In the course of work as an instructional designers, its routine to trawl the web constantly looking at ways people visualize ideas, concepts, processes. It’s an entire wonderland of variety out there on the inter-webs, in addition to the beauty one finds in various books on graphic design. Instructional designers then tend to be ‘inspired’ and apply those visualization techniques to whatever it is they seek to communicate.

IDEO is one of the companies I admire for solid and contemporary product design and especially follow their Play and Digital Experience areas on their website. I recently heard on twitter that they’d launched a toolkit for educators to assist with Design Thinking at http://www.designthinkingforeducators.com/

I’ve been working on some learning related material for children. Designing for children is a totally different ballgame from the workplace learning we are typically involved in. To put it mildly, designing for children is tough; to design for today’s children even tougher. The more I look at this demographic they call ‘digital natives’, I find individuals who take the digital world the internet enables for granted. To these individuals, the internet and its data services are just as mundane as electricity and phones were to us in older generations. I wrote about this group of people couple of years back.

Learning design is not just a science, it is an art. When the team works and generates effective learning designs, they are a result of a deep rooted instructional design philosophy. We like to look at instructional design in two clear veins, the first is the philosophy of learning design – the beliefs and faith in models that underly everything we do in design. The second is the methodology, the method and process based on these models that allow us to consistently generate good designs for all our clients and their unique situation. The philosophy is what we imbibe, methodology is what we practice.

I came across an interesting blog-post by veteran LucasArts and Telltale Games designer Dave Grossman describing how gaming’s limited appeal could come down to some very basic assumptions we make about the audience versus the actual thought processes of that audience. You can view the blog-post here.

Reams and reams of text have been written about the practical implementation of game-based learning, but a school in New York has taken it to a whole new level.  Quest to Learn is a school which uses the underlying design principles of games to create highly immersive, game-like learning experiences for students.

Where is the knowledge we have lost in information? — T. S. Eliot

That’s a pertinent question that we need to ask ourselves. We take immense pride in meeting project deadlines and delivering courses within budgets; however, somewhere in our quest to showcase our potential, we may have forgotten about the core objective — Delivering Knowledge.

So, what differentiates knowledge from information?

As designers of electronic learning and information, we often find ourselves confronted by the purpose of the learning. Electronic Learning is about performance and content; in a sense instructional design is not purely creative; it is design with intent.

Our storyboards and design documents need to be an extension of this intent. Design documentation may not be about solving problems, but it can help avoid them by providing an elegant way to document design intent.

“’What is the use of a book’, thought Alice, ‘without pictures or  conversations?’”

Most of us agree that the use of images and graphics in e-learning help the learners make visual associations. However the images or graphics need to be relevant to the content being presented. They need to support the text and be used, not for diversion, but a clear instructional purpose.

Some days ago, I wrote about some basic design principles pertinent to the presentation of information. Taking that forward, this post specifically addresses the issue of ‘Usability’.

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.

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.