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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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.
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Interaction, Activities, and Learning: Engage learners meaningfully to develop mastery
“If interactivity is considered an important measure of good online learning, the dilemma is that we often don’t know what we’re measuring, and that’s a pretty slippery slope. To answer that question we first have to ask: Interaction for what? That’s easy… Interaction that supports the desired learning.” Read this article to begin exploring how to arrange this result.
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Culturally Competent e-Learning: Prepare your e-Learning for different cultures — even within your organization
“[C]ultural competence doesn’t just mean preparing training for delivery across borders. It also means making training that appeals to people from different backgrounds within our own organizations. If you’re tasked with effectively training both a Somali immigrant who works in the mail room and a Salvadoran payroll processing clerk, you have cultural competence issues.”
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Drop Dead Gorgeous: How to Set Objective Standards for the Look and Feel of Your e-Learning.
“Too many times, evaluating the look and feel of a piece of e-Learning is reduced to a love-it or hate-it subjective evaluation. With a little thought, though, you can set objective criteria for your training’s look and feel and create a framework for deciding when a look and feel is working, and when it is time to go back to the beauty parlor.”
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More Than Just Eye Candy: Graphics for eLearning
Visuals included in your eLearning can improve learning—if you can figure out how to use them correctly. In this, the first of two parts, two experts guide you through the results of research into the best practices. This is an article you will want to refer to often!