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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Designing Learning for “When Things Go Wrong”
When things go wrong, there may not be time for employees to fire up an eLearning module, attend a class, or get some coaching. The problem has to be fixed now. This is a key moment of need that formal and informal learning strategies often fail to address. There is a strategy that works, though – leveraging social media and job aids. This week’s tip shows you how.
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Marc My Words: eLearning Boot Camp
Traditional roles in training and education are in transition, and perhaps fading away. Specializations in eLearning are merging and morphing. What was current last year is now passé, and what was a blip on the horizon is now mainstream. In a time of constant change in our professions, where do you focus your attention? The answer is continuous professional development, and here’s how.
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Avoid Making Assumptions That Backfire!
When you write text for eLearning content, do you use language that sets up unrealistic expectations for the learners? There are many types of assumptions that instructional designers can make when they write, that can undo even the best design. Here is an explanation of three of the most common of these assumptions, and what to do about them.
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Nuts and Bolts: Opportunity Knocks?
Formal design process gets a lot of attention, but not every problem requires the full treatment. Consider first what your client needs, before you start working on what the process flow chart requires, and when the problem is simple, keep the solution simple. Jane offers the key to remedies for performance issues.
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Fundamentals of Social Media Support for Learning
Social interaction has always been, along with experience and practice, a mainstay of learning for human beings. Until recently, this took place primarily in the “informal” arena. The use of online social media to support formal learning has now entered the picture, extending the blended learning paradigm. Here is a set of tips for adding powerful social support for learning.
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Well Read: Prototyping by Todd Zaki Warfel
The typical objection to prototyping in eLearning is that there is neither time nor money for it. Yet, in other fields, prototyping is not only accepted, but expected. There are compelling arguments for prototyping, including dramatically shortened development cycles and improved product quality. Here is a review that may help you find what you need to overcome objections to prototyping.
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Book Review: Design for How People Learn, by Julie Dirksen
Julie Dirksen has just published an excellent guide to better learning design. Here are the details. Her book is recommended for beginning designers, and for subject matter experts who have found themselves drafted into creating eLearning.
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Case Study: Engaging Learners in the Synchronous Distance Environment
To accomplish more with fewer resources, many organizations are turning from costly traditional face-to-face (F2F) training to alternate methods, such as self-paced eLearning and distance learning. Here is a summary of the techniques used recently to convert a four-day F2F course to a synchronous distance format, highlighting design considerations, successes, and best practices.
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Ensuring eLearning Success in 2012: Think Like a Charity
Organizations around the world are working to manage effectively under the threat of looming economic crisis. This is most especially true for charities. In the U.K., a children’s charity, Barnardo’s, has received an award for their innovative and successful eLearning initiatives. Their approach contains much that for-profit organizations would do well to imitate.
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Development Tips: HTML by Hand
We welcome Mark Lassoff to our family of Learning Solutions Magazine columnists. Each month, Mark will provide tutorial content on basic production skills that will help you master the tools you use everyday as you develop eLearning. He begins this month with the most basic tool: Hypertext Markup Language (HTML).