Want to promote informal learning in your company? Need to keep track of online and offline training? Your main challenge when tracking a learning experience in your business is the lack of actionable data? Do you want to track each of your employees' progress at a detailed level, in real-time? Do your students access training content from multiple sources (from LMS to other third-party learning applications)? If you answered yes to one or some of these questions... Then you'll be interested to learn more about xAPI and LRS technologies in the corporate training environment. For learning and development leaders, getting acquainted with these concepts is key to implementing a training strategy that responds to the technological changes and new context we live in today.

If you have been in the eLearning industry for a while, you know that the platforms commonly used by companies to manage online courses are LMS (Learning Management System). However, in the last 5-10 years, the introduction of new technologies, such as cloud computing and artificial intelligence, mobile learning, microlearning, and social learning, has spurred the emergence of other technologies, which are certainly changing the eLearning landscape, for instance: Learning Record Stores (LRS). In this article, with the intention of informing organizational leaders about the new concepts, we will share a short explanation of the most significant specifications of each technology (LMS and LRS), their main differences, and why the LRS and the LMS are not opposite technologies, but tools that can be used in a complementary way to take corporate learning to the next level.

10 Seconds. About the time it takes to check your phone “real quick” is all the time you have to make a first impression. This goes for your eLearning course too. People who view your course may be looking to learn, but before they ever read any info you’ve written, they will judge it… and judge it quickly. Not only are first impressions fast in general but also with the ever-growing amount of information thrown at us online, you need make your impression fast and make it count.

Brain research opens up new opportunities eLearning designers should make the most of. One such opportunity lies in how people read online. By tracking eye movements and fixation points while readers look at web content, study after study found answers to questions like

Have you ever wondered why Nokia lost the game to Apple? On the face of it, Nokia seemed to have it all—a slew of phones (from basic phones that just let you make calls to those Lumia models that pack in a mean computing punch), an invincible reputation for churning out quality products (that seemingly indestructible Nokia 3310), and a loyal customer base (if you owned a mobile phone, it had to be a Nokia). And then came Apple, and the rest, as they say, is history. The answer is simple: Nokia lost because it failed to learn. Why do you think search engine companies have come and gone (okay, some like Yahoo and Bing are still hanging around in the shadows) but Google stayed on and is prospering by the day? There is a reason why Google is one of the most valuable companies in the world—it innovates. So what are the lessons for your company? Learn. Grow. Innovate. It is a dog-eat-dog world of business out there. To survive, flourish, and lead the pack, you have to innovate and stay a step ahead of your audience’s desires and preferences. You have to stay on top of change, which, of course, happens at dizzying speed. You need to create and nurture a “culture of learning” in your company.

Like the King of Pop once sang “it doesn’t matter if its black or white…as long as you use good, complementary choices from the color wheel.” Ok, maybe those weren’t the exact lyrics, but the point is that color, regarding its place in eLearning design, is quite significant and knowing how to use it can make or break your eLearning courses. How do you decide what colors go where and how? The answer can be found in the spinning wonder we know as The Color Wheel. That spiffy, rainbow-hued circle you were likely introduced to all the way back in elementary school is actually an extremely useful tool for creating seamless, organized designs.

Elearning has gone from a niche type of teaching for techy subjects to being a preferred, growing and almost necessary way to teach EVERYTHING. Technology is expanding and people’s need and desire to learn on their own time and at their pace is making eLearning the goal for many companies.

Tom sits down to do his sales training online. He has been asked to complete three lessons each week adding up to 30 minutes of online training. Tom is dreading it, but he is delightfully surprised at how quickly he can navigate the page and how well the content has been paired with the graphics and features. He gets through 4.5 of the lessons and leaves the 5th lesson bookmarked for the next chance he gets. Mary has been trying to find the lesson that the Fraud Department has assigned her. She has barely gotten passed lesson one in the time she had expected to complete at least 3. Her screen has frozen a few times on the graphics, she has had to re-read some of the text-heavy slides, and isn’t sure if the lesson she is on is going to help her with the issues she is meant to address. Which of the two people mentioned above had a better UX Design experience with their eLearning course? Who is going to continue with their eLearning course?