How can you continually improve the learning experiences you design? Pull these levers a bit more with every new effort.
Most Recent Articles
Starting a Learning Design Team
With enough research and planning, your organization can build a learning design team. Here are the roles and responsibilities to consider.
10 Ways To Protect Yourself From Client Issues
You never know when it’s going to hit the fan. Take these steps to avoid trouble.
ELC 067: Educating the New Instructional Designer
How should instructors and professors educate instructional designers to meet the needs of the modern workplace? This episode focuses on the challenges and solutions facing instructional design educators.
Answers To Instructional Design Career Questions
Instructional design career opportunities are growing all over the world. Questions and answers about breaking into instructional design.
Planning A Training Video Production
If you are suddenly responsible for a training video production, here are the key things you’ll have to consider, plan for and get done.
Cognitive Psychology
Long-Term Memory: A User’s Guide
In learning, long-term memory is the ultimate destination. Here’s what you should know about how we encode, store and retrieve memories.
Designing Learning for Mental Models
By understanding a learner’s mental models, we can improve our user interfaces, instructional interventions and overall learning experiences.
How To Write Better Analogies For Learning
Effective analogies for learning rely on the transfer of a familiar concept to a new concept. Review the guidelines for writing more effective analogies.
Graphics
The Visual Design of Checklists
The visual design of a checklist has both a utilitarian and an aesthetic aspect. Here are several types of checklists you can adapt to meet your needs.
Use Visual Cues To Enhance Learning
Visual cues direct the eyes to the relevant information in a graphic. This helps ensure that people understand the intended message and adds efficiency to visual communication.
5 Steps To A PowerPoint Redesign
A consistent process to transform poorly designed slides into ones that are instructionally effective.
How to Improve Your Visual Design Skills
Visual design may seem like a mysterious process, but there is a formula for improving your skills. I’ve outlined it here.
How To Design A Quick Reference Card
In this article, I share the thinking, process, strategies and workflow that went into the creation of a quick reference card.
8 Ways To Choose A Color Palette For eLearning
If we only had 100 color choices, choosing a palette might not be a problem. But we have access to millions of colors, which makes the possible choices overwhelming.
Instructional Design
Answers To Instructional Design Career Questions
Instructional design career opportunities are growing all over the world. Questions and answers about breaking into instructional design.
Alternatives to Correct and Incorrect
Eight options for providing feedback that is informative, motivating and corrects misconceptions, moving the learner forward.
Finding Your Place In an Instructional Design Career
No need to be a square peg in a round hole. There are lots of options for instructional designers and developers.
ELC 065: Pro Tips For Working With Subject Matter Experts
Subject Matter Experts or SMEs are indispensable in learning design. Diane Elkins and Dawn Mahoney provide strategies for dealing with SMEs.
The World Needs More Checklists
The checklist is one of the most brilliant cognitive aids around. Hidden in this simple format is an ingenious type of performance support.
The Importance of Writing Effective Distractors
Although writing effective distractors (wrong answer choices) is often difficult, they can play an important role in getting the measurement information you’re seeking. Effective distractors discriminate between those who have achieved the performance objectives and those who have not.