Revealed: DevLearn 2023's top 7 sessions for L&D professionals + Watch Smartcat's recorded session on AI multilingual course content generation

One of the things that makes DevLearn unique is the range of ways that information is delivered.

From structured multi-day certification courses to informal drop-ins, DevLearn offers something for everyone. Among the enormous amount of sessions to attend at this year's conference – held in Las Vegas, 25-27 October – we've tried to do the impossible here of whittling them down to just seven.

This list is based on our own experience, from our team's attendance at the entire conference and the feedback from 200+ attendees with whom we spoke throughout this year's insights-packed event.

You can also watch the recorded session that Smartcat put on at DevLearn. Scroll down to watch. 

First of all, a disclaimer: Smartcat was the official sponsor of this year's opening general session. As the opener for the entire conference, it is, of course, an especially important session to kick off proceedings. This year's was given by Phil Rosenthal, the creator of Everybody Loves Raymond, and more recently known for Netflix series, Somebody Feed Phil.

In “Learning through Travel, Curiosity and Food”, Phil delivered a funny, insightful talk littered with personal anecdotes and stories of his much-vaunted career to 3,500+ attendees. attendees for his entire session. The recording will soon be available on the DevLearn site.

xAPI (Experience API) is an e-learning software specification. It records and tracks various types of learning experiences for learning systems. And it has the potential to become an effective supporting tool to course development professionals in 2024.

The Learning Guild’s xAPI certification program at DevLearn packed all the knowledge and information needed to get started into a dense two-day format. If you missed it, don’t worry.

You can still sign up for the Spring 12-week program, starting in February 2024. If you just want to know what xAPI is and how it differs from SCORM, check out this side-by-side comparison on the xapi.org site.

L&D teams tasked with delivering multilingual training content face three major hurdles: high cost, poor quality and slow turnaround time, especially when working with outsourced service providers.

In this session, Andrew Federici, Smartcat VP of Marketing, and Mark Stauffer, Senior Manager of L&D at Brink’s, shared how global enterprises use Smartcat AI and human workflows to translate courses and develop new content in minutes.

After Mark showcased how Brink’s uses Smartcat AI, Andrew delivered a live demonstration of Smartcat AI Content Generator in action, translating an Articulate course in minutes, and demonstrating translation of voice-over and spoken content into French.

Now you can watch it if you missed it! Click play in the video player below to watch the Smartcat session.

Want to try out generative AI for course development but don’t know where to start?

Christina Nilsen’s hands-on session proved to be a valuable introduction. The overview slides, notes and activity documents are all available online, so you can try it out for yourself even if you missed the DevLearn session.

If you like to geek out on AI, this may have been the geekiest session at DevLearn!

Michael and Nikolaus Hruska of Problem Solutions addressed the challenges and opportunities associated with the adoption of emerging tools to train custom AI models.

They covered custom model training, tuning, and how to decide if or when you need to train your own model. Of special relevance to L&D applications, they explored the ethical considerations associated with training custom AI models, including issues of bias, transparency, and accountability.

This session makes the list not just because of the topic, but also because of the breadth of panelists.

The result was an engaging and insightful look at the current state of AI in learning, and some thought-provoking suggestions on how to shape the evolution of AI within your own organization.

Panelists included David Kelly and Jane Bozarth of The Learning Guild, Frank Nguyen of Genentech, Clark Quinn of Upside Learning, and Don Taylor of The Learning and Performance Institute.

Starting at 7:30am, before the main conference sessions, Morning Buzz gave attendees the chance to take part in casual conversations with peers and provided a competitive advantage to participants looking to make the most of each day at DevLearn.

Early birds got to share best practices, learn about fast-moving trends, and hear recommendations for sessions to attend or booths to visit. This was a wonderful addition to inject a more casual meet-and-greet into the conference format, which we'd love to see more of at other industry events!

And that's our list for this year! If you stopped by the Smartcat booth or came to our presentation of Smartcat AI Content Generator, we'd like to say thank you. And if you missed out on this year's event or weren't able to meet us, we hope to see you at DevLearn 2024!