The Learning Dispatch

“E-Learning for All” — A TD Magazine Article

By Microassist Learning | August 3, 2017 | | 5

Strategies to Save Time and Reduce Costs for Accessible Digital Learning Editor’s note: Content originally featured in the August 2017 TD Magazine, ATD’s award-winning monthly magazine that covers learning and development industry best practices, emerging technologies, and trends. Workforce trends on diversity, equity, and inclusion have renewed attention to accessibility’s role across business, government, and education. A critical element remains creating digital content usable and navigable to everyone, without excluding

Game-Based Learning: How to Give Your Learners a Safe Place to Fail

By Kevin Gumienny | July 19, 2017 | | 1

Ethan Edwards of Allen Interactions likes to make the point that we can’t make people learn. You can’t learn someone to do something. You have to create the conditions where they want to bring the information to themselves. And games are a great place to create a sense of engagement. Games create a new world, one with rules that put constraints on actions. In terms of training, this creates a

The Indispensable Role of Clients in Learning Projects

By Kevin Gumienny | July 18, 2017 | | 4

The Client Role in Learning Development: How Much Do You Really Need to Be Involved, Anyway? If you engage a learning company to help create training, there’s a temptation to hand off development and then not touch base with the learning company again until the training’s ready to be implemented. Just write the check. What more is needed? Such an approach is…problematic. A client has an essential role—ofttimes several essential

Elearning Development Resources: Develop the Elearning Your Program Deserves

By Kevin Gumienny | June 28, 2017 | | 3

We had a great turnout during our recent webinar, Develop the Elearning Your Project Deserves—for the Training Results You Want. As promised, here are elearning development resources from the webinar, as well as a few extras. We covered a lot of ground in the presentation, so if I’ve missed any resources on any of these elearning subspecialities, please feel free to note it in the comments below. Elearning Development

Instructional Designer and Course Developer: One Person or Two?

By Kevin Gumienny | June 20, 2017 | | 4

Why Use Both an Instructional Designer and a Course Developer: Won’t One Person Suffice? Continuing our discussion about roles in a training team, this month we’re looking at the advantages of separating the roles of instructional designer and course developer. It’s pretty common for an elearning development team to have a single person who is responsible for building elearning. They analyze the need for a course, design the course, build the course

Develop the Elearning Your Program Deserves—for the Training Results You Want

By Vivian Cullipher | June 20, 2017 | | 3

Tuesday, June 27, 2017, 11 am ET / 10 am CT / 8 am PT | COMPLIMENTARY WEBINAR Understand the Skills You Need to Launch a Public Sector Elearning Training Initiative Whether you’re launching a new program at your agency or supporting an ongoing one…or whether your government program is directed to internal teams or an external audience… You need to know that the time invested in training will produce the results you need. Elearning

The Importance of Using Roles When Developing Learning

By Kevin Gumienny | May 10, 2017 | | 2

Make Your Course Creation Process Repeatable with Clearly Designated Roles I often say that each person on a learning development team plays a different role. I’ve discussed using a role-based process for creating accessible elearning on our blog; our CEO, Sanjay Nasta, has also described the roles needed in elearning creation. Why Use the Concept of a “Role” When Developing Learning? When creating learning, there are multiple possible roles: one role might

Corporate Training Development Tip #3: Take Training Yourself

By Kevin Gumienny | April 20, 2017 | | 0

Corporate Training Tips & Tricks—Save Your Money & Prove Your Worth, Book Excerpt #3 NOTE: The following article is taken, with minor changes, from Corporate Training Tips & Tricks: Save Your Money & Prove Your Worth by Katrina Baker. It is one of three articles by Microassist Senior Learning Architect Kevin Gumienny. To hear more training tidbits from Kevin and other learning and development professionals, we encourage you to get your copy of

2017 TxDLA Annual Conference Backchannel

By Sanjay Nasta | March 30, 2017 | | 3

The 2017 TxDLA Annual Conference held in Galveston, Texas from March 28-31, 2017. Conference Sessions focus on trends in educational technology, education innovations and best practices, research, accessibility and universal design, cybersecurity and data analytics, faculty and student support, PK-12, educational outreach, and workforce development, administration, leadership, and policy, gamification and virtualization, and more. Microassist was represented at the TxDLA 2017 Annual Conference by Senior Learning Architect Kevin Gumienny and Heather Poggi-Mannis from

How to Make Elearning Accessible: Insights from the 2017 CSUN Assistive Technology Conference

By Kevin Gumienny | March 20, 2017 | | 6

A week at the CSUN Assistive Technology conference in San Diego leaves the mind reeling. So much new information! So much of it related to learning! A few presentations made this connection explicit, directly correlating learning and accessibility. What I’d really like to talk about though, is the way that accessibility, the process and principle of making content available to those with disabilities, relates to elearning. Drawing from various presentations,