Do Cows Really Drink Milk and Other Musings from Brad Barton and Thiagi Thiagarajan

This past week I attended the ASTD Cascadia Chapter’s Regional Conference in Salem, Oregon. If you didn’t make it, you should have! With two great keynote speakers (Brad Barton and Dr. Sivasailam “Thiagi” Thiagarajan) and numerous breakout sessions, opportunities were plentiful to expand your comfort zone. I thought I would share a quick summary of [...]

Color and Culture, Improving Audio, and Capturing Attention in E-Learning

3 articles you should read this week: Article #1: As Instructional Designers, we have learned about the impact of using color in our training content. With so many companies moving into the global arena, I did a little research to find out how color is interpreted in other cultures. Did you know that Orange means [...]

Measuring Success: Who Needs Business Results Anyway?

In their 9/3/2010 report “Getting Started in e-Learning: Measuring Success,” the eLearning Guild provides the following key findings: Only 2% of respondents said they don’t bother to measure the success of their efforts. Of those who measure using Kirkpatrick’s four levels: Most tracked students completion of a course More than 1/2 tracked learner satisfaction Most [...]

You mean it will take that long to create my e-Learning course!??!!

Bryan Chapman (Brandon Hall Research) is in the process of updating his research on how long it takes to create learning. Stop by and participate in his survey between August 4-August 31, 2010. Until then, here are the results from a past survey. Note: These are development hours (from front-end analysis to delivery-ready content) to [...]

Nine E-Learning Warning Signs

In his book Beyond E-Learning: Approaches and Technologies to Enhance Organizational Knowledge, Learning, and Performance, Marc Rosenberg discusses nine e-Learning warning signs.  I’ve summarized them below: You let your learning goals be defined more by your technology than by the actual learning and performance requirements. You are excited to get into e-learning  and to deploy [...]

Instructional Designers as Change Agents

As an Instructional Designer, you will be faced with many challenges in designing, developing, and delivering content.  Some of these will require that you have a certain level of skill with tools (Articulate, Flash, Captivate, Dreamweaver, LMSs); other projects will test your ability to take complex information and present it in a simple, easy to [...]

Creating e-Learning that Makes a Difference

This week, I participated in a free Webinar series titled, “Creating e-Learning that Makes a Difference”. This webinar was conducted over four 1-hour sessions and was led by Ethan Edwards (chief instructional strategist and principal consultant) for Allen Interactions.  I thought I would share a few of the things from the session.

Top 100 Tools for Learning 2010

Well, it’s just about time again for the release of the Top 100 Learning Tools of 2010. This will be the fourth year the List has been published. So far, the top 10 tools are FREE and include: Twitter, YouTube, Google Docs, Delicious, Slideshare, Google Reader, WordPress, Skype, Moodle, and Facebook To get a look [...]

Rapid Elearning Tools?

I’m currently evaluating rapid e-learning tools. I’ve used Adobe Captivate as well as Articulate. What else is out there that will provide me with the ability to author content (demos, simulations) and produce printed content from the same output? I’ve looked at Datango, OnDemand… is there anything else out there? What do you use?