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Engaging learners through interactive video
Many people are already using video to deliver training, but traditional video can only go so far to meet learning needs. Interactive video, where questions, branching, and other interactions can be added to enhance the experience, has been becoming more mainstream and easier to create in the past couple of years. We’ve been particularly impressed…
New Staff On-board: July 2017
We warmly welcome Karen Gillie and Nigel Young to our team at Synapsys. A former lecturer in adult learning, Karen has been designing workplace L&D for most of her career. She has extensive experience in matching technology to organisational requirements and is responsible for managing our LMS implementation projects. Nigel has over 20 years’ experience…
Notes from ATD Atlanta 2017
With over 10,000 attendees and hundreds of presenters and vendors, nobody sees everything at ATD. Here are a random collection of ideas and tools that caught my attention. Evaluating learning impact From Tony Bingham’s conference welcome, IBM has sidelined big data analytics for measuring learning impact and gone to asking managers what they think…
Business Problems: Totara Solutions Workshop
Bebe and Phil ran a session on looking for technical solutions to business issues as part of the TotaraLMS conference last week. The focus of the session was to look at the issues and problems that workshop participants faced in their everyday work life. We flushed out a great range of issue – for example:…
Synapsys NZ appointed as provider on All-of-Government (AoG) Consultancy Services Panel
As part of the All-of-Government (AoG) Consultancy Services solution, New Zealand Government Procurement (NZGP) has established the Business and Finance category to offer eligible government agencies specialist advice and competitive solutions from a broad panel of experienced consultancies. Synapsys NZ Ltd is pleased to have been appointed as a panel provider in the Human…
Getting buy-in for measuring learning impact
I recently attended a webinar presented by Andy Webb from Applied.com on getting buy-in from your boss for learning measurement/ analytics projects. It’s worth a look here if you have time. If not, here are a few of my takeaways… Of course, your programme should be designed around your organisation’s KPIs, and you should measure…
Moving from workshops to blended learning
Many, many of our clients are looking to re-purpose workshop based learning programmes to a blended learning approach. There are numerous drivers. Cost of delivery is the most common one, closely followed by bottlenecks in availability of experts, and a concern around the lack of evidence of uptake and application of learning (“they attended, but…
ATD 2015 Panellists’ thoughts on ROI
Some thoughts from a panel on ROI at the ATD2015 conference comprising Rick de Rijk, James Kirkpatrick, Laura Paramoure and Shaun Riley… #1 We tend to frame programmes around curricula – the objectives we hope will deliver the change we’re looking for. If we framed them around the KPIs that defined success instead, we’d be…
Improving your development processes
For many organisations, a development process includes just the core of the product development cycle – the initial concepts or storyboards through to final deployment. But there are wider considerations within any development cycle that need to be addressed if you want to ensure your development process is the best it can be. There are…
Measuring the success of your initiatives
Whether you’re developing and delivering a learning initiative, or improving your L&D processes, we all know we should measure the success of what we’re doing. Clear benchmarks, clear goals, compelling evidence of the logic of us doing more with bigger budgets for the betterment of our organisation. Often we don’t though…. No benchmark to measure…
Inspirational Keynote from Sugata Mitra at ATD2015
Keynote speakers have a rare opportunity to shift thinking on a large scale. 10,000 registered for ATD2015, it looked like well over half attended Sugata’s session. He well and truly took his chance; this blogpost is no doubt a tiny part of the ripple that will spread out from the session. It doesn’t cover his…
Will LRSs replace LMSs?
Learning Records Stores are gaining traction because of their ability to track and report on informal or unstructured activity. Working with Experience API (also known as Tin Can and xAPI), LRSs provide rich data on learner activity as they move around outside of structured content typically put together and managed within LMSs. This leads some…
Global Human Capital Trends 2015; Deloitte University Press
This report from Deloitte puts Learning and Development as the third highest talent challenge facing organisations (from a survey pool of 3300 business in 106 countries). Sitting only behind culture and engagement and leadership, it got an average importance rating of 74/100. It’s up from 8th place last year. On the face of it, it’s…
Connection Culture by Michael L Stallard
Michael Stallard argues in Connection Culture that growing a ‘connection culture’ in your organisation gives competitive advantage. He argues that it helps productivity, innovation and staff retention, amongst other things. In support, he sites research that compared business units with engagement and connection scores in the bottom 25%, against others with the top 25%’s median…
Mastering Mobile Learning by Chad Udell & Gary Woodill
We all struggle to figure out how to fold new technologies into our learning experiences. It seems human nature to try and shoehorn the new tool into our existing paradigm, rather than ask how our paradigm could change. If this sounds familiar to you, Mastering Mobile Learning will be a useful tool to help you…
The New Social Learning, Tony Bingham & Marcia Conner
If you’re interested in understanding what Social Learning really is, and what it’s rationale might be, Chapter One gives you plenty to think about. There aren’t many recent trends the authors don’t touch on. Lean, BYOD, Gen Y and Millenials, 70/20/10, they’re all in there along with a strong underlying themes around passion, energy and…
Leveraging learning technologies for business impact
Summary of Retirement Villages Association Financial Sector Forum, October 2015 Presentation Recent research holds that Learning and Development has become a critical tool in meeting the global challenges in talent development.[1] We see common challenges across all sectors driving this; the need to adapt to change, retain staff, reduce cost, and find new revenue streams….