In continuation to our series of monthly roundup posts, here is a collection of our top 10 posts for August, each accompanied by a quick brief.
1. Creating Successful m-Learning Strategy – Part 3
Third and final post of the series on creating successful m-learning strategy, based on the mLearnCon workshop, this post discusses about the tools and techniques used for developing mLearning courses.
Over the last few weeks, I have been learning about the fundamental concepts and basic principles of designing electronic instructional media. These concepts are essential knowledge which constitutes a firm foundation, before one can be effective in an Instructional Designer’s role that involves media design.
In continuation to our series of monthly roundup posts, here is a collection of our top 10 posts for July, each accompanied by a quick brief.
A couple of month back I had shared a list of top 30 online resources for instructional designers to keep up with. That post seems to have got good circulation. Recently I came across this discussion on LinkedIn – best book for beginning instructional designers. The discussion has thrown up a great list of books for instructional designers worth sharing with our readers too.
We’ve had some new instructional designers join Upside Learning recently. They come from varied backgrounds, with varying levels of experience and expertise in eLearning development. We don’t offer much in terms of training other than a bit of induction niceness. While they’ve been assigned to work on projects on one hand, they’re also required to hit the ground running when it comes to media design.
Yes, I’ve not been blogging as regularly as I might have liked to. I’ve been busy with projects – bread and butter.
We’ve always focused on instructional design being essential to the design of courseware. That’s certainly true, it’s the first step to make a learning solution instructionally sound. The next in line is to make it interesting, engaging, interactive. Too many solutions fail at that crucial stage. I’ve seen too many hours of what is commonly termed ‘shovelware’ that result from this failure.
Previously when I discussed freeform and template-based rapid content authoring tools, I kept software simulation tools aside.
The main reason was that such simulation tools are not always used for developing just any type of learning but focused on training content creation for a specific software application or system.
Earlier I’ve written about multi-tasking and published a small interaction to help you draw conclusions about it. When multitasking, productivity decreases up to 40% and stress rises. Our lives would be happier, healthier, and more productive if they just focused on doing one thing at a time. Harvard Business Review’s Peter Bregman spent a week consciously not multitasking and writes about it.
Just before I went on holiday recently I was asked how human learning has changed with the advent, penetration and increasing ubiquity of computing technology.
My answer was simple – it hasn’t.
Human learning hasn’t fundamentally changed over the last fifty years. Our ability to learn is something honed over several hundred millennia, it’s what set us apart from the primates in the first place.
ID is an interesting domain to be involved in. On the one hand, you are continuously learning about different work environments as you are called upon to resolve different performance issues. On the other hand, your understanding of the domain, and your role in it, changes over time.
As an instructional designer, you start by learning a whole lot of theories and models.
While working on rapid authored courses (courses authored using rapid authoring tools), I often encounter the decision point of whether to use freeform rapid authoring tools or the traditional template-based tools. Both have their own pros and cons. In this post, I attempt to discuss more on these.
Last year, we mentioned that there is a time and place for rapid authoring while opting for it.
