"Hammock" by Life of Pix is Public Domain.

What a lot of distractions there are at this time of year! Whether you’re hunting down a Pikachu for your Pokémon GO collection or submitting to the lure of sun and sand, sometimes it’s hard to focus at this time of year. If you’re looking for some grounding, not to mention some new ideas for your business, why not check one of the free webinars being offered this August?

Tuesday, August 2, 2016, 12PM – 1PM PT: Reversing 200 Years in the Wrong Direction with Blended and Continuous Training

Attend this 60-minute webinar to get a preview of Martyn Lewis' session(s) at Training's Online Learning Conference in Chicago or to simply learn important best practices about grooming young professionals for success in an age of change:

In this session Martyn Lewis (Founder 3GS) will contend that training has been heading in the wrong direction for 200 years and that we now have the chance to reverse this trend by embracing blended and continuous training approaches. Thanks to technology, we can now re-architect and redesign training for how people actually work and live their lives in today’s world. However, this requires us to let go of old standards and embrace new approaches.

The webinar will cover:

Moving beyond the walls of the physical classroom.
How the physical classroom has acted as a constraint in the design of traditional training.
The 7 keys to the effective design of blended and continuous learning program.
How to determine what training should be live and what can be more effectively delivered asynchronously.
How the traditional content of a training program becomes highly decentralized and distributed across multiple mediums and vehicles.
The critical role of change management.

Tuesday, August 2, 2016, 9AM – 10AM PT: Authoring Awesomeness With 50,000+ Free E-Learning Assets (Free for ATD members)

Wouldn’t it be great if you could create training material quickly and easily without having to spend a lot of time and money designing your assets from scratch, or having someone design them for you? The good news is Adobe Captivate 9 makes it easy! You can use more than 50,000 free e-learning assets, which include themes, cut-out people images, interactions, and games, to build engaging and interactive e-learning courses and enhance your training programs.

In this webcast you will:

Watch a demo of the free assets available in Adobe Captivate 9.
Learn how to leverage the free characters, themes, and games to build engaging, interactive e-learning courses.
Find out how to quickly implement Adobe Captivate 9 to create new projects.

Wednesday, August 3, 2016, 10AM – 11AM PT: Learning Technology Strategy for the Modern Learner

Meeting today’s modern learners’ expectations requires a shift in our approach to the tools, resources, and strategies we use and implement as our environment rapidly changes and various generations merge in the workforce. Developing and implementing a strategy can be daunting with so many technologies to explore, along with navigating the challenging work environment, engaging the right stakeholders, and forming collaborative partnerships with IT and others. In this webinar, we will explore the following topics:

Making sense of the landscape.
Making an impact on the bottom line.
Making the connection with technology.
Making it happen.

Thursday, August 4, 2016, 10AM – 11AM PT: Are You Ready for the Inclusion Revolution?

Just a year or so ago, inclusion meant ensuring equal representation related to gender, ethnicity, race, and sexual orientation. But today, driven by the large numbers of millennials in the workforce, inclusion has come to mean something different. Increasingly, employees are calling for cognitive inclusion (CI), or the full acceptance of the whole person and their unique set of attributes and perspectives within the organization. In this interactive webinar, we'll explore recent research documenting the rise of CI and provide strategies for taking your inclusion strategies to the next level.

Thursday, August 4, 2016, 10AM – 11APM PT: The Critical Role of Leadership in Achieving Excellence in Healthcare Experience (ATD member/subscriber content)

Patient Experience matters. Its importance continues to grow and remains a top priority for healthcare organizations, as evidenced by our 2015 State of the Patient Experience study. And central to patient experience is the awareness that leadership is a primary driver of success in supporting an organization’s experience efforts. During this webinar, participants will learn a variety of strategies to support leaders’ success in delivering excellence in healthcare experiences.

Thursday, August 4, 2016, 10AM – 11AM PT: Work has Changed. Has Your Learning?

Organizations are constantly evolving—exploring new markets, improving processes and developing new products. Why is it then that so many do not give their employees opportunities to evolve as well? If the workforce isn’t developed, it can stagnate and prevent the type of innovation companies need to excel. Also, research from the Harvard Business Review states that a lack of development is the number two reason people in their 30s leave a job.

