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.
Latest from
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Nuts and Bolts: Leading a Horse to Water
It’s a mistake that happens all the time: We lose sight of the objective and add in interesting bits, extraneous fun. Or we spend time teaching the wrong skill. Here are a couple of cautionary tales about the need to be careful when you define your outcomes.
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Nuts and Bolts: The Story in the Slide Deck
Editing your own work or the work of your subject matter experts (SMEs) is an important activity for instructional designers, but it takes focus to do it well. Here are some tips that will help you become a ruthless editor!
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Nuts and Bolts: Blame the Learner
Beliefs about learners can show up in an instructional designer’s work, often unwittingly. Sometimes it’s the beliefs of an SME or the client, sometimes it’s the designer’s assumptions. In online content converted from classroom materials, it can be the original designer’s unchallenged beliefs. This month, Jane looks at some ways assumptions and beliefs affect design decisions.
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Nuts and Bolts: Happy New Year 2015
Here’s a review of the themes that stand out in Jane’s columns from 2014, to provide a launch pad for your work in 2015.
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Nuts and Bolts: Expand Your Surface Area
At DevLearn 2010, John Seely Brown urged each of us to “expand your surface area”—in other words, to stretch our personal bubble of experience and ideas to other domains, beyond immediate work interests. Here are some suggestions that might prove useful in helping you push past the boundaries of your daily line of sight.
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Nuts and Bolts: Figure It Out
In the United States Marine Corps, “improvise, adapt, overcome” has become an adopted motto in many units. It should be our motto in eLearning, considering all the times things don’t go the way we planned or the way we wish they would. Sometimes you just gotta punt.
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Nuts and Bolts: Instructional Design for the Real World
Textbooks and graduate courses on training and development sometimes suggest practices that are too good to be true in the real world where instructional designers live. Here are seven tips that are better matched to the challenges of our work.
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Nuts and Bolts: Needs Assessment Basics
Needs assessment is critical to success in instructional design, but it is often left out for no good reason. (Expediency is not a sufficient excuse.) Here are a baker’s dozen of questions to ask.
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Nuts and Bolts: What You Measure Is What You Get
“What gets measured gets done” and “If you don’t measure it, you can’t improve it” are two management maxims that have been around so long nobody is sure who said them first. But what is certain is that it’s not as simple as just starting to measure something. Here are two questions that will help you avoid bad measures.
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Nuts and Bolts: Reflective Practice
Professional development—our own, personal, professional development—is one of the most important things we can invest in. This isn’t a matter of paying money, necessarily, but of paying time and attention on a regular, even daily, basis to consciously becoming better at what you do. How? Reflective practice. Reading this column could be the best thing you do for yourself today.