Finally, more businesses are concentrating on the bottom line and their return on investment (ROI) from their organization's training efforts and expenses. As a result, you will continue to hear more about Performance-Based Learning (PBL), which focuses learners on what they need "to do" to drive business results and delivers learning aligned closely to actual need.

1. Good instructional design helps learners make sense of new information being taught. Training should never be just a dump of information.
2. To make sure learners understand what they need to learn, good instructional design provides clear learning goals. This ensures that learners will not focus on the wrong things and will focus on the appropriate specific pieces of information they need to learn.
3. By including examples, practices, exercises, and discussions (interactivity) throughout the training, good instructional design provides the context and perspective (real meaning) learners need in order to understand and process (remember) new information.
4. Using information from the subject matter expert(s) and compressing it into a streamlined course saves learners a lot of time (and saves companies a lot of money).
5. By designing and developing engaging learning experiences, good instructional design better engages learners and provides more effective learning.

1. Participants must believe the e-learning will be useful to them.
2. If value for the participants is not obvious, provide a vivid example to make it obvious.
3. The program must provide opportunities for success, never failure or uncertainty.
4. Make the program real to participants by, for example, anchoring the topic to something familiar to them.
5. Since participant involvement will be required, demonstrate what that participation might look like.
6. Make the program active and thought-provoking - keep participants doing and thinking.
7. Make it human by including stories, lessons learned, quotes, anecdotal trivia, etc.
8. Guide and track participants.
9. Blend your e-learning program with other learning tools and opportunities, such as blogs, a performance support tool, an online assessment, online chats with fellow learners, a forum, videos, etc.
10. Use online communities to help participants form relationships, collaborate, and work as a team with others - by using a blog, wiki, discussion board, and other online tools.
11. Make it POP! Add some WOW! This requires creating something dramatic, compelling, and authentic that is still also perceived as valuable to the learner.
12. Measure results and effectiveness, and keep on improving.

• Of the eLearning Guild members surveyed, 17.3% use mobile learning (m-learning) sometimes or often.
• Members with 7+ years of experience use m-learning 25.6% more often than members with 6 years of experience or less.
• Of the Guild members who took the survey, 37.5% said they plan to do more m-learning in the next 12 months.
• The most popular m-learning platform used by survey responders is Blackberry (46.6%), with Windows Mobile being used by 26.9% and iPhone 15.2%.
• The majority (81.4%) of members who have implemented m-learning have seen improvements in learner/user access and availability, with 59.4% seeing improved user performance.

Corporate training is necessary for a variety of reasons, from focusing on a company’s critical needs to empowering employees to take control of their responsibilities and help improve business performance. Each organization follows its own methods to impart this training, both to new hires and existing personnel according to the needs of the company. E-learning programs, once considered the outcast in the training world, has gained in popularity for more reasons than one:

• The software and resources needed are cost effective.
• They can be designed and tailor-made to suit the needs of your organization.
• They can be altered and changed as the nature of jobs and responsibilities morph to adapt to changing expectations and policies.
• They can be implemented rapidly.
• These programs are standardized, which means employees across the board are provided with the same instructions in the same form of delivery. Your company is thus more cohesive as a unit.
• They allow trainers to cut back on travel costs and time.
• With the Internet and the Intranet offering the advantage of connectivity anywhere and everywhere, employees can train on the job or at home at their leisure.
• E-learning development can be outsourced leaving your staff free to handle other responsibilities.

In spite of all these advantages that e-learning offers, organizations have moved on to a newer form of training, one which blends traditional and e-learning methods and takes the best of both to impart training to corporate circles. In other words, it’s old wine in a new bottle. Blended training came into its own when people started realizing that one size does not fit all and that each company’s needs are different.

Blended training sought to maximize returns on training programs from the organization’s point of view – it followed the principle that training programs exist not to educate employees and make them experts in their jobs but to help improve their performance in such a way that the business is profitable and that the organization’s goals are met.

With more emphasis on increased performance and maximum returns at the lowest cost, organizations are turning to a mixture of media and tools to impart training. Depending on their size and turnover, they adopt a blend of electronic and human training methods – the electronic aspect ensures that there is an element of standardization while the human aspect ensures that the process is accountable and the returns measurable. Formal classes, PowerPoint presentations, seminars on the web, manuals and discs with study material, books, meetings, conferences, hands-on experiences and simulations are all adopted in varying degrees by organizations, all of whom are striving to find the optimal combination that provides the best impact.


Guest Blog Contributor By-line:

This article is contributed by Heather Johnson, who regularly writes on California teacher certification. She invites your questions and writing job opportunities at her personal email address: heatherjohnson2323 at gmail dot com.