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.

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: