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...
We instructional designers are trained to think about learning objectives from the very beginning of a project, to design backwards from the outcomes we want to produce in learners, then think about the specific content and activities we want to build and deliver.
Non‐educators think about this...
I was struck when I joined the world of corporate training about how widespread the use of interactive PDFs was as an eLearning tool internally, but I then learned how it solves some common problems we learning designers face. Where the scrappy charter school teacher in me would normally reach for a...
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...
I recently started planning a three‐day live training event with a colleague, in which we had to design several active lear...
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 t...
Over the years I’ve been exploring Markdown as a content development tool, I’ve tried most of the Markdown editors available for Mac and Windows. In this article I’ll share my preferred editors aimed at different types of writers.
Markdown is very popular among two main au...