Enspire deploys its Signature Simulation line of leadership development products to clients worldwide. Opportunities and excitement come with the territory, as did a recent… military coup. Enspire Associate Taylor Nyberg was already in country when political events in Thailand temporarily derailed her team’s Bangkok deployment. Applying the maxim "improvise, adapt, and overcome" Taylor and Co. adjusted plans and hit the countryside to befriend an elephant, and this apparently well-fed tiger. The post Spotlight > Enspire Sims in Thailand appeared first on Enspire.

There’s a lot of developer buzz around AngularJS, and rightly so. Angular has pretty cool features right out of the box that can save web devs bunches of time. Two-way data-binding, dependency injection, and modularity are just some of the big features being touted for this framework. After scrolling through dozens of blog posts and articles discussing the benefits of Angular, we decided to take a look to see how it could fit into Enspire project workflow. Verdict: AngularJS needs some of its pointier angles filed down before it joins our toolbox. Why? Read on. Intangibles Parts of the Angular framework are described as "magic". Maybe this term is used to abstract away some of the framework’s complexity. Or maybe we’re just grouches, but calling something "magic" implies that what goes on behind the scenes is unknowable, or too complex to convey to users of the framework. This is a problem with any open-source framework that is as complex as Angular, because it can make it hard to find shortcomings or areas where the framework doesn’t line up with project need. In the end, that can make a dev’s life harder. This feeds into our second concern: There are very few people actually talking about limitations of AngularJS. Sure, there are plenty of people out there saying that Angular sucks (possibly, because it is unfamiliar). We actually think Angular is pretty cool and some of the things it can do take some of the burden off the shoulders of coders using it. But all frameworks have shortcomings. The fact that it is hard to find objective information regarding Angular’s pitfalls - perhaps because it’s new - makes it hard to evaluate the framework. Getting started with Angular is almost insanely easy: download the library, add it to your app, do a tutorial, and bang you can use Angular. Ok, ok - almost every framework or library touts how quick it is to get started building apps. That leaves something very important out of the conversation, however. It takes a good deal of familiarity with AngularJS to build a medium to large app that doesn’t look like spaghetti (I’m looking at you directives). This makes it more costly, both in time and resources, to get new developers ramped up on a project which uses Angular and can present a barrier to entry for otherwise qualified developers. Tangibles The documentation is terrible. Quite a few people have mentioned this, and it really should be one of the things Google addressed prior to releasing the framework as 1.0. Word on the street is that documentation has been getting better and by 2.0 should be fantastic. But that doesn’t help now. The two-way data binding which Angular is capable of is at once pretty cool and a potential nightmare. Having two thousand pieces of data rendered on the page seems like a large number and an argument can be made that having that much information displayed at once is bad UX and rightly so. Except that there are cases where you might have a great deal of information hidden until needed or even some large tables, grids, or other dynamic visualizations which easily hit two thousand discrete pieces of data very quickly. This is not something we would expect to encounter with every project but is a crucial bit of information when deciding which stack to use. Directives are also a really cool feature of Angular and a necessity if you plan on building anything with more than a modicum of complexity. Directives can be hard to figure out, even using the documentation, but are what really drives the time-savings when using Angular. The main problem I see with using directives is that it is difficult to tell when a directive has completed (for something like an animation) without using something hacky like a timeout. It may not look to bad from a pasta point of view, but if you want consistency across the widest range of browsers and devices then this is really a no-go solution. There are other issues with Angular including how the router works, lack of support for accessibility, 3rd-party library headaches, and consistency with TDD. But those can be worked around for the most part. I hope to find myself working with Angular one day on the right project, but for now there are a few roadblocks making it difficult for us to do so. The post Heretic: Our Reverse Angle on AngularJS appeared first on Enspire.

1) Would you guess that a typical adult learner spends more time in his or her email inbox or LMS? Obviously, the email inbox. So why not deliver courses via email? This would be a smart solution for bite-sized portions of learning content delivered over a period of time. Little and often. 2) Speaking of "little and often," Donald Clark lays out 10 ways to massively increase retention. All 10 strategies lead to one thing: spaced practice over time. The post Two for Tuesday: Email and Retention appeared first on Enspire.

