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...
I was lucky enough to grow up during the 1980s heyday of Choose Your Own Adventure stories, a low‐tech precursor to the electronic branching scenarios that are now common in modern eLearning, as well as the interactive fiction craze made possible by branching text editor Twine in the Int...
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...
This is an update to my previous post, The “Attention Method” for Effective PowerPoint Presentations.
My Attention Method™ of presentation design is a philosophy more than anything. It’s a belief that your presentation slides must support your audience’s attention to fully follow and comprehe...
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...
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...
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...
You, the learner, are the most important person in any learning or training experience. Not the teacher, not the textbook, not the technology. You.
According to learner‐centered instruction, the focus needs to be on what information you retain, the lasting insights you create, and the skills you...
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...