matter your audience’s interest level. One of the best ways to do this is to incorporate engaging and unique characters in your courses. A learner might not remember every piece of content you present to them, but they will remember an aqua aardvark appropriately named ADDIE. While that might be too cartoonish or “out there” for many courses, I think you can see the point of how using a character gives your audience something to visualize and hold onto in the sea of new information they are being immersed in.

Embrace the race or get left in the dust. While the world of e-learning design might not seem as fast paced or ever-changing as other environments, it is still a business, and there are changes in motion that designers need to be aware of to to stay relevant in the field. In the same way, that education has begun to leave the classroom and is now accessible from mobile devices, technology is still evolving to make the new learning arena better, faster and more widely accessible. Companies now have options they never did before for providing training. Being aware of these changes means keeping your courses relevant for students and keeping your design skills in demand.

It can be challenging to find images for your eLearning courses that are stunning, high-resolution and most importantly, free. With the availability of current resources, it’s no longer necessary to use clip art or the type of generic (or cliché) images that make training look dated. Whether you lack the skill or simply the time to create the images for your eLearning courses, we have compiled a list, of what we consider the best free stock photos on the Internet right now. Each of the following websites contains free high-resolution images that can be used for personal and commercial use. We encourage your to visit and bookmark any (or all) of these sites today!