Chicago eLearning & Technology Showcase 2026

Many learning and development professionals are carrying silent questions into every room: Do my skills still matter? Is this field leaving me behind? Where do I even start?

In this keynote session, Dr. Myra Roldan will create space for those questions and answer them with truth, clarity, and practical direction. Instead of offering recycled advice or abstract encouragement, Myra will give you a way to think about this moment differently. AI may be changing parts of the work, but that does not erase the need for people who know how to guide learning, support performance, and design with real humans in mind.

With the feel of group coaching and the energy of a keynote, this session will help you stop spiraling and start moving. You will leave with language for your value, practical ideas for upskilling, and a 30-60-90 day action plan for what comes next.

You are not obsolete. You are in transition.

Most L&D teams still respond to stakeholder requests by building courses. The real problem is never “we need training”—it’s an undiagnosed performance gap hiding in workflow breakdowns, missing tools, or management blind spots. This session introduces the Human-Machine Performance Analyst framework—a practical model for shifting from content order-taker to AI-augmented diagnostician.

Through live demonstrations with real workforce data, you’ll watch AI separate genuine training needs from systemic issues, map tasks across a 7-level human-AI collaboration scale, and generate executive-ready attribution narratives in real time. You will leave understanding how a small L&D team can diagnose at enterprise scale.

By the end of this session, you will be able to

• Distinguish between genuine training needs and systemic performance issues using an AI-augmented diagnostic process.
• Map current L&D tasks to the 7-Level Human-AI Task Scale to identify where AI should lead, support, or stay out of the way.
• Structure a 90-second executive data narrative that uses attribution modeling to connect learning interventions to business outcomes.

Is your elearning course due for a refresh? This session explores how to transform outdated, text-heavy content into visually engaging and interactive learning experiences using Articulate Storyline 360. You will learn modern design principles that improve layout, typography, color use, and white space to create cleaner, more effective courses.

The session also focuses on building meaningful interactivity that encourages learner engagement and exploration. Learn how to use layers, states, triggers, and variables to create user-driven navigation, scenario-based learning, and responsive feedback.

Through real-world makeover examples, you will discover how small design changes can significantly improve the learner experience. The session includes practical tips, creative techniques, and reusable templates that can be applied immediately to current projects.

Ideal for instructional designers, elearning developers, and training professionals, this session provides tools and inspiration for creating modern Storyline 360 courses that look better, engage learners more effectively, and improve overall learning performance.

By the end of this session, you will be able to

• Redesign an elearning course by applying modern visual design principles.
• Develop interactive course elements to support learner-driven navigation.
• Transform text-heavy content into visually engaging slides by incorporating appropriate multimedia and interactive components.
• Evaluate real-world examples of a course makeover.

In this session, learn how to leverage Articulate 360’s Rise to create an ebook accessible from a learning management system. In the context of a case study, Chris Zahn and Lauren Hamm will discuss the pros and cons of various document formats. They will also describe how they arrived at the decision to use Rise to solve a particular publishing problem for their organization. They will demonstrate the ebook they created and explain how to design and implement an ebook in Rise.

By the end of this session, you will be able to

• State the pros and cons of various publishing formats.
• Decide on the correct format to address a particular problem.
• Use Rise to implement an ebook.

Learning teams want better elearning experiences, but many instructional designers get stuck between rigid authoring tools and full custom development. In this session, Destery Hildenbrand will show you how to build lightweight interactive experiences faster using a practical prompt-and-revise workflow.

You will move from problem to prototype and explore where AI helps most with repetitive build work, basic layout, and rough first drafts. Destery will also demonstrate where the learning designer brings the most value, through structure, setup, organization, flow, and final design decisions. You will leave with a practical process that you can use right away.

By the end of this session, you will be able to

• Define a practical workflow for building interactive experiences.

• Evaluate which parts of the work are best supported by AI.

• Refine prototypes using strong instructional design decisions.

Your design toolkit is about to get a microlearning upgrade. You already apply design principles to your elearning, so what happens when you add principles built specifically for microlearning? Microlearning-specific design principles are a valuable complement to the elearning design knowledge you already have.

This session unpacks the seven microlearning design principles and the learning science behind them. You will see each principle come to life through a microlearning development tool, examining designs in real time and discerning the application and need for each element.

Whether brand new to microlearning or looking to sharpen an existing practice, you will challenge and validate your design thinking through guided discussion and collaborative activities. A practical takeaway handout will support continued application long after the session ends.

By the end of this session, you will be able to

• Define the role of cognitive load theory in microlearning design.

• Identify the seven microlearning design principles.

• Evaluate the application of microlearning design principles using a microlearning development tool.