One frequent buzzword you’ll hear a lot in the eLearning world is “microlearning”. More often than not, it’s pushed by companies trying to sell you on their new platform for authoring/ delivering learning in micro‐sized doses to your learners.
To adapt Dan Ariely’s quote about big data to the on...
Online learning tools like LMSes and 3rd party apps offer a variety of ways to notify learners of key events in their course. The new ubiquity of smartphones among learners opens up a wide variety of ways we can grab their attention – but with great power comes great responsibility. We need to t...
In response to: What Should Higher Ed in the Metaverse Look like? – from linkedin.com by Joe Schaefer
“The Metaverse is coming whether we like it or not…”
Spoken like a vendor with a vested interest in the Metaverse coming. In truth, any school or institution that embraces the Metaverse wi...
Alfred is my #1 favorite productivity tool for the Mac, and over the years I have developed some ferocious tricks to support the tasks I do everyday as an Instructional Designer. My work is equal parts content development and web design, so I like to mix conventional productivity tools with modern...
Our team maintains a library of basic research about eLearning vendors we’ve worked with, or may explore in future. Until now, these files were stored in Microsoft Office docs. When I was asked to review and revise them, I decided to convert them into a non‐linear, visual knowledge base using markdo...
I am subscribed to the r/instructionaldesign forum on Reddit, and this year it is positively overrun with teachers trying to figure out how to get out of the classroom and into the field of instructional design. This NPR article “More than half of teachers are looking for the exits” shows just...
I recently peer reviewed an early draft of a colleague’s training activity where he had to introduce a new corporate framework that employees are required to use in their work to a new group of employees who had never seen it or worked with it before. The first half of the training was a lecture int...
Since the rise of tools like Facebook and Twitter in the mid‐2000s, there have always been alternatives to the big social networks. Back then, most of the alternatives were me‐too products trying to achieve the same fame and fortune as Twitter a...
I often find myself being the old curmudgeon when the topic of gamification in learning comes up.
Don’t get me wrong – I love video games, but I think the characteristics that make a great game also make it a poor fit for most learning tasks (or at least, the types of tasks that we often teach in...
Most of us work from one deadline to the next, in an endless race to check tasks off our to‐do lists and stay ahead of everything left to do. Whatever your work is, digital technology means that you can also be saving little bits of the work you’re doing anyway and using them in interesting side pro...