When I was a young high school teacher, I remember reading an article drawing a distinction between “activity” teachers and “outcome” teachers. Activity teachers were the ones who planned their lessons full of engaging activities, but who didn’t think deeply about the learning outcomes that they’r...
How is the day‐to‐day life of an Instructional Designer different than that of a K12 classroom teacher?
Many classroom teachers are looking to make the switch into instructional design, and even though it’s all still teaching and learning, there are some big differences in the way you’ll work in a...
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...
One frequent buzzword you’ll hear a lot in the eLearning world is “microlearning”. More often than not, it’s pushed by companies trying to sell you on their new platform for authoring/ delivering learning in micro‐sized doses to your learners.
To adapt Dan Ariely’s quote about big data to the on...
I recently peer reviewed an early draft of a colleague’s training activity where he had to introduce a new corporate framework that employees are required to use in their work to a new group of employees who had never seen it or worked with it before. The first half of the training was a lecture int...
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...
I wanted to drop in a quick plug for familiarizing ourselves with the Mozilla Web Literacy Standards and 21st Century Skills. Though edtechies have lots of great tools that are focused on education, it’s also good to have a more fundamental understanding of basic web skills. These are skills a...
The Blockchain in Education: Research Questions
Audrey Watters recently posted a great set of research questions for thinking through the ways blockchain technology might potentially interact with edtech.
I have been keenly watching blockchain technology for a few years now, especially int...
In my first career, I was an AVID video editor and worked in Hollywood editing television shows for Paramount TV, MTV, E Entertainment, Lifetime, and others. A lot of the job of a video editor is to watch raw footage of people talking and doing things, cutting out the boring bits, leaving only the...