This week’s curated content includes links exploring the following:

• • how to vet neuroscience-related content
  • a great resource full of free icons
  • an interview with the developer of KFC’s VR application
  • questions to explore why your L&D department exists and the purposes it serves
  • a list of great explainer video examples
  • an examination and comparison of personas and the Jobs-To-Be-Done framework

Neuroscience Under Scrutiny by Stella Collins
Neuroscience is one of the hottest buzzwords in our industry. Unfortunately, that also makes it one of the most confusing terms in our industry, as plenty of orgainzations and individuals use the term inaccurately and improperly to capitalize on the buzz. What’s a learning and development professional to do to separate the fact from fiction in the emerging world of neuroscience-backed training? This post proposes six powerful questions you can ask to vet information being shared about neuroscience. More importantly, the questions are easily adapted to any emerging topic whose research you are looking to verify.

Magicons – 2867 Flat Icons
Imagery is a valuable – and sometimes expensive – asset for elearning designers and developers. Any time an resource with free and/or low-cost assets becomes available, I like to bookmark the site for future reference. This link takes you to a site offering a download on thousands of simple icons that can be used in your projects.

KFC Virtual Reality: The Hard Way by Scott McCormick
Last year a new VR application became available that “taught” people how to make KFC chicken. It was a unique storytelling experience that blurred the lines between training, entertainment, and marketing. This post shares an interview with one of the developers of the project, offering a unique behind-the-scenes view into the design and results of this virtual reality application.

Aligning L&D with Business by Taruna Goel
In the rush to deliver upon the needs of projects learning and development teams support, it’s easy to lose sight of the larger “why” questions that can form the lens through which we see and apply our work. It’s important to take time to step back and look at the work we do each day and apply it to the context in which it’s being done. This post does a nice job of providing one of those “step back” moments and includes a number of great questions to consider about the work we and our teams do each day.

17 Examples of Fabulous Explainer Videos by Lisa Isbell
Explainer videos are very common, and are used in all sorts of areas, from sales to marketing, and yes, for training? But what makes a good explainer video? Sometimes the best way to understand what makes a great video is to see some quality examples in action. This post curates 17 such examples, so you’re likely to find inspiration for the next explainer video project you embark on.

Personas and Jobs-To-Be-Done: Which is Better? by Beatriz Costa
While the use of personas in elearning development is growing. they’ve actually been in use in the larger world of design for quite some time. There’s another design emerging framework called Jobs-To-Be-Done (JTBD) that some in the design community argue should be used instead of personas. I share this post here because it does a great job of explaining both personas and JTBD, as well as comparing the advantages and disadvantages of each.

Win an Oculus Go!

facebook recently released the Oculus Go, the first standalone VR headset for consumer use. This watershed moment will help propel the usage of virtual reality – including the usage of VR for training and learning – even further.

We’re excited to explore this new technology at Realities360 and will be hosting a testing station in our Technology Showcase where you can try this amazing technology for yourself.

We’ve also secured two of these devices to be raffled off to Realities360 attendees! To be eligible to win, you just need to be registered for the conference by Friday, June 8. To gain an additional entry into the conference, follow @realities360 on Twitter and tweet about why you’re excited to #GoToRealities360 using the hashtag.