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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Making It Matter to the Learner: e-Motional e-Learning
Why is it so difficult to engage learners in the learning experience? Maybe our designs are missing key ingredients that could make learners care about the experience. This article reviews what we know about the non-cognitive elements of learning, and suggests how you can hook the learner, relieve anxieties as you set expectations about content, and design emotionally engaging experiences.
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Avoiding Assessment Mistakes That Compromise Competence and Quality
Assessment of learning is one of those elements of design that many practitioners talk about but find difficult to do well, or to do at all. Yet there are ethical and even legal reasons why doing assessment properly is critically important. Fortunately, designing good assessments is simple, given some basic principles. An expert designer walks you through these basics and shows you how to succeed.
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Building an e-Learning Strategy that Keeps Pace with Business Dynamics
E-Learning is properly understood as part of overall business process, and not simply as an end in itself. This calls for additional kinds of “blending”. Learning strategy must arise out of business strategy, and it must include a way to reconnect to on-the-job application. In this article, a pioneer in online mentoring and virtual practice environments shows you the steps to achieve this.
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Efficiency in e-Learning: Proven Instructional Methods for Faster, Better, Online Learning
Instructional designers face the constant challenge of balancing many considerations affecting learning. Of all the guidelines from research offering advice on these matters, few are more challenging than those dealing with cognitive load. How much is too much? Is cognitive load always bad? In this article, two authors who have focused on these questions give you the answers and a systematic view.
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Curriculum Update: Converting Instructor-led Classes to a Blended Learning Solution
Large e-Learning projects can seem daunting, but there are sound ways to successfully tackle them — even without resources. It is important to pay attention to your process and to make adjustments to the procedures and tools you use. In this article, you will learn how a single developer converted an entire instructor-led curriculum to a blended concept!
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Using Digital Experiential Learning to Deliver Corporate Policy Training
Engaging is in the eye of the beholder, not the eye of the designer, and sometimes our assumptions about what “real” training looks like get in the way of learning. Many designers disagree with the idea of games as the basis for e-Learning, but before you dismiss the idea, read this article about Allstate’s innovative combination of instructional and gaming elements to deliver policy training.
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Closing the Loop in e-Learning Development: How to reconnect instructional design and project management
This is the first in a series of columns that address the relationship between the generic life cycle of e-Learning and the documented processes of project management. The focus of this article is a high-level overview of ADDIE, the generic life cycle description applied to traditional learning materials, and on the generic project management life span. This will include highlighting key concepts.
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Can They Do It in the Real World? Designing for Transfer of Learning
The purpose of e-Learning is to improve the accomplishment of real tasks in the real world. Transfer is the key to achieving this purpose, and designers should focus on interactions that help learners gain the desired level of mastery and then apply it on the job. Here are six basic, proven strategies that will improve transfer from e-Learning to the job.
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Unsticking Hands-on Activities: How to think outside the monitor
Practice is critical to learning many skills. While practice is relatively easy to arrange in classroom instruction or OJT, it is not always so simple in e-Learning. Furthermore, this is also true of the activities we require learners to perform when we evaluate whether they learned. This article discusses strategies for thinking about how to solve this problem.
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Is Instructional System Design Dead? Why there are better questions to ask
Is instructional systems design (ISD) dead? The arguments against ISD usually center on its perceived inflexibility and the excessive time it takes to go through the process. The arguments for ISD cite its systematic approach and evidence that, if followed, you’re likely to produce more effective training. Maybe there are better questions to ask. Here are four such questions.