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: Instructional Design 101—Be a Learner
Steve Jobs once made the observation that diverse experience is important. Without that diversity, he said, “A lot of people … don’t have enough dots to connect, and they end up with very linear solutions without a broad perspective on the problem. The broader one’s understanding of the human experience, the better design we will have.” Here’s how to gain some perspective.
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Nuts and Bolts: How to Be an Overnight Success
Good practice is made up of work, and thought, and mistakes, and time. Things that look easy in the hands of a skilled professional are often the end result of years of practice and experience. Jane offers some sobering thoughts about what it takes to make things look easy.
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Nuts and Bolts: How to Deal with Barriers
Change management is always a large part of introducing new tools and approaches. In fact, logic and talking points are seldom effective in dealing with resistance. It is important to understand the barriers to change and their predictable progression. Here are the barriers you can expect and the keys to getting past them.
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Nuts and Bolts: We Need New Words
We need new words. They might have to be neologisms, or even sniglets, but we are doing many things these days in ways that we never did them before, and so there are no words for them. Jane reflects on three such instances. Can you supply the words?
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Nuts and Bolts: Design Assessments First
The matter of assessment is one of the most consistent problems I see with instructional design. The disconnect between workplace performance, course performance objectives, assessment, and content is a huge contributor to learner failure.” Here’s a simple way to fix that disconnect.
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Nuts and Bolts: What Is “Good” eLearning, Anyway?
Does an eLearning production have to exemplify Hollywood-level production values and adhere to every criterion of good taste in order for people to learn from it? Maybe not. This month, Jane gets down to the heart of the matter—what it really takes for eLearning to be “good.”
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Nuts and Bolts: Seeing the Forest
Those who are closest to a situation can be the last to notice a problem when it exists. Experts can have trouble getting beyond their expertise to find a better solution. Here’s a way to solve the old instructional design paradox: When you can’t see the forest for the trees.
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Nuts and Bolts: Content Becomes its Own Context
Concepts sometimes map over from one field of human activity to another, and the result of the juxtaposition can be a better understanding of both fields. In this month’s column, Jane offers her review of a new book about the music business in which she found many parallels to the learning and development business, and the insights she gained.
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Nuts and Bolts: Metaphors
What are your metaphors about teaching and learning? How do they affect your practice?
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Nuts and Bolts: Assessing the Value of Online Interactions
There is no magic formula for assessing the value of social interactions; no formula like “two hours on LinkedIn + four comments in groups = tangible outcomes for the organization.” So how do you know time spent using social media isn’t wasted? Jane has some ideas you can use.