The Importance of Having a Graphic Designer on your Learning Development Team Do I need a graphic designer on my learning development team? Yes. Generally, I prefer to weigh the sides of an issue and make a carefully nuanced decision; but when it comes down to it, you need a graphic designer on your team. Of the information transmitted to the brain, 90% is visual. Articles with images get 94%[…]
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Accessibility Expertise: Determining Where It Belongs in Elearning Development
Building accessible online courses requires specialized skills—but do all accessible elearning development skills reside in a single role? Manage Accessible Elearning Development by Looking at Processes We talk a lot about making sure that elearning is accessible to all learners. Accessibility, in the context of elearning, means ensuring that people with disabilities (generally related to cognition, mobility, hearing, and vision) experience the course in the same way as those without[…]
READ MORE about Accessibility Expertise: Determining Where It Belongs in Elearning DevelopmentBut What Could *Possibly* Go Wrong? Testing Your Online Course
Testing Your Online Course: How to Evaluate Elearning Functionality before Launching How does testing fit into elearning development? It’s tempting to assume, when an elearning course has been created, that everything will just work. Advancing through the course will perform as expected; when questions are answered, the correct feedback will appear; completion will be properly registered with the user’s account. And yet… Here are some things that I’ve seen go[…]
READ MORE about But What Could *Possibly* Go Wrong? Testing Your Online CourseThe SME Role in Course Development
What Does a Subject Matter Expert Do, Anyway? SMEs May or May Not Be Instructors Subject matter expertise can be part and parcel of instructing. A K-12 teacher is both an instructor and an expert in their subject (like fifth-grade math); a college professor is often a subject matter expert (SME) first (researcher in genetics) and a teacher second; corporate trainers often spend years in the field and then transition[…]
READ MORE about The SME Role in Course Development“E-Learning for All” — A TD Magazine Article
Strategies to Save Time and Reduce Costs for Accessible Digital Learning Editor’s note: Content originally featured in the August 2017 TD Magazine, ATD’s award-winning monthly magazine that covers learning and development industry best practices, emerging technologies, and trends. Workforce trends on diversity, equity, and inclusion have renewed attention to accessibility’s role across business, government, and education. A critical element remains creating digital content usable and navigable to everyone, without excluding[…]
READ MORE about “E-Learning for All” — A TD Magazine ArticleGame-Based Learning: How to Give Your Learners a Safe Place to Fail
Ethan Edwards of Allen Interactions likes to make the point that we can’t make people learn. You can’t learn someone to do something. You have to create the conditions where they want to bring the information to themselves. And games are a great place to create a sense of engagement. Games create a new world, one with rules that put constraints on actions. In terms of training, this creates a[…]
READ MORE about Game-Based Learning: How to Give Your Learners a Safe Place to FailElearning Development Resources: Develop the Elearning Your Program Deserves
We had a great turnout during our recent webinar, Develop the Elearning Your Project Deserves—for the Training Results You Want. As promised, here are elearning development resources from the webinar, as well as a few extras. We covered a lot of ground in the presentation, so if I’ve missed any resources on any of these elearning subspecialities, please feel free to note it in the comments below. Elearning Development[…]
READ MORE about Elearning Development Resources: Develop the Elearning Your Program DeservesInstructional Designer and Course Developer: One Person or Two?
Why Use Both an Instructional Designer and a Course Developer: Won’t One Person Suffice? Continuing our discussion about roles in a training team, this month we’re looking at the advantages of separating the roles of instructional designer and course developer. It’s pretty common for an elearning development team to have a single person who is responsible for building elearning. They analyze the need for a course, design the course, build the course[…]
READ MORE about Instructional Designer and Course Developer: One Person or Two?How to Make Elearning Accessible: Insights from the 2017 CSUN Assistive Technology Conference
A week at the CSUN Assistive Technology conference in San Diego leaves the mind reeling. So much new information! So much of it related to learning! A few presentations made this connection explicit, directly correlating learning and accessibility. What I’d really like to talk about though, is the way that accessibility, the process and principle of making content available to those with disabilities, relates to elearning. Drawing from various presentations,[…]
READ MORE about How to Make Elearning Accessible: Insights from the 2017 CSUN Assistive Technology ConferenceA Note on Details: Which versus What?
When writing multiple choice questions, do you ever wonder whether the stem should read “what option should you choose” or “which option should you choose”? And should options begin with a capitalized letter, even if they are incomplete sentences? Should options have closing punctuation? Should the stem end in a colon? Will anyone even care? And, of course, it’s not just about the quiz. Throughout your curriculum, there are decisions[…]
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