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Michael Choi is CEO of Coding Dojo, a coding boot camp.

Michael Choi

January 2019 - TD Magazine

Tech Skills Are the Next Must-Have

Motivational speaker Michael Clark delivers power tools and real-world strategies in high-energy keynotes and trainings. Michael teaches business and education professionals the most essential 21st century skill: How to transform productivity and performance in the midst of intense situations, persistent challenges and difficult people. Michael’s entertaining and engaging delivery brings the direct experience of performance transformation to your audience and event. He teaches people how to think and communicate better, manage emotions more effectively, and make creative choices within the context of daily professional and personal challenges and opportunities.

Michael Clark

An understanding of the need for better online accessibility has grown markedly in recent years, perhaps accelerated by the digital shift during the COVID-19 lockdowns in 2020. Legislation in different parts of the world has also been a driver of awareness and action.Accessible learning is good for everyone.As an online activity, e-learning falls squarely within the scope of accessibility requirements. But whether you’re responding to a compliance deadline, pressure from customers, or a corporate commitment to diversity and inclusion, it’s well worth noting that designing training with accessibility in mind can enrich the learning experience for everyone, not just those with a defined disability. So, accessibility should be a priority for any L&D professional who wants to optimize the learning experience.Where to start?Unless your strategy is to invest in your own in-house accessibility expertise, the natural first step is to find the right partner to advise and assist you.First, they should understand the requirements of any legislation you need to comply with. Second, if you’re interested in more than compliance—because, let’s face it, ticking compliance boxes is not always the same as taking a best-practice approach— they’ll be able to explain different standards and what you could be doing to transform learning through accessibility improvements. There’s a difference, for example, between a basic screen reader experience, which may be good enough for compliance, and a great screen reader experience, which makes a real difference for usability.Third, they should be able to help you develop a roadmap and a plan to achieve your e-learning accessibility objectives.Consider remediation from the start.Every respectable accessibility improvement plan starts with an audit against the relevant standards to establish what accessibility gaps exist. Once these are identified, the next step is remediation—fixing the identified accessibility issues—so it’s worth considering from the start whether you want your accessibility partner to help you with this.If you’re happy to handle remediation in-house or through a different partner, then it won’t matter if the accessibility specialist you choose doesn’t have specific expertise with e-learning platforms, hosted assets, and content formats. But if you do expect to need their remediation support, it can be a big advantage if they are also e-learning specialists. Consider this carefully before making your choice—and don’t forget that accessibility covers both your e-learning platform and the training content that it holds.Consider the impact of localization.Hopefully, localization is part of your e-learning strategy, since L&D has a greater chance of success when it happens in the learner’s native language. But this means that accessibility testing must cover all the languages you localize into. Even if you’re applying the same accessibility standards across countries and languages (legislative differences may mean this isn’t the case), it simply doesn’t follow that if your e-learning is accessible in one language, it will automatically be accessible in any other.For example, what if your e-learning platform doesn’t accept voice commands in all of the languages you cater to? Or, what if the way you’ve handled forced line breaks for certain Asian languages causes real trouble for screen readers?When you’re choosing an accessibility partner, make sure that they cover all of the languages you need. If they’re helping you with remediation, they also need to know coding best practices that address the user experience from both a localization and accessibility point of view—not compromising one for the sake of the other.Another way that localization and accessibility can go hand in hand is that the right localization partner can make a big difference to your accessibility journey. For example, video accessibility might feel like a big hurdle to clear, but it isn’t if your localization partner also offers (multilingual) accessible content services such as closed captions, signed videos, audio descriptions, and descriptive transcripts.It's an ongoing process.E-learning accessibility isn’t a one-off project that you complete and forget. It takes continuing vigilance and an accessibility-first approach to platform and content development. Otherwise, improvements you make will be undone over time.If you use a third-party e-learning platform or rely on e-learning vendors for course design and development, you’ll need to engage with them to achieve your accessibility objectives. If you do any of this in-house, you’ll need to update your own software standards, guidelines, and checklists, and educate your software engineers and learning designers to put accessibility front and center.There’s certainly a lot to get right when it comes to e-learning accessibility. But that doesn’t mean it needs to be painful. Help exists to make the complex more controllable and achievable. I hope I’ve inspired you to get started.

E-Learning for Everyone: How to Address Accessibility

Given the economic and emotional benefits of working for leaders and organizations that cultivate cultures of connection, it’s no wonder that organizations that pay well and provide emotional compensation become the employers of choice in their indus

To Cope With the Labor Shortage, Raise Emotional Compensation

True and sustainable accountability cannot be imposed on others through regulations, protocols, or management edicts. Real accountability comes from within each person and reflects individual values and purpose. It’s a choice.
Creating a culture where this kind of accountability is the norm doesn’t happen by chance. It requires intentional effort to develop the skill of accountability in each of your employees. They need to be able to:

Take ownership of their responsibilities.
Show initiative to produce key results.
Tackle high-stakes situations by using all of their 28 relational strengths.

In this webinar, Michael Patterson will explain how healthcare organizations can elevate their performance by creating a proactive culture of accountability using a proven behavior-change method that integrates people, performance, and process. In the end, you’ll see what it takes to get people to want to be accountable and create sweeping changes in your culture.
 

Creating a Culture of Accountability in Healthcare

January 2023 - TD Magazine

How to Listen: Discover the Hidden Key to Better Communication by Oscar Trimboli and The Burnout Challenge: Managing People’s Relationships with Their Jobs by Christina Maslach and Michael P. Leiter

Book Capsules, January 2023

Winter 2018 - CTDO Magazine

Chief Talent Officer Michael Arena is helping build adaptability into General Motors’ workforce.

GM’s Internal Disruption Engine

Michael Hussey has been chief information officer (CIO) for the Utah Department of Technology Services in October 2015. He has been with the Department of Technology Services since 2006.

Mike Hussey

Michael W. Allen is chairman and CEO of Allen Interactions, whose studios build universally acclaimed custom e-learning, provide strategic learning consulting, and train e-learning professionals in collaboration with ASTD. With a PhD in educational psychology from The Ohio State University, Dr. Allen has pioneered multimedia learning technologies, interactive instructional paradigms, and rapid-prototyping processes, bringing each forward into leading corporate enterprises. He is an adjunct associate professor at the University of Minnesota Medical School, a popular conference speaker, and a prolific writer. In May 2011, he received ASTD's Distinguished Contribution to Workplace Learning and Performance Award. In May 2012, Allen was selected by The National Ethnic Coalition of Organizations (NECO) Advisory Committee as a recipient of the 2012 Ellis Island Medal of Honor. Through a proven process and skills born from experience, Allen Interactions delivers exciting interactive solutions that enhance knowledge, skills, and performance. It is one of the most successful and highly regarded providers of custom e-learning, training, and consulting, with studios in Minneapolis, Tampa, and San Francisco.

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