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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Make the Complex Understandable: Show, Don’t Tell
Infographics are visuals specifically created to represent, instruct, or to disseminate information in a visual format. These visuals have many potential uses, but many instructional designers overlook the format and we seldom see them in e-Learning. Here’s how to create and use visualizations effectively.
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Beginning Instructional Authoring: Decide What to Leave Out
Creating effective, PowerPoint-based e-Learning requires thinking in some new ways. Often, the most important part of creating PowerPoint slides is deciding what to leave out. In this month’s column, Patti gives you some tips on thinking about content.
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Marc My Words: Want a Free iPad? Get an Equus
Mobile devices as performance support platforms is a pretty cool idea these days – but only if the designer thinks through the whole problem, from the customer’s point of view. Marc has some words for Hyundai about this.
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App Fusion: Twaining in Twitter
Many instructional designers and training managers believe that Twitter is not a useful channel for learning. However, it is where many of your learners spend a lot of time, and it offers some often-overlooked features that can serve as effective delivery vehicles. Terrence shows you how, and offers a demonstration.
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Book Review: Designing mLearning, by Clark N. Quinn
In this age of mobile devices, all of us in the learning field need to learn to think differently about what we do. Change is upon us, and Clark Quinn has produced a superb guide to help us meet the challenge of a strategic shift in our world.
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Nuts and Bolts: SURPRISE!
Every instructional designer knows that it’s important to engage the learner. With certain types of content, this is easier said than done, and sometimes our own design standards work against us. Jane shows you how to avoid boring your learners stiff.
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Dispatch from the Digital Frontier: Working the Numbers Game
Metrics matter, especially when it comes to improving our product. We in e-Learning can learn a lot from the success of our brethren in Marketing, but we need to adapt their methods to our world. Anne shows you where to start: defining our terms.
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Book Review: Virtual Presentations That Work by Joel Gendelman, Ed.D.
Experienced face-to-face presenters often have great difficulty learning to be effective in Webinars and other virtual presentation situations. If you have to teach managers, salespeople, and executives how to be compelling online presenters, this book is a great resource.
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Career Development: Informal Mentoring
Mentors make a difference: in salary, in job satisfaction, and in career success. If you don’t have a mentor now, here are some tips on getting one.
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The Human Factor: Do You Speak Video?
Being familiar with video, as a lifelong consumer of it, does not guarantee that we know how to produce it. Instructional designers should learn to think like a director, and to look at the story from the point of view of the audience. Here are some pointers to get you started.