Develop Yourself in Addition to Training

Though instructional designers make a living by helping organizations develop their people, many may struggle to find opportunities to develop themselves. This article describes five sources of professional development opportunities, including specific examples and resources for getting started.

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7 Habits of Highly Effective Instructional Designers

This article applies Stephen Covey’s seven habits of highly effective people to the craft of instructional design. It includes reflections on the profession’s best practices such as anticipating business needs, conducting cause analyses, closing performance gaps, and working with subject matter experts.

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Use Scenarios to Make Quiz Questions Relevant to the Job

Instead of just presenting information in training and then prompting learners to apply it afterward, why not make an entire lesson into a story? Introduce new concepts in the context of the story…instead of introducing concepts in a decontextualized way and bringing examples in later.

This type of thing can work with quizzes too. The story might not be as fluid and involved in a quiz, but even using basic scenarios seems to make quiz questions more relevant. And learning theories out there support this approach. I used my latest contribution to the Integrated Learnings: eLearning blog to describe my application of scenarios to quizzes.

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Five Highlights from the National Cowboy Poetry Gathering

Signs crowded with flashing lights, a light layer of snow on the ground, men with cowboy hats and handlebar mustaches, women in cowboy hats and ruffled skirts, music, poetry, and a semi-cleanish room at the Motel 6. You’ve just gotten a glimpse into my weekend at the National Cowboy Poetry Gathering in Elko, NV. Prior [...]

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Five Reasons I’m Heading to the National Cowboy Poetry Gathering in Elko, NV

I recently learned about the National Cowboy Poetry Gathering from a friend. From what I’ve pieced together, it sounds like a one-week event in which real cowboys from all over the country gather to share their love of poetry, music, dance, and perhaps other forms of expression. What Is It? It’s a week of poetry [...]

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Practical Tips for Using Online Learning Technologies

The article provides tips on how to use an online course from a basic technical perspective. To write it, I reflected on the online courses I’ve taken through various organizations and made a list of the features that most of them shared. Besides moving forward and back, what navigational options were available? What tricks have I employed to move through a course more quickly? And as usual, I collected ideas from training peers as well.

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