My instructional design philosophy I’ve developed over decades as an instructional designer is one I call “Design for Forgetting.” It’s an alternative to the typical approach to workplace training that I think solves a lot of persistent problems in workplace training.
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...
We instructional designers are trained to think about learning objectives from the very beginning of a project, to design backwards from the outcomes we want to produce in learners, then think about the specific content and activities we want to build and deliver.
Non‐educators think about this...
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...
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...
A friend emailed me asking about the latest AI‐powered tools that we instructional designers might use in our work. 2022 witnessed an explosion in the quantity and quality of AI‐powered media creation tools, and I wanted to summarize some of the main types and leading products in this space that we...
Alfred is my #1 favorite productivity tool for the Mac, and over the years I have developed some ferocious tricks to support the tasks I do everyday as an Instructional Designer. My work is equal parts content development and web design, so I like to mix conventional productivity tools with modern...
In early 2020 I was tapped to design an onboarding program for three new Instructional Designers that would be added to our team in the coming months.
I decided to take a multi‐modal approach to designing the onboarding experience, balancing consistent, online, low‐touch eLearning experiences with...
A live learning conference or training event can be a busy, chaotic, and stimulating setting for learning new things. Not only are you following a packed schedule of interesting speakers exposing you to new ideas, but you’re also surrounded by other professionals like y...
The open source writing tool Twine bills itself as an “Interactive Fiction” authoring program – a way for people to make text‐based choose‐your‐own‐adventure games and post them online. In fact, there is a vibrant community of writers who create their own branching fiction stories for others t...