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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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!
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The Garden of Good and Media
e-Learning designers get a lot of advice about the use of media, and oftentimes this advice seems contradictory. What is needed is a simple set of guidelines, to be applied in a way that produces brilliant outcomes. In this article, a master of the craft provides his suggestions for using media.
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If You Only Look Under the Street Lamps… Or Nine e-Learning Myths
The e-Learning industry is obsessed with finding the answers to the question, “Why hasn’t e-Learning been more successful?” Perhaps we have been looking in the obvious — but wrong — places because our mythology of e-Learning is misleading us. Follow along as a consummate changemeister examines the myths and suggests new ways tounderstand e-Learning.
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Back to the Basics: Revisiting Great Training on Behalf of Great eLearning
ELearning must support a “big tent” view of knowledge, performance, and support—but training is still the deliverable. What makes great training? One of the masters of instruction and design lays out the nine attributes of great training, along with examples and references. Whether you are new to e-Learning or an old hand, this article is one you’ll keep referring to on future projects.
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Classic Learner Interface Errors
Design mistakes always seem like things that only happen to other people. But we all have made our share of them, totally unaware of the anxiety and frustration that they cause for learners. Here are the nine most common interface errors in e-Learning, with their solutions. Make this article into a checklist for your team to use on your next project!