OptumInsight is driven by the philosophy that information and technology are the keys to transform the healthcare industry and improve people’s lives. Over 8,000 OptumInsight employees world-wide, including doctors, nurses, biostatisticians, coders, epidemiologists, economists, engineers, and technologists are dedicated to this mission.  But with such a diverse workforce, many OptumInsight employees were unaware of all the markets the organization serves, or how it provides solutions to these various markets. OptumInsight partnered with Enspire and our media design arm, Houndstooth, to develop This is OptumInsight! an online onboarding program that prepares and unites new employees in a common understanding of the company. Learners explore through three doorways, "Working at OptumInsight," "Who We Serve," and "What Is OptumInsight?" A variety of sleek, vibrant, media types provide a fun, dynamic, and compelling welcome to the company, culminating with the OptumInsight challenge. The challenge is learners’ opportunity to showcase their new understanding of all that OptumInsight is and does. To see more, contact Enspire today for a demo of This is OptumInsight!   The post Friday Spotlight > This is OptumInsight! appeared first on Enspire.

Today, more than ever before in human history, knowledge is readily accessible. There is no need to cram training programs chock-full of content. Instead, learners can connect to just-in-time knowledge resources: ubiquitous internet access instant text/voice/video communication tools "cloud" workflow collaboration performance support systems knowledge management systems Just-in-time knowledge resources combined with a self-service model is the answer to course content glut. Text is a resource. Practice is instruction. Focus online learning programs on practice rather than knowledge acquisition. Create a risk-free tryout environment, contextualized to performance needs. Enable learners to sip from the fountains of knowledge, rather than to drown by a fire-hose of information. Knowledge is readily accessed. But experience is earned. The post Why less is needed more than ever before appeared first on Enspire.

Physicians’ Reciprocal Insurers (PRI) understands that effective communication in medical care is highly correlated with better patient adherence. According to an extensive review of literature published between 1949 and 2008, training physicians in communication skills results 1.62 times better odds of patient adherence. With this statistic in mind, PRI partnered with Enspire and our media arm, Houndstooth, to create Tuning In: Communication Skills for Partnering with Patients. The five-hour online curriculum features virtual patient encounters derived from real medical malpractice cases, and allows physicians to explore and enhance their medical soft skills in a variety of challenging patient situations. Learners make decisions about what to do, say, and the appropriate care to provide to virtual patients. These patients provide real-time feedback to the learner’s choices. Success is measured by whether patients understood and took an active role in the course of their care, and if they received the care that was best for them. The fun, immersive experience is facilitated by a virtual mentor who provides expert consultative feedback, enabling learners to draw valuable learning conclusions from larger patterns of behavior. To see more, contact Enspire today for a demo of Tuning In: Communication Skills for Partnering with Patients.   The post Friday Spotlight > Medical Soft Skills appeared first on Enspire.

Cisco needed a way to promote a new global initiative called Cisco Organizational Learning (COL), so we developed an e-learning course in the style of a graphic novel that introduces COL and motivates employees to participate. The learner is taken down two paths of the story to reveal cause and effects and discover the importance of the initiative. This course was a true collaboration between Cisco’s subject matter experts and Enspire  instructional designers, artists, and developers. If you’d like to learn more about the design and development process, watch a 2012 Brandon Hall webinar in which Cisco’s Dawn Adams Miller and I talk about the project. Or, watch the following short video for a few highlights from the course.   The post Friday Spotlight > Cisco appeared first on Enspire.

1) Our industry is obsessed with "the fold." It’s as if we think our learners forget how to scroll once they enter an online learning experience. Baloney. 2) Inspiration comes when you least expect it, and often not right when you need it. I think the trick is to continuously expose yourself to things that have the potential to inspire you and save those sources of inspiration for later retrieval. Get started now. Here are 10 unusual sources of inspiration. The post TFT: Above the Fold and Inspiration appeared first on Enspire.

