Have you ever had an idea you knew was good but didn’t truly understand the work involved until you began laboring to make it a reality?
This happened to me when I started changing one of the assignments in my history class into a branching scenario. Continue reading “Choosing the Right Tool to Design Interactive Scenarios”
As an online instructor, it can be challenging to create and maintain community with students in your courses. Last fall I discovered an education model that continues to help me create and maintain community, both as an instructional designer and as an adjunct instructor: Charles Sanders Peirce’s Community of Inquiry (CoI).
We live in a culture, and work in a field, that prizes and demands efficiency. A million things always need to be done immediately, and at least a thousand projects needed launch yesterday. We make endless to-do lists, debate time tracking and performance metrics, hire project managers by the truckload, and do everything in our power to wring every last drop of “efficiency” out of our daily lives.
And often, we’re making a mistake. Continue reading “Efficiency: The Trap of Modern Design”
We use the term student-centered in instructional design all the time. And that’s good. We obviously want our eLearning to focus on the students and their needs. Sometimes, it can be tricky to do that though, particularly when Continue reading “Practical Tips for Staying Student-Centered”
Sometimes, the technical and skilled nature of instructional design makes it difficult to explain our work to key stakeholders. Shakespeare might have said a rose by any other name would smell as sweet, but the collective (mis)understanding of words can sometimes muddy how our external audience sees our work.
Recently, our eLearning team found a simple change of terminology helped our stakeholders grasp one of our fundamental tasks: Continue reading “Communicating “What You Do” to eLearning Stakeholders”
I recently concluded my Motivation in Education series, which explored Keller’s ARCS Model for Motivation. Each of the model’s components (attention, relevance, confidence, and satisfaction) share a common thread: the relationship between a teacher and their students.
Continue reading “Student-Teacher Relationships: The Key to Motivating Students”
A few years ago, a friend stopped by for a visit. When it was time for her to leave, I walked her to the front door where we chatted a bit. I slipped on a pair of black flats sitting in front of the door and continued talking. We exhausted our good-byes, and my friend grew silent.
Finally she said: “I’d leave if I could have my shoes!”
It turns out we had the very same shoes, and I had slipped HERS on by mistake! #embarrassing
In the context of teaching and learning online, Continue reading “Student-Centered Faculty Training”
History is rich and vivid, and it shouldn’t be presented in a way that students see as dry. As an adjunct history instructor, I am always looking for ways to motivate students to explore history and to look at it from different perspectives. I’ve discovered that infusing a scenario-based assignment engages learners and encourages them to think outside the box. Continue reading “Making your eLearning Assignments More Interactive”
Have you noticed that our culture is beginning to value authenticity over authority?
We’re tired of being told. We want to be asked.
We’re tired of overly-complicated wordsmithing. We want clear and concise information.
We’re tired of not knowing. We want to be kept in the loop.
Authenticity is what we all crave. Continue reading “Make your eLearning More Authentic”
We’ve all been there. The course launches in two days. Your SME just gave you another laundry list of ‘essential’ revisions, and entire sections of the course need to be added. So, other than starting an intravenous drip of caffeine, how do you tackle rapid development without going insane? Here are four tips and tricks to help you meet your course development deadline.
You’ve heard it a hundred times: “Plan the Work. Work the Plan.” When you’re in crunch mode, however, Continue reading “4 Tips to Survive Rapid Course Development on a Deadline”
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