Whenever “education” and “learning” are mentioned, most people immediately associate those words with children and youths. Adult learning is its own category, but there is more work in getting adults to learn, and to be invested in learning. It’s not that the old dog can’t learn new tricks, you just have to teach them differently. Attributes of adult learners include: 1. Self direction Adults like to maintain control over their decisions, so giving adult learners the options

Lately we have had a lot of clients who are new to eLearning. For many of us who have been in the training industry for the last 5-10 years, we have been accustomed to most people using eLearning as the predominant method of training and it always comes as a bit of a surprise to us to encounter an organization that has not used eLearning at all (due to various reasons such as not having an internal Learning Management System (LMS) or for other reasons such as employees prefe

There are different ways to bring knowledge to users, like interactive modules, videos, infographics, etc., and they should be used in conjunction and not as isolated products, to improve the learning experience on the users. Let’s say you have to put together a product for a client, a video, an interactive module or an infographic. After days, nights and weeks of graphic design, architecture, programming, testing and fixing, you have the final files to deliver to your client

Storyline 360’s made a lot of improvements over Storyline 2, one of which is the addition of more features to the Motion Paths animations for eLearning courses. This gives the programmer more control over the animations they put into their elearning, making for better, more interesting content. The first is simply the option to rename your paths, making it easier to keep track of which object you’re moving at a given time in your trigger panel. This is really helpful compared

Last week I discussed one of the great instructor led programs we offer here at Pathways Training & eLearning, and this week I was intending to provide few details of some of the popular eLearning courses we offer. However, first I thought perhaps I could provide a more detailed explanation or definition for eLearning to ensure we all share the same understanding. Often when completing a needs analysis for a development project I am asked to include elements of eLearning. W

The new year came with a wave of very low temperatures here in Canada, but also brought a wave of very interesting and challenging requests from our clients. One of them, specifically, requested a modification to an eLearning course, that consisted in tracking some values out of it, but without hosting it in a LMS, meaning that they wanted to distribute the course as a web page (kind of). So, without an LMS, how do you track values, for example, when a learner answers a speci

When developing eLearning modules, there is a final component that I usually test before handing the files to the client (of course, it depends on the requirements) and it’s the capability of the module to report completion, score and bookmarking to the LMS. It is not the most complicated nor the easiest task to complete, but you’ll need to keep a few things in mind to have a smooth experience: Have an LMS available Have a SCORM Cloud account Have a SCORM Testing tool Ideally

Lately, I have been working in Adobe Captivate to create / modify eLearning courses for different clients and even though I started my journey with this software, I stopped using due to the high demand of eLearning modules produced in Articulate Storyline. I won’t get into any comparisons right now, since I have done it in previous posts, and I want to focus my effort for this blog post on a very important (in my opinion) feature in Adobe Captivate: Timing. When you create a

Over the next couple of weeks, I thought it would be interesting to hi-light some of the great courses offered by Pathways Training and eLearning, both ILT and WBT. For this week, we will look at one of our more popular instructor led courses, Excellence in Team Management. This full day course focusses on first ascertaining the level of managing experience of each participant, and as well their personal comfort level with the responsibilities of the role, hi-lighting what t

In my humble opinion, I think social learning is one of those topics that seems to come and go in our industry. I remember this being more of a "thing" when people of all ages became more comfortable with the various social platforms that extended beyond just Facebook. Back then, I always thought it would be so cool to integrate social technologies in corporate training, and was often told things like "Michelle, cool doesn't cut it.", or "it's not a learning thing, Michelle,

The demanding increase of offering learning solutions that's engaging and current with today's technology is ever-rising. Though training in today's organization continues to lend itself to a blended range of informal and informal learning experiences, L&D professionals are becoming more responsive to where technology is leading our learning now more than ever. Few organizations no longer feel the need to "play it safe" when it comes to their training budget and instead, hav

Over the past several weeks I have written about communication best practices, including most of the concepts that we (Pathways) focus on when facilitating customer service or similar training. To wrap up this discussion, here is a summary of the key concepts we covered which for the most part, dealt with effective communication within your workplace. The goal of interpersonal communication is to establish connections and build relationships with colleagues so that we are we

Organizations across Canada are stepping it up; efficiently improving employee performance by investing in modern technology that reflects the ongoing needs of today's learner. With Millennials now surpassing Generation X to become the largest generation in the workforce, top companies understand the importance and benefit of advancing their approach to learning in the workplace. Learning is beyond a keyboard and mouse, or pulling 50 salesmen out of their jobs and into a th

This morning I was browsing my LinkedIn page, looking at a few of the recent posts related to eLearning development when I noted a particular page, indicating I was one click away from previewing an interactive elearning demo. The posting included a few instructions which I reviewed and then, my curiosity perked, I selected the link that was labeled “demo” and that is where my interest ended. Immediately I found out the demo would not work with certain types of browsers,

As I promised on my previous post, I will talk a bit more about the Captivate asset library in this article, so that you can have an idea of what you are missing for not using Captivate 😊 Honestly, and beware of the spoiler that follows if you haven’t finished watching the season 6 of Game of Thrones, with this library I kind of feel like Samwell Tarly when he entered the library in the Citadel, and was awestruck by the awesomeness and vastness of the knowledge that surrende

Here at Pathways, we truly don’t have a preferred eLearning authoring tool, as we accommodate our development workflow to the needs of our clients and the project. Of course, we offer expertise not only using these authoring but so many other tools for audio, video, graphics, interactions, etc., and we suggest to our clients the optimal route, for the sake of the project. However, in many cases, we are restricted by the requests from our clients, who will ask to only use one

One of the things I really enjoy (when the opportunity arises) is talking shop with other training professionals as I am always eager to learn what is new and exciting in the world of facilitation, instructional design and eLearning. It was during one of these conversations recently that a fellow training professional that had been in training the past month, shared what we all agreed, was an excellent example of what not to do when leading a class. To summarize her story,