Admit it, didn’t the title of this post catch your eye? Coming back from vacation and digging into my feeds I found this interesting article from Wired – Everything You Thought You Knew About Learning is Wrong. While the title makes a sweeping statement, I found that’s not what the article is really about. Perhaps the reporter needed to relearn a thing or two and forget a few too. As an instructional designer, there is a lot of common sense in this article that I directly apply to creating learning solutions. However, there are two really interesting points that caught my attention and linked back to some ideas I had written about before (you can read those here and here).

Over the years, you have probably noticed that the typically linear eLearning development process has undergone some changes. One change that I’ve noticed are that customers are realizing that we aren’t just creating courseware or writing content and interactions, we are also developing software. This has led to an expectation that the eLearning industry adopt some development models and methodologies from the software industry.

There sure are lot of learning design community folks who love to play digital games.

It’s always interesting to hear gamers talk about why they play certain genres of games and what aspects of those games they love.

What is even more impressive is the passion and motivation that gets individuals to play these games.

I recently came across a blog-post by Susan Weinschenk which provides a quick overview of ideal user experience guidelines from a psychologist’s point of view.

The article addresses a diverse set of user experience guidelines and standards and consists of some really practical and useful tips which can and ought to be implemented right away.

Here’s a quick summary of the points which I found to be relevant to eLearning and Instructional Design.

Last week Towards Maturity published its latest report on e-learning adoption, utilization & effects in the European automobile industry. I worked in the automobile industry for a few years in the early part of my professional life. I remember attending a large number of classroom training sessions and video based training using VHS players which at the time were the only technology assisted learning at that time –between 1997 & 2000.  So I was quite keen to see what the report had to say about the state of learning technology use in the industry today.

There’s a definite movement towards delivering learning on tablets and mobile phones. It is quite common these days to get client requests for delivering elearning (meant for traditional desktops) or mobile learning (meant for mobile phones) solutions on tablets too. Is that a good idea? I think a more consciously chosen approach for tablets would be better in most cases, while sometimes just publishing to multiple devices may be suitable.

The battle between web technologies (read ‘Apple and Adobe‘) started a couple of years back when Apple decided to not support Flash on its newly launched iPad terming it buggy. Apple backed HTML5 to be the next big thing and single handedly forced the developer community to take sides. The eLearning industry was not too happy about the iPad not featuring Flash as it meant reinventing the wheel for animation and interactivity in eLearning.  Also HTML5 was not ready for eLearning development then. The fact is the iPad has taken a significant lead in the tablets market. I’d say purely because of the brilliant ‘form factor’ and the fact that it’s backed by the most popular app store.

I’ve been away from the blog for a while; work assignments have required that I travel to North America. After some long flights and the resultant jetlag, I’m just starting to get back into the groove now. As I was looking through my feeds this morning, I noticed a post from Karl Kapp in which he mentions a presentation by the Chapman Alliance, which talks about development costs for an hour of Elearning based on a survey.

This time around we focus on the basics – learning and its right mix. We talk about the changes in the key drivers for blended learning, some fundamental characteristics of training to be followed, and the pros and cons of eLearning. And while we are on this, how can social learning and game-based learning be left behind? Read an exciting case study in social learning and learn about some games and game-related projects that are already making a difference.

We’ve been serving the Australian market for more than four years now. It’s not a large market for us but one that has been growing consistently. I just returned from a two week-long business visit to Australia this Sunday, not my first visit to the country but definitely the one where I sensed that the local eLearning industry is gaining momentum. A little googling and I discovered this report from The Canadian Trade Service, claiming the y-o-y growth rates in Australian elearning market to be around 27.3% between 2004 & 2009 and 12.8% for next 5 years. This blog claims that analysts predict Australia is likely to become the 2nd biggest market for eLearning after the USA.

It’s been a trying time of the year; erratic schedules, vacations and finding time to introspect has meant I’ve not blogged over the last month or so. As I get back on track, it’s time to start blogging in earnest again. We’ve gone from attending eLearning conferences to mLearning conferences; it’s just around the corner from mLearnCon 2011. As mobile computing becomes mainstream, it is worth thinking about the nature of learning in the future. As technology permeates our daily lives and goes on to become an essential part of it, the impact promises to be far-reaching.

From transforming a classroom course to an online format to globalizing eLearning for a global audience to implementing QR codes in classroom, and more. We have covered it all here in our Weekly Digest – a collection of our top 9 links from the week gone by, each accompanied by a quick brief.

Need to quench your thirst for the latest in learning, technology and media links further? You can dig into our previous lists here