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...
When I was a young high school teacher, I remember reading an article drawing a distinction between “activity” teachers and “outcome” teachers. Activity teachers were the ones who planned their lessons full of engaging activities, but who didn’t think deeply about the learning outcomes that they’r...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
In college I had a writing teacher who stressed the point that
Writing represents you when you’re not there. -Alberto Rios
It was his way of impressing upon us young writers to make sure everything we mean to say actually makes it onto the page. A common pitfall among young poets is to...
This video shows you how you can quickly convert a Markdown formatted presentation outline into an HTML5 presentation using Reveal.js. I think this method is a great way to familiarize yourself with web technologies while producing attractive and powerful presentations that work gr...
A longtime friend, colleague, and collaborator of mine who works in new teacher education is starting a blog, and asked me for some help on getting started. Here’s my email response…
Hi Friend, There’s s...