In early 2020 I was tapped to design an onboarding program for three new Instructional Designers that would be added to our team in the coming months. I decided to take a multi-modal approach to designing the onboarding experience, balancing consistent, online, low-touch eLearning experiences with high-touch, rich, interactive, learner-centered …
The Coronavirus quarantine has given all kinds of non-technical computer users a crash course in Zoom online meetings. This creates an opportunity for those users to develop skills in recording their own high-quality explainer videos, screencasts, and lecture sessions. Zoom’s record meeting feature can produce a high-quality MP4 video file …
Harnessing Turned-On Brains A live learning conference or training event can be a busy, chaotic, and stimulating setting for learning new things. Not only are you following a packed schedule of interesting speakers exposing you to new ideas, but you’re also surrounded by other professionals like yourself, with interesting insights …
Whether you’re designing a presentation, an online course, or just updating your blog, your choice of images can add meaning to your message, or completely distract from it. At worst, poorly-chosen images can diminish your credibility, distract your audience, and even get you into legal trouble (!!!), so it’s important to choose images with care.
According to learner-centered instruction, the focus needs to be on what information you retain, the lasting insights you create, and the skills you are able to perform after the training event is over.
My process for creating animated motion graphics is unconventional but it has distinct advantages over the industry standard method of using Adobe AfterEffects or CC Animate. Instead, I design a slide deck in Apple Keynote using slide transitions and object builds, export the timed presentation as a video file, and …
This is a pretty dense, fiber-full article about backward learning design by one of my instructional design heroes, Michael Feldstein. It introduces the concept of Backwards Design (part of Understanding by Design, which he also introduces). Most importantly, it makes the case that designing course strictly aligned with learning outcomes enables us to collect data programmatically, scalably, so we can make timely interventions that result in better student learning overall.
I recently started planning a three-day live training event with a colleague, in which we had to design several active learning experiences, with the learnings from each session building upon those that came before it. Whether you’re writing a multi-chapter book, planning a complex course, or prepping for a big …
In this post, we’ll discuss the difference between “just in case” learning and “just in time” learning, showing the ideal use cases for each.
The open source writing tool Twine bills itself as an “Interactive Fiction” authoring program – a way for people to make text-based choose-your-own-adventure games and post them online. In fact, there is a vibrant community of writers who create their own branching fiction stories for others to enjoy and play. …