Discussion topics include:

Current trends in learning strategy and technology.
The expansion of the learning ecosystem.
Strategies for creating more effective learning experiences.
Best practices of high performing organizations.

Thursday, August 4, 2016, 11AM – 12PM PT: How to Shoot Rich Cultural Videos on a Smartphone

The value of creating rich, engaging cultural stories using video is often outweighed by the perceived time, expertise, and outside resources needed to produce them. This is especially true in L&D, where video creation is an area where content creators and instructional designers may not feel comfortable giving it a shot. In this webinar, we’ll share the philosophy behind our authentic, documentary-style videos and show how our proven production process puts them within reach regardless of your filmmaking experience. By the end of this webinar, you’ll have the insight, techniques, and resources needed to create your own cultural stories using the tools (smartphone and laptop) already at your fingertips.

Monday, August 8, 2016, 5:30AM – 6:30AM PT: Blended Learning (Free for ATD members)

Blended learning occurs when the best delivery methodologies available for each specific learning objective are incorporated into a curriculum. While you may have been blending pre- and post-program elements into your training mix for years, the increasing prevalence of learning technologies and tools requires a more strategic look at the most effective ways to integrate delivery methodologies.

In this webcast, you’ll learn how ATD’s Blended Learning Certificate Program can help you define blended learning and how to integrate it into traditional instructional design processes.

Tuesday, August 9, 2016, 10AM – 11AM PT: Training Doesn’t Work if Performance Matters

Once upon a time, learners attended full-week workshops. They had others who backed them up so they could be fully focused on the learning. When they returned, their boss and team expected them to be competent in the new things learned, and to begin using them immediately.

It’s likely this looks nothing like the world you are in. If you get a chance to go to an all-day workshop away from the office, you are constantly interrupted by work during the day thanks to email and other media, and you are twice as overwhelmed when you return the next day. The likelihood that performance will change is becoming less and less.

If you’re a person who, like me, believes that our duty is to help people perform better and make more impact at work, this realization is tough to accept. It’s time to step up, revisit how we deliver performance change and rise to the opportunity to truly improve productivity and engagement. Join Lou as she shares ideas, rubrics and tactics to move into the next evolution of learning and development.

Tuesday, August 9, 2016, 10AM – 11AM PT: Measurement Strategies of High-Performing Organizations – Does Your Learning Measure Up?

Often in organizations, the learning strategy loses sight of the overall business objectives and begins to operate in a vacuum where the only outcome is learning itself. Without proper measurement, it can be nearly impossible to know what impact learning is having on individual employees or the organization as a whole. So, where do you start? How do you identify the proper metrics and determine the proper ways to measure them?

Join David Wentworth, Principal Analyst with Brandon Hall Group, as he explores the results of Brandon Hall Group’s latest survey on learning measurement and identifies the strategies of high-performing organizations.

Webinar topics include:

Measurement strategies.
Use and effectiveness of various metrics.
The use of the Kirkpatrick and other models.
A focus on high performers.

Tuesday, August 9, 2016, 11AM – 12PM PT: No Desk? No Problem. Enable Your Mobile Workers With Engaging Content and Training (Free for ATD members)

Today’s deskless workers use mobile devices to access, discover, and learn new information. Take advantage of your mobile-enabled workforce by delivering interactive, engaging content and training programs to their smartphones and tablets. Use this interactive, mobile content to save time, money, and resources while empowering your workforce.

In this webcast, the speaker will share best practices for creating mobile content that educates and inspires your workforce. You will learn:

How mobile learners are different from traditional classroom learners.
What content techniques make training useful, memorable, and effective.
How multimedia and interactive content should be utilized in mobile training.

Wednesday, August 10, 2016, 10AM – 11AM PT: Enabling Virtual and Blended Learning Success: An SAP Case Study

Is your virtual classroom viewed as just a cost-cutting measure? Prior to 2013, the SAP sales organization utilized virtual and blended learning, but without an integrated strategy. Learn how in 2013 they introduced GCO University Virtual Live Classroom program, serving over 15,000 sales and sales-related employees globally and changed from a perception of “yet another online training program” to a core value in learning plans with an integrated approached and consistent, quality instructional design.

