As I’ve moved from traditional high school and university education into corporate Sales Enablement training, a very noticeable change is the culture and expectations about how instructors demand time from their learners.
The culture around tradition...
I recently tried a video game from a genre I never knew about – a roguelite game called Returnal – and I was surprised by the powerful effects it had on my motivation and willingness to persist through its high level of difficulty and frequent failure experiences. Returnal is infamous for its b...
My instructional design philosophy I’ve developed over decades as an instructional designer is one I call “Design for Forgetting.” It’s an alternative to the typical approach to workplace training that I think solves a lot of persistent problems in workplace training.
I have an 8 year old who’s a good reader but would rather spend his time doing anything else — especially pursuing his interests in karate, friends, and video games. His homework from school is to read 25 minutes per day and it’s a challenge to find high‐interest reading materials for him at his gra...
I’ve written before about my admiration for the WebQuest as a learner‐centric, active learning activity that can promote critical thinking through groupwork and authentic methods of representing learning. These were all the rage when I earned my M.Ed. in 2003 but have sadly been bumped aside in fa...
Often we instructional designers are given hours of video footage of recorded lectures or webinars, and it’s our job to edit them down into easily consumable, topic‐focused chunks of video. This can be challenging due simply to the sheer workload of reviewing hours of video, but it’s even harder whe...
How is the day‐to‐day life of an Instructional Designer different than that of a K12 classroom teacher?
Many classroom teachers are looking to make the switch into instructional design, and even though it’s all still teaching and learning, there are some big differences in the way you’ll work in a...
A friend emailed me asking about the latest AI‐powered tools that we instructional designers might use in our work. 2022 witnessed an explosion in the quantity and quality of AI‐powered media creation tools, and I wanted to summarize some of the main types and leading products in this space that we...
There are multiple stages each learner goes through in the process of learning something new. Learning (as well as “online learning” and “eLearning” and “remote learning”) are first and foremost a human, learner‐centered activity that is only augmented with various technologies.
Don’t get this t...