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.

The Learning Circuits Big Question this month asks –“What will the workplace learning technology look like in 2015”.

Learning technology today, particularly enterprise-wide online content management systems coupled with the internet provide huge amounts of information. While this is useful for learning, it lacks good narrative. Learners find it difficult to navigate disjoint information, and this affects learning outcomes. Typical elearning courseware is focused around individual topics, while often the challenge the enterprise faces requires knowledge from a variety of domains and functions to be learned and leveraged. Just like McKee’s principles that I mentioned in my last post, we need models or tools that can assist a process-driven creation of narratives for engaging learning.

With 29 new posts, April has been the most active month on our blog. And we do realize that some of you would want to get a quick summary post at the end of the month that lists which ones were hot. So here’s the first of our monthly roundup posts that we intend to put up every month now.

We talked on various topics in April – from LMS to Augmented Reality, from Games to AS 3.0 Resources.

Earlier this morning, I was trawling through my feeds and came across this interesting post on Cathy Moore’s blog. She points to a really great example of a branching scenario, an activity called ‘Connect with Haji Kamal‘. The online scenario is the homework part of a lesson plan that includes in-class discussion about how to build rapport across cultures; part of a larger toolkit for military educators to strengthen soldiers’ cross-cultural and peacekeeping skills.