During this session, participants will:

Gain an understanding of the challenge of virtual live learning faced in SAP.
Hear about SAP's virtual learning strategy, evolution and how it's enabled.
Discuss the future environment, vision, and way forward.
Have access to an infographic and white paper related to the session.

Wednesday, August 10, 2016, 11AM – 12PM PT: 7 Ways to Build a Virtual Learning Strategy (Free for ATD members)

Does your learning management system (LMS) leave your employees dazed and confused? Are you struggling to capture the attention of your global employee base? Would you like your training to be more interactive and engaging?

Join this webcast to learn how virtual learning environments can complement your existing LMS platform to better equip your learners for success at your company. It will feature seven best practices for:

Providing a more engaging learning experience.
Making training a more accessible, intuitive process.
Tracking training activities more effectively.
Dramatically reducing the costs associated with training.

Thursday, August 11, 2016, 9AM – 10AM PT: Super Closers, Openers, Revisiters, and Energizers or SCORE for Webinars

If modern technology is so groovy, why do so many webinars put people to sleep faster than “The Monotone Silence” Symphony? Often, instructors neglect their participants’ learning needs. In this fun and interactive session, Pluth models activities and principles that convey content through a webinar format while keeping learners engaged, no matter the size of the audience. You’ll get to the CORE of Webinars with Super Closers, Openers, Revisiters, and Energizers.

Thursday, August 11, 2016, 10AM – 11AM PT: Agile Learning Technology for the Corporate Enterprise

Year after year, our research shows that above all else, organizations want learning technology that is easy to implement, easy to integrate, easy to use. That doesn’t change for organizations that have to roll out training to a large number of learners. So why do these enterprise-scale companies find themselves with large, unwieldy tech implementations? Just because your organization is large and complex doesn’t mean your learning technology has to be.

The current array of solutions available opens up the landscape for large companies, who once had only a handful of large providers to choose from. It is possible to roll out a solution that is relatively easy to implement, includes modern features and functionality, and scales to the needs of the enterprise. Does your learning technology reach the entire organization?

Discussion topics include:

Enterprise learning tech landscape.
Implementation challenges.
Best practices for linking learning and performance.
Examples of large companies and their solutions.

Friday, August 12, 2016, 10AM – 11AM PT: Technical Experts to Strategic Leaders (Free for ATD members)

The transformation of a technical expert into a strategic leader is an evolutionary process. The process consists of distinct stages of development, moving from a base of personal competence to building organizational capacity to changing the business.

This webcast will describe a road map of the changes in perspective and behaviour needed for individuals to operate at a strategic level.

Tuesday, August 16, 2016, 10AM – 11AM PT: Leading Virtual Teams (Free for ATD members)

Leading virtual teams is one of the toughest tasks in today’s organizations. This webcast will help managers develop the intercultural competence and communication skills required when leading virtual teams. Attendees will learn to:

Identify the characteristics of a virtual team, including the challenges and opportunities of leading virtual teams, and apply key techniques to build trust with and among team members.
Define three key strategies for leading effective virtual teams and identify what virtual team members need and expect from virtual team leaders.
Apply virtual team leadership techniques and identify technologies for working on a virtual team and how to apply them effectively.

Tuesday, August 16, 2016, 12PM – 1PM PT: Slack Classrooms, EduGadgets and Hot Learning Design: 2016 Online Learning Conference Preview

The 2016 Online Learning Conference is nearly here! The conference is loaded with great keynotes, xFactor experiences in Chicago, in-depth certificate programs, diverse breakouts, hands-on clinics and lots more.

In case you are wondering what else will be happening at 16OLC, you can get a sneak peek in our coming webinar with Training magazine's creative engagement director Steven Dahlberg and three 16OLC speakers:

Educational Futurist Myra Travin on why the online collaboration platform, Slack, is increasingly a great choice for online classrooms—which we will also be using for our online Peer-Learning Community for four weeks leading up to the conference.
Instructional Strategist Phylise Banner on how to smash—"combine"—multiple apps to create the ultimate learning object. Plus, get a preview of the 16OLC Technology Test Kitchen and the EduGadgets that will be featured in this makerspace approach that will share innovative tools for integrating technology into training design, development and delivery.
16OLC Chief Technology Officer Bryan Chapman on some of the coolest eLearning tools, products and services that will be showcased in the 16OLC Learning Design Challenge—including mobile, gamification, social/collaborative, microlearning and analytics solutions.

