Why You Should Subscribe to Learning Solutions Magazine Today! by Bill Brandon

“Learning Solutions is regular, reliable, and convenient. It offers quality content from qualified writers. Articles and their authors are vetted. Publication happens every week, and all content is searchable. Learning Solutions Magazine and its predecessor The eLearning Developer’s Journal have been in continuous publication since March 2002, much longer than most blogs, resulting in a much deeper, much richer collection of content.”

Content is more than king on the web today. Content is everything on the web, including eLearning. Content includes text, video, images, audio, and all the conversation that flows through social networks.

In that vast sea of content, Learning Solutions Magazine is number three on the list of the Top 50 most socially-shared online eLearning publications, according to the Center for Management and Organization Effectiveness. Readers shared articles from this magazine across social media over 10,000 times in 2013, and that number is rising even faster in 2014. Each month this year, over 53,000 individual professionals read at least one article in Learning Solutions Magazine. This publication is respected and trusted in the community of learning professionals worldwide.

If you aren’t currently a subscriber to Learning Solutions Magazine, I’d like to tell you a bit more about us, what we offer, and why you should become a subscriber. Maybe I should mention something at this point: the subscription is free! Not only that, you don’t even have to belong to The eLearning Guild. Subscribing allows you to see the full text of all articles as soon as they are published, and to participate in the comments.

Learning Solutions Magazine is the online publication of The eLearning Guild, which is the largest community of practice for professionals in the training, learning, and development field, currently with over 60,000 members around the world. We publish three to seven articles most weeks, 52 weeks a year. Last year that added up to 244 articles, and this year, as of this article, we have published 162. Our archive includes over 1,400 articles.

When you become a subscriber to Learning Solutions Magazine, you have access to this entire collection of searchable content.

First, every one of those 1,400+ articles comes from authors who actually work in the training, learning, development, and performance support fields. Unlike some other magazines, we do not use freelancers with no experience in the areas we cover to produce content.

Second, Learning Solutions Magazine presents a range of topics relating to the design, development, and management of content to support learning and performance mediated by technology. We also offer content for the needs of readers across the spectrum of experience, from trainers who have never produced technology-mediated content, to those just getting started, those with several years of experience, to those who are at the advanced level, and management all the way up to director and executive levels.

You’re busy, so our articles are concise and to the point. Each one is intended to respond to a need or concern or problem that is common to many practitioners. We offer:

Weekly featuresFirst-rate columnists: Jane Bozarth: Nuts and Bolts (instructional design and social media)Marc Rosenberg: Marc My Words (management)Patti Shank: eLearning Guild Research (real data from real practitioners)Art Kohn: Brain Science (neuroscience research applied to learning)Joe Ganci: Toolkit (software reviews and tips)Nic Laycock: EMEA Reporter (excellent learning examples from Europe, the Middle East, Africa, and South America)Mark Lassoff: Mobile, Tablet, and Laptop (adaptive design)Tips and “how-to” articles Spotlights (cool stuff other designers and developers are doing)Industry news and announcements

Here are some popular articles from our current and past offerings:

“Corporate Executives and the New Secret Weapon: Learning Data”“From Teacher to Facilitator”“eLearning Guild Research: Reconsidering Bloom’s Taxonomy (Old AND New)”“The Elusive ROI for Learning Through Technology”“Taking Blended Learning to the Next Level”“Interactive Video: The Next Big Thing in Mobile”“Video Compression Secrets: Smaller Files, Better Quality”“Six Steps to Creating High-quality Video Training”“Seven Top Authoring Tools”“Online Education for Instructional Designers: Picking the Right Program”“Reconciling ADDIE and Agile”“The xAPI and the LMS: What Does the Future Hold?”“Development Tips: Creating an HTML5 Mobile App with PhoneGap”“Five Steps to Evaluate and Select an LMS: Proven Practices”“The Six Proven Steps for Successful LMS Implementation”“Writing Multiple-choice Questions for Higher-level Thinking”“The 2014 Global eLearning Salary & Compensation Report”“Gamification, Game-based Learning, Serious Games: Any Difference?”“Report Card: Gamification in Learning (What Works?)”“Moving Beyond MOOCs: Experiments in Non-traditional Product Education”

There are hundreds (if not thousands) of blogs that address training, learning and development, eLearning, performance support, and related topics. You can certainly gain a lot of knowledge from them if you are patient, but how many blogs do you have time for?

There are other characteristics of blogs to consider. Each blog typically offers just one person’s viewpoint, often less a viewpoint than an opinion. You don’t always know much about the writer’s level of experience. It isn’t often easy to search blog content for the specific information you are looking for, and searching across all blogs can be time-consuming and unproductive. Publication intervals vary: some blogs publish daily, some weekly, and some catch-as-catch-can, so you have to check them all regularly; even using a feed reader does not solve the scanning and searching problem.

I’m not suggesting that you give up reading blogs. There are excellent ones and you are smart to take advantage of what they offer. What I am suggesting is that you should also take advantage of everything that Learning Solutions Magazine offers, and the way to do that is to subscribe.

Learning Solutions is regular, reliable, and convenient. It offers quality content from qualified writers. Articles and their authors are vetted. Publication happens every week, and all content is searchable. Learning Solutions Magazine and its predecessor The eLearning Developer’s Journal have been in continuous publication since March 2002, much longer than most blogs, resulting in a much deeper, much richer collection of content.

Your free subscription to Learning Solutions Magazine gives you immediate access to everything in that collection of content, and you benefit from the combined knowledge of a global community of practice. I’ve listed just a few of the many benefits of subscribing, and I invite you to join our thousands of subscribers today!

(Bill Brandon has been the editor of Learning Solutions Magazine since 2002. He has been working as a trainer and a designer, developer, and manager of instruction and performance support since 1968. He began developing and managing eLearning in 1984.)

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