Having spent over a decade training and mentoring educational content developers and instructional designers, I have come to the conclusion that there are two qualities (or perhaps personality traits) that are nearly impossible to teach to someone who doesn’t already possess them: precision and creativity, both of which are...
Sometimes I am struck by how much the world has changed within the scope of my own meager lifespan, whether in the world of education, in the world of technology, or in the realm of day-to-day life. There are many features of the contemporary everyday educational experience that were...
In higher education there is a cultural and psychological trend toward standardization and normalization. Certain ideas about education become socially reinforced and codified as norms and standards. This is, to some extent, to be expected. After all, educators and instructional designers should rightly be concerned with student performance and...
Jan 07, 2019
Change the World by Inventing New Tools
Many of the people who ushered in the personal computer revolution in the 1970s and 1980s, and subsequently internet culture in the 1990s and beyond, had ties to counterculture movements of the 1960s and early 1970s. For example, Steve Jobs was a reader of the Whole Earth Catalog, a print...
Jan 02, 2019
Online Course Writing: Check Your Work
As any current or former math student knows, “Check your work” has been a constant refrain of teachers through the ages. In fact, “Check your work” is good advice for any project you are working on, educationally, professionally, or personally. Checking your work is an important part of online...
Dec 13, 2018
The Act of Planning vs. Acting on a Plan
My maternal grandfather gave me some of the best life advice I have ever received: “Always have a plan.” Having a plan helps you set your goals and figure out the necessary steps to achieve them. Too often, however, having a plan (or acting on a plan) is confused with...
Nov 05, 2018
The Online Course Development Factory: Instructional Design Lessons from the Manufacturing Industry
While the pedagogical creativity inherent to creating an engaging online learning experience should not be understated, an equally important aspect of online course design is the production workflow. The creation of any product, whether tangible or intangible, has constraints of time frame, checkpoints, and quality control, all of which...
The English language has several easily-confused horizontal-line punctuation symbols: Hyphen: – En Dash: – Em Dash: — Minus Sign: − Underscore: _ Although these punctuation marks look similar at a glance, they are actually distinct punctuation marks with specific intended uses and with distinct unicode character values. Let’s look...
Oct 05, 2018
A Microlearning Approach to Education
There are two approaches you can take to education, a macro approach and a micro approach, although these two approaches are not mutually exclusive. A macro approach, as the name implies, focuses on education at a larger scale, at the level of institutions, accreditation, academic program design, and so...
Theories of Consciousness As a philosopher, educator, and instructional designer, I find it worthwhile to explore competing theories about the nature of consciousness and their consequences for education and instructional design. Very quickly, the major categories of theories of consciousness are as follows: Mind-Body Dualism: The mind is nonphysical...