Wednesday, August 17, 2016, 10AM – 11AM PT: The Road to Success – 10 Steps to Gain Leadership Buy-In for Your Online Training Program

Leadership support is critical to the success of a training program, but many are challenged in building that bridge and actually gaining the support that is necessary.

In this session, the facilitators will cover why leadership buy-in is critical and introduce a 10-step program to make it happen. You’ll walk away with ideas, guides and action plans to implement.

This session is perfect for anyone just starting out or struggling to make the leap.

In this session you’ll learn:

The 7 Key Factors for Learning Program Success.
Learn about the Maturity Model, what it is and how to take action.
Go through the 10 steps to gain leadership buy-in.
How to manage change or interruptions to your launch.
Valuable recommended resources to continue on your journey to leadership buy-in.

Thursday, August 18, 2016, 10AM – 11AM PT: Using The 5-Step Scenario Learning Design

Scenarios have been with us for so many years. Yet, a significant number of designers and trainers use these as a memorization tool or branching exercise. They forget that scenarios are supposed to re-create life situations.

Consequently, most scenario courses come across as really boring. Learners end up “clicking-clicking-clicking” without being emotionally engaged.

In this webinar, you will learn the very heart of the scenario design.

The 5-Step Scenario Learning Design is a sure-fire formula that you can test your scenarios against. Discover how you can revitalize, reinvigorate and add the much-needed spark to your design again.

Topics covered:

Making scenarios truly engaging.
Learning the 5-Step process.
Using the engagement test.
Implementing the character vitality test.
Applying the real-life test.
Utilizing the learning objectives test.

Attend the webinar and preview demos and examples.

Tuesday, August 23, 2016, 5:30AM – 6:30AM PT: Mobile Learning (Free for ATD members)

The ongoing evolution of mobile technologies is driving continuous change in the ways organizations do business, recruit talent, and communicate with customers and employees. Those same mobile technologies offer unprecedented opportunities for talent development functions to connect with workforces and deliver relevant learning content when and where it is most needed.

Companies are aggressively looking for ways in which mobile technologies can give them a competitive edge. Mobile learning is becoming an important area of focus for many organizations looking to push learning and development to an audience that has smartphones, tablets, and other mobile devices.

Yet there is still a strong belief among people who are not intimately familiar with mobile learning that it is nothing more than e-learning on a mobile device. How do companies take their significant investment in e-learning and convert it for use in a mobile world?

In this webcast, you’ll learn:

About the current mobile learning landscape.
How ATD’s mobile learning certificate program can provide you with the latest and most accurate content on mobile technologies, strategy, design, and resources.

Tuesday, August 23, 2016, 10AM – 11AM PT: Are Your Leaders Really Ready for Today and Tomorrow’s Business Challenges?

Leadership readiness is stuck in the status quo.

Brandon Hall Group’s research shows that only 12 percent of organizations currently feel their leadership is very ready to meet the needs of the organization and only 5 percent feel their leaders are very ready to take on the future needs—organizations as just not “leadership ready.”

Organizations need to accelerate the velocity and positively change the trajectory of their leadership development programs by focusing on how to better help their leaders grow—the question is how do we accomplish this?

This session will explore:

What is the state of leadership development?
How do organizations assess where they are and where they need to go with leadership development?
What are the challenges impacting leadership development?
What are some of the practical solutions organizations are implementing to address these challenges?

Tuesday, August 23, 2016, 11AM – 12PM PT: 5 Instructional Design Principles to Help Improve Your Corporate Training (Free for ATD members)

Corporate training is vital for any business, but employees don’t always retain what they’ve learned. Businesses often lack skilled instructional designers and instead leverage in-house experts with no background in training. This webcast will review some simple instructional design principles based on cognitive science that are easy to understand and apply. You’ll learn how to:

Improve learning outcomes.
Build engaging training that employees will retain.

