One of the reasons I fell in love with instructional design is that it's both analytical and creative. You might start the day deep into an instructional analysis and you might be ideating a creative … [Read more...]
Writing Multiple Choice Questions For Higher Order Thinking
One of the biggest criticisms of multiple choice questions is that they only test factual knowledge. But it doesn't have to be that way. We can also use multiple choice questions to assess … [Read more...]
Novice Versus Expert Design Strategies
About The Expertise Reversal Effect
Common sense tells us that we should design differently for novices than for experts. Wouldn't you expect a novice swimmer to learn new strokes differently than an advanced swimmer? What might not be … [Read more...]
Using Critiques To Improve Learning Experience Design
How to Run Design Critiques for Learning Experience Design
Many creative fields use critiques to improve the design concepts, mental models and their implementation. The input from others can bring new perspectives and insight to a draft or beta version of … [Read more...]
How to Do a Quality Assurance Self-Check on Your Own eLearning
Before you send your eLearning on for a quality review, how well do you test it yourself? A Quality Assurance (QA) self-check may seem like an obvious task, but some people pass on their eLearning … [Read more...]
5 Levers Of eLearning Design
How can you continually improve the learning experiences you design to make them more effective? Pull these levers a bit more with every new effort. 1. Motivation Start with the person. Who are the … [Read more...]
Starting a Learning Design Team
It may not be as easy as pressing a button, but with enough research and planning, your organization can build an instructional design team. You will need to define its purpose and understand the … [Read more...]
10 Ways To Protect Yourself From Client Issues
Whether you're dealing with stakeholders, subject matter experts, internal clients or external customers, some issues are bound to arise during the design and development of learning experiences. … [Read more...]
10 Lesser Known Free Or Inexpensive Stock Photo Sites
With 6 Additional Sites Added From Readers!
Paid stock photo sites have many advantages over the free ones because of their massive collections, efficiency of search filters, light boxes for saving favorites and (hopefully) better pay for … [Read more...]
Answers To Instructional Design Career Questions
I get lots of emails from people who are considering a career in instructional design. In fact, that's why I created a free 12-lesson email course called Breaking into Instructional Design. It's all … [Read more...]
Five Resources for Estimating Development Time – Update
Are you unsure of how to answer the big question: How long does it take to develop one hour of online learning? As you might expect, there is no one answer to this complex question because there … [Read more...]
Alternatives to Correct and Incorrect
Eight approaches to providing learning feedback
Imagine a trainer at the front of the room responding to a participant's comment by saying nothing more than "You're right!" or "Incorrect." Imagine this happening over and over again. So, why is … [Read more...]