Conversations on Learning Online
Posted on Oct 25, 2019
Nineteenth-century British moral philosopher John Stuart Mill famously said, “It is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied.” — John Stuart Mill As instructional designers, we are often tasked with creating “satisfying” educational and learning experiences....
Posted on Aug 05, 2019
Collaboration is often touted as an inherent virtue in the modern world, whether in business, education, product development, or product design (instructional design or otherwise). It is important, however, to distinguish between productive collaboration and unproductive collaboration (or, even worse, counterproductive collaboration). Unquestionably collaboration has many benefits, such as...
Posted on May 23, 2019
As an instructional designer, working with subject matter experts and course writers can be a complex process with many potential challenges, from setting expectations and discussing requirements to navigating the multitude of personalities and challenges you may encounter from course writer to course writer. The following overview covers some...
Posted on May 14, 2019
When you are teaching a face-to-face course, you have some freedom to provide assignment instructions to your students that are somewhat imprecise. This is because you have the opportunity to provide further clarification or to answer any questions in person when your students are right in front of you....
Posted on May 07, 2019
Just as a carpenter or an architect each has a set of essential tools for his or her craft, so does the working instructional designer come prepared with a set of essential instructional design tools. These essential instructional design tools vary from instructional designer to instructional designer based on...
Posted on Apr 30, 2019
I did not begin my career as an instructional designer. Having spent several years in the classroom as a college- and university-level instructor of philosophy and logic, I stumbled into instructional design by way of educational content development as a learning design author and subject matter expert, combining my...
The following quote, along with its many variants, is usually (but perhaps mistakenly) attributed to Henry Ford, founder of the Ford Motor Company: If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse. — Henry Ford Regardless of whether Henry Ford ever actually said...
Posted on Apr 11, 2019
One of my most formative television/film experiences was the television miniseries adaptation of Anne of Green Gables (Sullivan Entertainment, 1985), based on the book of the same name (1908) by Lucy Maud Montgomery. Set on Prince Edward Island in the first decade of the 1900s, Anne of Green Gables...
Posted on Mar 29, 2019
Although opinions differ about the role of hanging indents in the post-print digital era, from time to time you may need to add hanging indents for things like APA references in your online course materials. Unfortunately, the WYSIWYG (“What You See Is What You Get”) editors in many Learning...
Posted on Mar 20, 2019
Anyone old enough to remember the mid-1990s internet browsing experience will remember largely text-based web pages with some number of hyperlinks to other web pages. As I have described in a previous article, Rediscovering the Power of the Link, the ability to hyperlink to other pages has an almost...
