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.
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Marc My Words: Is It eLearning or Something More?
Imagine a world where the tools we use remove complexity rather than add to it, and are so intuitively easy to use that we can operate them—correctly—the first time, precisely when we need to use them, with minimal risk. The possibilities for this are here. Are you ready for them? Marc talks about performance support, training, and saving lives.
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How to Succeed in a Massive Online Open Course (MOOC)
Massive online open courses (MOOCs) are attracting a great deal of attention, but they require effort on the part of participants who want to be successful in them. Here is a guide to success in a MOOC. You may find it useful for yourself if you try a MOOC out, or you may want to provide these guidelines to learners if you are using MOOCs as part of your organizational strategy for learning.
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Interview: Jason Calacanis on the Future of eLearning
In thinking about the future, it often helps to hear the way that someone from outside the eLearning community sees the way ahead. At mLearnCon 2012, we asked angel investor Jason Calacanis some questions about the future of eLearning and recorded his answers in a short video. You’ll find his vision and insights extremely challenging!
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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.
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Research for Practitioners: Social Interaction, Belief, and Learning
Do you learn more by interacting with a live person, or by interacting with a computer? Does the belief that you are interacting with another person (as opposed to a computer) affect learning? In this first installment of our new research review series, a study looks beyond the Turing Test. This article summarizes the findings and offers some implications for instructional design.
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Make Your Cloud/MOOC Course BYOD Friendly (Part 4)
As more and more training moves into the cloud, enabling mobile access is all the rave. But doing this for a free and open course makes the designer’s life that much more exciting. Make design and development easy for yourself—use what is already out there before starting to develop your own mobile solutions that enable access to your open, online, or cloud course. Here’s how!
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Book Review: Video Nation, by Jefferson Graham
Do you want to use video in your eLearning content, but don’t have thousands of dollars to spend on equipment, production, and post-production? Looking for help and ideas for short-form Web video? This is the book you need, written by an expert who has produced, edited, and hosted over 300 episodes of USA TODAY’s “Talking Tech” series.
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Customize Lectora’s Table of Contents with Visited-page and Chapter Icons
In Lectora-created eLearning content, users find it very helpful to have a table of contents, and to be able to identify which pages they have visited. This can involve a lot of work for the developer. However, it is possible to create a reusable solution so that much of the work only needs to be done once. Here’s a step-by-step guide to setting up the JavaScript and HTML to do the job.
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Development Tips: Funky, Fun HTML5 Forms
Forms are a critical factor in user interaction design, yet they often fail to provide good data (or even to provide data at all). HTML5 offers new ways to deal with the problems of obtaining clean data. Here is an introduction to the new data types that you can put to work today.
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Interview: B.J. Fogg on “Tiny Habits” and Learning
What we really should be concerned about in producing eLearning is “habit formation.” At mLearnCon 2012, Dr. B. J. Fogg challenged us to rethink what we are doing if we are not creating habits in users and learners. He showed how he is using mobile and social technology to create “tiny habits.” In this video interview, Dr. Fogg explains more about the technique.