Wednesday, August 24, 2016, 10AM – 11AM PT: The Costs Associated with Buying an Open Source LMS

When you purchase a cloud-based learning management system (LMS), where is your money going? How does the value compare to that of ‘closed’, proprietary systems – subscription fees, hosting, set-up and configuration. The costs vary, and it can be hard to compare.

In this live webinar, facilitators will unpack this seemingly senstitive topic, and try to lay the facts open for all to see. With 15 years of experience implementing LMS solutions – much of it in the open source world, including Moodle and Totara LMS – we know all the behind-the-scenes factors that keep your LMS running seamlessly, meeting your e-learning requirements, and ultimately require investment of one kind or another.

From set-up to data migration to training, join us and discover where exactly your money is going when you purchase an LMS.

You'll learn:

The main costs associated with an open source LMS
Important questions to consider when organizing deployment activities
Workarounds to avoid hidden LMS costs
How to maximize user adoption

Wednesday, August 24, 2016, 10AM – 11AM PT: From Monologue to Dialogue: Adding Interaction to your Presentations

Opening channels for collaborative communication is critical in today’s ever-changing work place. Employers and managers risk drowning out valuable input and alienating employees if they simply push information out and dictate direction. However, providing and managing invitations to participate can be challenging. In other words, moving from monologue to dialogue is necessary, yet difficult. You must balance presenting clear information concisely—that is, commanding the room—with facilitating input and innovation—in other words, collaborating creatively.

In this webinar, you will learn specific, immediately applicable facilitation techniques that are informed by scholarly research.

Your will learn to:

Manage anxiety prior to speaking so that you are calm and confident when engaging your audience.
Prepare your audience for interactive participation.
Facilitate the participation while it’s happening, such as calling for questions and queuing them up.

Thursday, August 25, 2016, 10AM – 11AM PT: Developing Resiliency: 6 Powerful Strategies for Women to Thrive at Work (Free for ATD members)

Women bring exceptional talents to the work they do, yet often face struggles to achieve fulfillment. While women make up roughly half of the world’s workforce, the vast majority of senior leaders across industry sectors are male. Women need to anticipate, navigate, learn, and grow from the challenges they encounter for career success. The ability to maintain your resiliency and thrive in the midst of adversity is an intentional choice. When women consciously make that choice, they are better equipped to be transformed by work-related challenges.

During this webcast, the presenters will introduce the Resiliency Framework, which was developed from extensive research and interviews. The framework consists of six strategies that help women thrive in the face of career challenges. While the framework is focused on women, many of the strategies can be applied across genders. The strategies are also applicable to all people developers who work with women, including coaches and HR professionals.

Attend this session to find out which resiliency strategy you need to strengthen to increase your career satisfaction and viability. You will take a brief assessment to determine your resiliency needs, and you will leave with at least one action that you can take immediately to increase your resiliency. By using the six resiliency strategies, you can create a career defined by growth, success, and satisfaction.

Friday, August 26, 2016, 12PM – 1PM PT: How to Avoid Being a Terrible Boss (ATD member/subscriber content)

If you are a manager or aspire to be one, don't miss this special members-only webcast. Katy Tynan, author of Survive Your Promotion! The 90 Day Success Plan for New Managers, will discuss how to avoid negative management behaviours and will answer queries posed by you.

Friday, August 26, 2016, 11AM – 12PM PT: Creating Sustainable Operations in Healthcare Using Lean Six Sigma (Free for ATD members)

Many clinical care settings suffer due to organizational and operational inconsistencies and inefficiencies, reducing the quality of care and patient outcome measures. This is also true in emergent care settings, where the stakes can be higher. This is because, as with medicine, process improvement is a field of knowledge that must be learned and applied; you can’t just hope for better results. Patients don't recover from injury or disease by being frustrated with the status quo or by wishing things were better—and operational practices don’t improve spontaneously, either.

This webcast will cover many of the tools and methods that offer the opportunity for immediate triage when sustainability seems elusive, as well as making your processes work for you in the long term. You’ll learn:

Some of the most common ways in which clinical and emergent care settings miss their objectives.
The principles of Lean and Six Sigma that were designed specifically to address these issues.
The results of a case study in which Lean Six Sigma principles were applied to performance improvement in a hospital setting.
Ways to keep performance improving over time.