Everyone knows what a quality learning experience feels like: exciting, energizing, satisfying, and entertaining. Conversely, everyone knows what a bad learning experience feels like:bored, useless, disappointing or unsatisfying.
So how do you create experiences that inspire the first set of words and avoid the second? Based on our experiences designing high impact learning experiences for adults, we’ve identified four universal truths that apply to almost all of our engagements.
Demonstrating return on investment is much easier in some parts of the business than in others. In business development, for example, it’s much easier to prove that allocating additional sales resources or tools can directly lead to an increase in quantifiable revenue, which is then factored into a clean-cut ROI formula.
Last week, I had an opportunity to attend Charles Melcher’s Future of StoryTelling Summit at Snug Harbor in Staten Island. The Future of StoryTelling (FoST), a conference founded in 2012, invites influential thinkers to discuss how technology is going to change the “most fundamental unit of human culture”–the story. I was part of a team of graphic recorders visually capturing various roundtable sessions throughout the two-day event. What follows is my own story of my experience at the conference and some of my thoughts about what the future has in store for storytelling.
Due to the rapid evolution in consumer behavior when browsing travel destinations online, TripAdvisor is a brand that is constantly working to stay on top of their customers’ desires, expectations, and digital behavior.
In the video above, Ravi Meta, VP of core consumer product at TripAdvisor, highlights three key methods for staying ahead of customers through both quantitative and qualitative feedback: Continue reading
Companies in all industries are wrestling with how to crack the code to win in the digital space. Typically, they focus their efforts on shifts in business strategy. They concentrate on enhancing marketing capability, creating new digital products and services, improving their social media efforts, and upgrading their IT expertise.
From our experience working with clients across various market segments, it is clear that far less attention is paid to the important shift in leadership behavior that is necessary to foster a culture of innovation and experimentation.
There are four key issues that senior executives need to address in order to retool their organizations for success in the digital space. They must implement practical strategies that proactively engage:
With all the buzzwords and stigmas tied to online learning, rolling out online education programs in large organizations can be overwhelming. Earlier this month, we brought together online learning professionals and our Enterprise partners at General Assembly’s HQ in NYC to discuss online learning experiences. Throughout the day, participants engaged in activities to identify opportunities for engaging employees in online learning and helping employees apply what they’ve learned.
Around a year ago, when I first joined General Assembly, the zeitgeist held that Massive Open Online Courses, or MOOCs, were dying and that online education was doomed to fail. It was around this time that The New York Times cited a UPenn study that stated that only 4% of MOOC registrants complete their lessons and only half ever even view a single lesson.
So it was with a healthy dose of skepticism that I took on the role of Online Instructional Designer, tasked with building GA’s first online course: “The Essentials of Digital Marketing.” Over the next few months, the Essentials of Digital Marketing grew into an extremely successful and engaging learning platform, boasting a 71% engagement rate of students who complete lessons. To reach this point, my team engaged in a whirlwind of testing and discovery that uncovered a number of defining features for building effective online learning experiences.