This week Enspire’s Product division delivered Executive Challenge to 270 new Full-Time MBA students at the University of Texas at Austin’s McCombs School of Business. Enspire has delivered the simulation - one of Enspire’s suite of Challenge business simulations - since 2007. The Executive Challenge day begins early with a fast-paced introduction to the sim, then proceeds through several quarters during which learners make critical business and organizational decisions under time pressure. Between rounds, learners are encouraged to break out and strategize their company’s actions for coming quarters.  The simulation is  part McCombs’ orientation to its top-ranked MBA program, and serves the following goals: To offer a shared experience during which students can network and build relationships they can leverage in the future To introduce students to important concepts which will be built upon in business school To encourage the students to think about the ethical implications of business decisions As the end of day capstone, Learner companies pitch to a panel of investors. Enspire will also be executing Executive Challenge with their Executive MBA and Executive MBA at Mexico City students later this month. If you think ExChal might be right for your business program, contact Enspire today!       The post Friday Spotlight > Executive Challenge appeared first on Enspire.

Think of the most engaging asynchronous course you’ve ever experienced as an online learner at work. Can you picture it? Remember the interactivities, practice opportunities, and challenges included in the learning experience? Now ask yourself: Did you use a keyboard? Maybe you typed a password that enabled you to launch the course. Or, you entered your name to "personalize" the course (that’s not really personalization, by the way). Other than that, you most likely only interacted with the course by clicking or touching. You were probably not asked to write anything. Now, think of the work emails you’ve composed this week. Can you picture them? Remember the explanations, justifications, and clarifications you painstakingly detailed? Now ask yourself: did the composition of your emails or the completion of the online learning experience require deeper thinking? Most likely: the emails. That brings up three questions: Why is the act of writing such a powerful learning experience? As I said in an earlier post, writing promotes reflection, increases creativity, builds networks, and more. Perhaps the greatest benefit is that writing helps clarify ideas. The process of writing this very post is a great example — I’ve written and rewritten these paragraphs multiple times as I’ve sharpened my thoughts. What is it about writing for an audience that is so powerful? Wired recently included an excerpt from Clive Thompson’s new book, Smarter Than You Think, that explains this phenomenon. It’s called the audience effect — the shift in our performance when we know people are watching. When a person is asked to communicate an idea to someone else, they focus and learn more. For most people, the size of an audience doesn’t matter. Thompson argues that "the cognitive shift in going from an audience of zero (talking to yourself) to an audience of 10 (a few friends or random strangers checking out your online post) is so big that it’s actually huger than going from 10 people to a million." Why don’t we ask our online learners to write more often? Perhaps the most common explanation is that it’s difficult to track online learners’ writing. The SCORM standard doesn’t make this easy. In theory, a SCORM package could tell an LMS, "Hey, Joe Blow wrote the following paragraph…" However, SCORM packages have a finite number of characters that can be stored and communicated to an LMS. So, depending on a variety of technical factors, one could ask learners to type short responses to a handful of questions that are then reported to the LMS. But, unless someone is going to read all of the responses submitted to the LMS, no one is going to be able to verify that they were sufficiently written. Besides, writing for an audience of one (i.e. the LMS) isn’t very motivating. Despite the challenges associated with providing writing opportunities during an asynchronous learning experience, it’s possible. Here are a few ideas to get your started: Early in the design process, send a survey to your target audience asking for their thoughts on a topic. Then, include a sampling of those responses word-for-word in the course. Ask learners to respond to questions outside of the SCORM package. Link to a discussion board where learners can write their thoughts and read posts written by others. If tracking participation is important, provide a numeric code on the "Thank You" screen that appears after a post has been submitted. Learners could then enter that numeric code within the course to demonstrate completion of the activity. Based on a learner’s performance within the formal learning experience, assign them to one of two groups: experts and up-and-comers. Then, pair a member from each group together and ask them to connect via e-mail. However you do it, try to stop ignoring the keyboard when designing asynchronous learning experiences. Pointing and clicking can make for great learning experiences, but writing can make them even better. The post Keyboardless Corporate Training appeared first on Enspire.