SHIFT's eLearning Blog

Our blog provides the best practices, tips, and inspiration for corporate training, instructional design, eLearning and mLearning.

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    Recent Posts:

    The 6 Laws of Learning No Instructional Designer Can Afford to Ignore

    You may pack your courses with tons of relevant content and awesome visuals, but if they don’t make a dent in the learner’s mind, they have failed in their purpose. It's time to STOP spending long hours working on courses that learners forget the moment they complete the course. You pour much love and sweat into the course creation. Your courses need to acknowledge the habits and tendencies of how people learn, so the experience becomes relevant, lasting, and useful to the learner.

    • 12 min read
    • Fri, Dec 30, 2022 @ 11:11 AM

    A List of Brain-based Strategies to Create Effective eLearning

    There is a simple way to design effective eLearning courses about any subject: brain-based learning. This instructional approach was defined by Hileman in 2006 and has since inspired many “brain-compatible designers” — those who seek to understand the principle and reasoning behind their teaching.

    • 14 min read
    • Thu, May 26, 2022 @ 01:11 PM

    The 4 Adult Learning Elements You Should Include in Your eLearning Courses

    Adult Learning highlights that adult learners are fundamentally different in their methods of learning in comparison with children. As an L&D professional, you need to understand these differences and figure out the best ways to apply them to meet your learner's needs. With adult learners, you will encounter unique expectations, demands, and challenges. The key is to accommodate these and design training and eLearning courses in a manner that is most effective and engaging for them. While there are multiple methodologies to make this happen, there is a model proposed by Lila Davachi, Associate Professor of Psychology at New York University that is known to be effective. Known as AGES (Attention-Generation-Emotion-Spacing), this model highlights four key elements that are essential for effective adult learning to happen.

    • 9 min read
    • Fri, May 20, 2022 @ 01:51 PM

    The Key Principles of High-Quality Instructional Design

    The quality of instructional design is often gauged on three things: effectiveness, efficiency, and cost. Effectiveness has to do with how well the instruction enables learners to achieve stated goals or expected outcomes. Efficiency deals with the energy and time invested to complete the instruction while cost covers all expenses incurred for its design and delivery. These are good points, to begin with. It's equally important, however, to zero in on the details involving the design and development of quality instruction. As with any other good design principles, there are human characteristics deeply involved here. Richard Buchanan, a professor of Design, Management, and Information Systems, said it best: “a good design can be defined not only to be creative, stylish with an extraordinary visual look, but it must consider human engagement in its activities.” Follow these five golden principles to help you achieve high-quality instructional design:

    • 8 min read
    • Wed, May 18, 2022 @ 05:55 PM

    Learner-centered e-Learning Design: 4 Steps to Get There

    Take a moment to step back from your role as an eLearning designer, instructor, or course developer and focus on yourself as a learner. Answer these questions: How do you learn best? What learning activities are the most motivational to you? How do you interact with other learners? What do you struggle with when learning new information or mastering a new skill? Understanding your own learning preferences is an excellent place to start when considering the benefits of a learner-centered eLearning model.

    • 9 min read
    • Sat, May 14, 2022 @ 08:17 AM

    Create Better eLearning Courses: 8 Techniques to Engage Your Audience

    With an infinite supply of content available on the Internet, how will you make your next eLearning course stand out? Beyond merely being informative, your content must be engaging as well. Here are eight techniques you can apply today to make your learners love your eLearning courses.

    • 13 min read
    • Tue, May 10, 2022 @ 03:33 PM

    Want Your eLearning Courses to Deliver Results? Avoid These Mistakes

    Perhaps you’ve been here: Amidst pressure from colleagues or employees, or after reading an online article about training trends, you took the plunge. You started an eLearning program at your organization — and then watched with dismay as it fell short of your goals. What went wrong? Chances are your program fell into at least a few of these five common mistakes:

    • 8 min read
    • Sat, Apr 30, 2022 @ 09:17 PM

    How To Improve Online Compliance Training Using Learning Analytics

    Do you know how effective is your compliance online training? Is the program well-integrated into the company? Are employees completing the courses on time? Are they really learning the safety parameters or regulatory laws you are teaching? You won't have the answer to this if you aren't leveraging the power of Learning Analytics. Having the right data is key to understanding if your compliance online training is making an impact. Simply tracking completion rates and passing grades is not enough. Monitoring deep-level insights like engagement, behavior, and struggles are also important to analyze to make well-informed business decisions and provide actionable insights to your team. You can set the X passing score for successful completion, but in compliance and safety issues, if employees aren't really learning the information it could represent a huge cost in the long run. So, leveraging online platforms and learning analytics becomes essential for companies to supports students throughout their journey. For instance, if an employee does not get a question right, they can be redirected to revisit a specific module and come back to take the test.

    • 11 min read
    • Wed, Feb 23, 2022 @ 04:44 PM

      Related Posts

      The Challenges of Implementing AI in L&D and How to Solve Them

      As Learning and Development (L&D) professionals, you are currently at the heart of a technological revolution that promises to redefine the very essence of workplace training. The rapid integration of generative AI into training practices is not just a trend—it's a seismic shift that is reshaping how knowledge is delivered and skills are cultivated. However, this transformative wave brings with it a host of challenges that are testing the resilience and adaptability of training departments across industries.

      5 Human Psychology Facts You Can Use To Create Effective eLearning

      We're in the era of artificial intelligence (AI), and there's no turning back. We're going to use AI more and more to create eLearning courses quickly and efficiently. Isn't it amazing how technology makes our work easier? With AI, we can design visually appealing courses and optimize content in record time. But before we get too excited, there's something we can't forget: the psychology of learning.

      How to Use AI Avatars in eLearning Courses

      Why do so many eLearning courses still feel like they’re stuck in the last century? If you're a training leader, you've likely encountered your share of dull text pages, uninspiring quizzes, and videos that barely hold attention. It's somewhat surprising, given today's technological advances, that many courses haven't evolved to be as engaging as the latest streaming series.