About Guild Articles
Find practical, solution-oriented information—on design, development, management, technology, and executive matters—that you can use to make well-informed business decisions to ensure your organization’s success with learning.
-
Open Badges: Portable Credentials for Learning
The next target of disintermediation is diplomas, certifications, and other “official” records of learning, skills, and knowledge. A number of organizations are promoting a credentialing approach that awards “badges” directly to learners from providers. Learners can maintain and publicly display their badge portfolios independent of employers. Read about these new initiatives here.
-
Toolkit: Ready? Go! The ReadyGo Authoring Tool
The ReadyGo authoring tool is one of those that always seems to be unknown to most eLearning developers. This review should definitely get ReadyGo on your radar!
-
Supporting Critical Thinking in eLearning
eLearning design (and many authoring tools) may often support rote learning, recall of information, and acquisition of discrete skills, but not use of the information or skills to solve difficult problems, evaluate ideas, or settle arguments. Is there a way to use eLearning to develop or sharpen critical thinking skills? This article explores the question and suggests some answers.
-
Book Review: Teach Beyond Your Reach
In her significantly updated and expanded edition of Teach Beyond Your Reach, Robin Neidorf provides new and experienced distance educators with best practices and examples, an overview of tools and platforms, and strategies for dealing with key issues. Read the review here!
-
Game Architecture: Delivering Meaningful Learning Experiences
Recent research challenges the assumption that games are not an appropriate channel for learning. By focusing on delivering the necessary experience, designers can produce meaningful, engaging eLearning as games. Here are guidelines to effective mechanics, story, aesthetics, and technology selection that support contextualized practice, invitation to action, and self-assessment of decisions.
-
Marc My Words: So You Want to Get Into the eLearning Biz?
Looking for a new career? Think you have what it takes to be an eLearning specialist or manager of eLearning? Here are the nine things you need to know on your first day in your new career … or maybe the nine things it would still be good to know even if you’re already on the job.
-
Converting Classroom Training to Virtual Instruction: Some Tips
Many organizations are looking at moving face-to-face classroom delivery of instruction to web conferencing or virtual classrooms in 2013 as a means of reducing cost. This is not necessarily simple, and this article offers some tips, suggestions, and resources to help guide the conversion process.
-
Research for Practitioners: How to Improve Knowledge Retention
In academic approaches to teaching and learning that focus on knowledge rather than skill, the activities often involve traditional studying that involves repetition of the content. There are other methods that may also support learning. Do you know which one works best? One study attempted to find an answer to that question.
-
The Most Impactful Learning Content Comes From Data
How are you using data to set strategy and guide development and deployment of your learning programs? Collecting and analyzing data makes it possible to understand the resources needed in order to move forward, and to differentiate the needs by organizational unit and location, and by tenure. Here are some tips for using real-time data to create effective learning content.
-
Designing Learning for “When Things Change”
People sometimes have to unlearn an old way of doing things and relearn a new way. This is one of the “Five Moments of Learning Need” for learning, but learning strategies often do not consider it. The result of this omission can be resistance to change. Here is a method that will help you succeed in the relearning situation.