Average skills are no longer enough to get or keep an average job, and you need even more when you are working in the technology-driven world of e-learning. As computers and machines take on almost Orwellian levels of skills and abilities, once adequate human skill sets simply aren't cutting it anymore. To give you and your e-learning team a fighting chance against the machines, learn, love and live these skills to succeed in 2016 and beyond.

It’s time to get serious about playing because when it comes to eLearning, gamification isn't just for fun. While it’s commonly assumed that gamifying your eLearning courses is merely a pleasant distraction or attention grabber, it is far more useful tool than people tend to give it credit for. According to educational video game designer Marc Prensky “students now learn differently than students did even a generation ago” and "you can't hold people's attention the way you used to.” And because of this attention problem, games are becoming more important than ever in making effective eLearning courses for the actual and coming generations. As gamification makes seemingly mundane tasks fun, using it appropriately can boost participation rates in eLearning courses, increase employee motivation and even improve retention. In this post we will take an in-depth look at why gamification can make your eLearning courses more engaging and effective.

The thing today is not whether eLearning benefits your business; the real issue is whether you can afford not to join in the trend. Here are some statistics that show why your company should have already implemented this training method like, yesterday! These stats are so darn compelling; it’s really hard to imagine why companies would not want to start using eLearning to train its workforce.

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.

Think your organization is too young, hip, and fresh to have baby boomers on its books? Think again. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, approximately 59,000 Americans over the age of 60 are currently enrolled in colleges and universities. A recent report by the Pew Internet & American Life Project estimates that 70 percent of people aged 50 to 64 uses the Internet, and 33 percent of people over 65 do the same. Oh and also, did we mention that those over 50 are the fastest growing demographic online? According to Immersion Active, that’s a fact. Wow. If your eLearning audience are baby boomers then, how do you design eLearning courses that cater to their needs? Well, let’s have a look. What follows is our guide to eLearning design for the baby-boomer audience.

Design Thinking is a problem-solution and creative-solution creation method. In the world of design, it is the logical process designers undergo when creating a new product or service. In business, it has represented a disruption from the traditional way of thinking and coming up with new ideas. What sets this method apart and what has made it a corporate must-have is it focuses in understanding the problem and the context first before even thinking about implementing solutions. This method allows for the analysis of all the aspects and users involved. All of this may sound far from groundbreaking but unfortunately, still many companies neglect its user’s real needs in order to make their products or projects more profitable and successful.

“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.