• Plans for starting podcasting in a company with the dream big, start small and plan to scale up quickly philosophy.
   
• Some interesting work from David Rock on brain research and applications for rethinking training programs.
   
• An interesting product called LeaderGuide Pro that was in the expo.  It imports notes and slides from PowerPoint and automtically formats them into participant and leader guides.

• Increasing participation in mandatory inservices--It may help to encourage competition among departments and reward the first department to achieve 100% participation with an ice cream social or free lunch.  We also discussed going to the departments that have the lowest participation and discussing with the manager ways the training department could help the manager improve compliance for the mandated training.
   
• Dealing with project throughput.  How can the instructional design team adjust workload to remain fully employed even when a client delays a project and yet not become overwhelmed when the client suddenly decides to restart the project but you have already moved on to other projects.  Does anyone have some ideas for handling this?
   
• Building buy-in from other departments to use the services of a training department (currently they want their SME's to retain ownership for the development of training)--Ideas included having the one department that had successfully transitioned course ownership to the training department share its experience with other departments.  Another possibility was to train the SME's in the instructional design process.  That can help improve the quality of the training they develop, and the SME's may be excited to participate because it is professional development for them.  Yet another idea was to throw a party/ice cream social to thank the "friends of the training department."  At the party you could showcase the department that has the more progressive relationship with training as well as thank the SME's in the other departments and highlight ways the training department can support them.

• One of the first issues raised was on evaluation.  The question raised was "what do I do with the 'smile' sheets after I put them in Excel; what do I do with the data?"  There were several sessions on ROI and evaluation at the conference that could be useful in helping answer the question of how to get the most value from the information collected.
   
• Another topic was looking for ideas here at the conference on what's new and help in creating new and different training.  What can be done to help when it feels like you're doing the same thing over and over again in your training program?  A big challenge in bringing in new ideas is finding ways to incorporate activity that the trainers will actually use.  How can you address creativity when those conducting the programs skip those activities in the name of saving time?  Creating materials with blanks that participants would fill in was an idea that was shared - a simple way that trainers would not skip over and something to keep participants active.  One question to suggested was "if you didn't have a training room and tools, how would you do the training?"  A great thought to stimulate creativity on ways to incorporate active learning.  Sharon Bowman's "The 10 minute Trainer" book was a resource suggested for ideas.  The book has over 140 ideas for activities that take from 60 seconds to 10 minutes.  Even those trainers who try and cut time from your designs would likely do an activity that only takes 60 seconds.
   
• What do you do when you have a lot of great content but want to move it from instructor led to elearning?  What if you still want to make sure that there is a high degree of interactivity?  There are many vendors here at the Expo that have elearning tools to help with rapid design/conversion of content.  Rapid Intake, Articulate, and Lectora were all tools that were mentioned.  Michael Allen's alleni.com website was suggested for ideas and examples of different techniques to involve and engage learners.  Michael also has several sessions at the conference as well as several books - one of which was just released last week.  ASTD also offers an elearning and advance elearning certificate programs.
   
• What are some ways to learn those instructional design skills when you're a new designer?  And how can you help convert existing materials into reference materials to accompany training?  Another professional association like ISPI (International Society for Performance Improvement) has great resources for instructional design.  Also, ASTD has several certificate programs like the designing learning certificate.  And Langevin Learning (langevin.com) also has public seminars for learning instructional design skills.  Information Mapping (infomap.com) has some great samples, tips, and techniques for creating documents and reference manuals that are readble and organized for maximum readability.

What great thoughts do you have for the questions raised by the group?