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 a learning design team. You will need to define its purpose and understand the roles that … [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...]
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...]
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...]
Finding Your Place In an Instructional Design Career
If you aren't happy with your career in instructional design or want to start a career in this industry, there's no reason to be a square peg in a round hole. There are numerous paths you can follow … [Read more...]
ELC 065: Pro Tips For Working With Subject Matter Experts
Strategies and techniques from Dawn Mahoney and Diane Elkins
Subject matter experts or SMEs are usually an indispensable part of a learning development team. Even though they are on the same team, however, the SME and the learning professional may be living in … [Read more...]
The World Needs More Checklists
Using Checklists for Performance Support
One of the most brilliant cognitive aids devised by some very smart humans is the checklist. Hidden in this deceptively simple format is a type of performance support that has saved lives in the air … [Read more...]
The Instructional Design Life
Today I remembered how odd our instructional design life can be. For example, I attended a kickoff meeting to design and build a course that teaches medical personnel about venous access devices … [Read more...]
The Importance of Writing Effective Distractors
Writing Distractors Is Not Easy The purpose of a test is to determine a participant's mastery of the performance objectives and to find out whether a learning experience was successful. … [Read more...]
What Do Instructional Designers Do?
Starting a Career in Instructional Design
What is instructional design? Instructional design involves the process of identifying the performance, skills and attitude gaps of a targeted audience and creating or selecting learning experiences … [Read more...]