Tag Archives: elearning

My Transition from Training to Elearning Design

Posted on by Judy Unrein
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Image of a tree turning orange for fallRecently, a friend asked me how I transitioned from training to instructional design. In the interest of possibly helping others, I thought I’d share my path here.

1) Starting as both a test prep trainer and a software trainer, I volunteered for ILT curriculum design projects, which led to blended and elearning. Often trainers are tasked with design projects or asked to work with staff IDs.

2) I got a new job managing ILT and elearning projects and grew more interest in doing elearning design and development.

3) I got some formal training and made new connections. ASTD’s E-Learning Instructional Design class was an outstanding place to start. I also looked to the blogosphere for opinion and examples. (Aggregators like eLearning Learning and Alltop can help you find the blogs you like best.)

4) I changed jobs again to do actual ID.

I also highly recommend you find mentors; luckily, the instructional design community is full of people who love to help other people! Diane Elkins and Desiree Ward (who founded the company I now work for) have been mine since I first realized I wanted to become a designer, and I’ve been lucky to make many other connections — mainly through social media — since starting this blog.

I’m sure others have taken other routes and have more suggestions. Any one else care to share their paths and/or tips?

If Not ADDIE, Then What?

Posted on by Judy Unrein
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A waterfall in West Virginia.ADDIE is often maligned in our industry these days, and often for good cause. I’m not going to delve into criticisms here; rather, I’m just writing to introduce a series of short posts I will make over the next few days, highlighting instructional design models that have had profound impacts on my work — specifically those that:

  • speak to the creative process of creating learning experiences, and
  • have originated in the practice of creating corporate learning (rather than in academic theory).

I hope to reach designers who might be hearing criticisms of the models promoted by their organizations, associations, and schools, and might be asking themselves the question in the title of this post.

Please stay tuned and feel free to share your own inspirations, as well!

Photo credit: kingarthur10 on Flickr.

Part 1: Overall Course Structure – Thiagi’s 4-Door Model

Part 2: What to Include? – Cathy Moore’s Action Mapping

Part 3: Designing Interactions – Michael Allen’s CCAF

No Seriously… If Not ADDIE, Then What?

Full series here.

 

 

 

The Mozart Magic Cube

Posted on by Judy Unrein
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One of the boys received a Mozart Magic Cube for his birthday a couple of weeks ago. It’s a cube with big, colorful, light-up buttons on each side: one for Orchestra and the other five for various instruments.

The other buttons toggle individuals instruments, turning on and off each part in the piece. The buttons light up as that instrument plays each note. The Orchestra turns on all instruments to play together. If you press the Orchestra button while a piece is already playing, it changes pieces. And — sometimes thankfully — holding down the Orchestra button turns the whole thing off.

This $20 toy has more interactivity than most of the elearning I’ve seen. Why do you think that is?

I’ve set up an Ideascale so you can weigh in. Add your own ideas, vote, and/or comment. Looking forward to your responses!

How Your Company Would Prefer to Train You

Posted on by Judy Unrein
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Image of a probe being plugged into Keanu Reeves' head, from the movie, "The Matrix"

This is more of a PSA than anything, because of friends whose companies or managers seem to think that this is how it works. That’s not how it works.

Would I like that to be how it works? Yeah, to tell the truth, I would. Because the aim of what we do is to help people be better at what they do, and plugging directly in to someone’s head would be an efficient, consistent, and effective way to do it. But since no one has figured out how to overcome the downsides yet, I guess I’ll work on building this instead…

Image of Neo and Morpheus sparring in the training construct, from the movie, "The Matrix".

I’ll let someone else focus on the probes.

Accessibility Testing for Hype-Published Content

Posted on by Judy Unrein
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Reporting back on the accessibility question I posed earlier about Hype…

My company does quite a bit of testing with screen readers to make sure that our courses are not only 508-compliant, but as usable when using accessibility devices as when not. Yesterday I did some testing with Hype-published text, embedded into Lectora, and I’m happy to report that it read flawlessly.

It was a very basic test… no appearing or disappearing, just some text flying around the screen. The text was read just as if it were in a regular text box. Naturally, you would still want to include a description of the animation, but… Sweet!

This would be one of the reasons markup is awesome… If it’s machine-readable, it’s inherently more accessible.