I’ve written before about my admiration for the WebQuest as a learner‐centric, active learning activity that can promote critical thinking through groupwork and authentic methods of representing learning. These were all the rage when I earned my M.Ed. in 2003 but have sadly been bumped aside in fa...
I was lucky enough to grow up during the 1980s heyday of Choose Your Own Adventure stories, a low‐tech precursor to the electronic branching scenarios that are now common in modern eLearning, as well as the interactive fiction craze made possible by branching text editor Twine in the Int...
There are multiple stages each learner goes through in the process of learning something new. Learning (as well as “online learning” and “eLearning” and “remote learning”) are first and foremost a human, learner‐centered activity that is only augmented with various technologies.
Don’t get this t...
I was struck when I joined the world of corporate training about how widespread the use of interactive PDFs was as an eLearning tool internally, but I then learned how it solves some common problems we learning designers face. Where the scrappy charter school teacher in me would normally reach for a...
Online learning tools like LMSes and 3rd party apps offer a variety of ways to notify learners of key events in their course. The new ubiquity of smartphones among learners opens up a wide variety of ways we can grab their attention – but with great power comes great responsibility. We need to t...
I often find myself being the old curmudgeon when the topic of gamification in learning comes up.
Don’t get me wrong – I love video games, but I think the characteristics that make a great game also make it a poor fit for most learning tasks (or at least, the types of tasks that we often teach in...
In my work now, I’m often approached by subject matter experts who know they need some sort of training in place but who need guidance on the details of how to implement it. It becomes clear that they are envisioning something that looks a lot like a course in school, with long lecture presentat...
I’ve never felt that digital mind‐mapping apps offered much improvement over pen‐and‐paper drawing. Mind mapping is supposed to be a creative, right‐brained experience, and so when I do it, I like to write with my hands, in multiple colors, drawing pictures or writing text according to my whim. Howe...
Until recently, I worked on Propero.org, a collection of accredited, self‐paced, online learning courses where students work at their own pace and pick up college credits with maximum convenience. I joined the team after the curriculum had been developed, so it was my job to review the courses and...