By Eileen Terrell, VP, Communications and 2018 ATDChi President Elect
Dejuan Johnson, Statistician with the Membership Team
Susan Camberis, Editor, Training Today
The 11th annual Chicago eLearning and Technology Showcase (CETS) was held at Northern Illinois University’s Naperville campus on Tuesday, August 14, 2018. Co-hosted by ATDChi and STC Chicago, this year’s event was a well-attended exploration of eLearning and how people interact with technology.
Sessions discussed a range of topics from designing eLearning and ways of making it more engaging to using different (less traditional/ less obvious/ emerging) technologies in eLearning. There were also learning spark sessions, in which speakers had a very limited amount of time to present with timed slides!
“I sat in on a session entitled ‘A First-Timer’s Guide to Building eLearning.’ It was an appropriate session for me considering that I’ve never completed an eLearning project. I left the class with a better sense of how to plan out an eLearning project, and [am] pretty excited to do so,” said Dejuan Johnson.
One of the day’s highlights was the keynote address by David Kelly entitled “The Now & Next of Learning & Technology,” during which Kelly discussed the importance of looking at innovations in technology and in our lives so that we can understand how we learn with technology. According to Eileen Terrell, “The key takeaway was to look outside of the L&D world at other industries to expand how one thinks about how technology can be used…what I am doing differently is seeking to understand how others are using technology. For example, I am asking questions from my Marketing and Healthcare friends to learn more about what type of technology they are exposed to, and how.”
According to Terrell, “[One of] my other favorite sessions was ‘Podcasting, the On-Again Trend in Audio Content: Tips, Tricks & Techniques’ with Nancy Munro. [Nancy] really made it simple to understand the process for creating a podcast and shared a variety of interesting ways that podcasting can be used. I am now looking for opportunities to create podcasts, for the sales organization, since they spend a lot of time driving.”
CETS will return in 2019, location and date yet to be finalized.
