Jane Bozarth
Director of Research, The Learning Guild
Jane Bozarth, the director of research for the Learning Guild, is a veteran classroom trainer who transitioned to eLearning in the late 1990s and has never looked back. In her previous job as leader of the State of North Carolina’s award-winning eLearning program, Jane specialized in finding low-cost ways of providing online training solutions. She is the author of several books, including eLearning Solutions on a Shoestring, Social Media for Trainers, and Show Your Work: The Payoffs and How-To’s of Working Out Loud. Jane holds a doctorate in training and development and was awarded the Guild Master Award in 2013 for her accomplishments and contributions to the eLearning community.
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Nuts and Bolts: Read Up!
Does an instructional designer or other training practitioner need a specialized degree in order to work effectively? There’s a lot of debate about this. You should read this article and Jane’s suggestions, and decide what works for you. There’s not just one answer.
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Nuts and Bolts: Happy New Year 2016!
“It’s my habit at years’ end to recap what had my attention over the past 12 months and tie the themes to resolutions—things to keep in mind going forward into the new year.”
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Nuts and Bolts: Getting Organized
Continuing the discussion of Richard Mayer’s “SOI” model (select, organize, integrate), this month’s column focuses on organizing information into meaningful wholes. Most slide-based authoring tools and old habits get us to think in terms of bullet points, but there are better ways! Here’s how to re-think content and concept information.
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Nuts and Bolts: Give the Learner a Fighting Chance
A constant challenge with eLearning (and face-to-face) courses is managing “overwhelm:” too often the learner is inundated with content and ideas and bullets and more content. Here’s how to select the really important information and present it in a way that helps learners focus and make sense of what they are seeing.
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Nuts and Bolts: Social Media for Learning Part 2: What to Use When? And the Role of Community
“Which tool should I use?” If you hate to hear that “it all depends,” this article may give you a new perspective on that answer: “The best tools are the ones you’ll use, that meet your particular goals and needs—and the ones your audience likes.”
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Nuts and Bolts: Social Media for Learning Part 1: Extending, Including, Supporting
In the four years since Jane’s column “Social Media for Learning” appeared here, the popular use of social media and tools that make it easy to generate and share images has exploded. This month’s column looks at some of the new ways you might extend your own practice through use of these social tools.
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Nuts and Bolts: Art: Maximizing Your Resources
Sometimes we find ourselves in a situation where we can either not do something at all, or we can figure out how to do it with no money. Many times this happens when it comes to finding art for our eLearning productions. Here are some tricks that will help you make the most of what you’ve got—for no money!
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Nuts and Bolts: It’s Not Just About “Compliance”: Accessibility in eLearning
Accessibility in eLearning may be something that’s just isn’t on your radar—yet. Your eLearning materials should be accessible to everyone, including those with challenges like low vision and blindness, hearing loss and deafness, learning disabilities, and mobility problems. Here is a quick rundown on things you should be addressing in your design standards, and some help getting started.
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Nuts and Bolts: Performance Matters, or, Guy Walks into a Brain-tumor Clinic
Jane reminds us: “Job performance” goes beyond a particular task in a particular moment. A true and very personal story.
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Nuts and Bolts: Causing Serendipity
The story of the three princes of Serendip is more than an entertaining fable. It illustrates the limits of formal training, and the value of being able to learn something valuable from information that just came your way. You may not be looking for a lame, one-eyed camel that is missing a tooth and carrying an unusual cargo, but you might also learn something valuable from this column.