As I scanned through social media today, I came across a couple of things that are routinely posted related to instructional design. The first was an article proclaiming that online learning was found to be less effective than face-to-face instructional for a particular population of learners. As they say, if I had a dollar ……
We all have blind spots (e.g., being unable to understand something or to see how important something is) when we are learning about something new. For instructional designers, blind spots come with the territory as we’re always learning something new. One of the biggest challenges is how do we start something new when we don’t know what we don’t…
I was supposed to be in Virginia this weekend working with a team of collaborators figuring out “What’s next?” for Designers for Learning. At the last minute, we had to postpone the face-to-face trip, but the momentum will continue in the interim with online conversations until we reschedule. This question of “What’s next?” runs through…
Today, I connected in a series of small group meetings with people from Virginia to Oregon and dozens of points in between. I connected to them using Zoom, Webex, and Hangouts, but never managed to leave the condo with back-to-back web conferences from 10:30 to 4:00. The weird part is it doesn’t feel weird.
I’m always on the hunt for global, national, or local data to give context a topic. Recently, I’ve had on my to-do list finding data to provide context to the various accessibility projects we have under development. I came across the Disability Statistics website, an online resource for U.S. disability statistics managed by the Institute on Employment…
In one of my first research classes, our professor was big on asking if the paper passed the “so what?” test. Of course, most of the papers we were reviewing were published so there was a good chance that someone along the way felt the author was making a worthwhile contribution. However, this notion of…
There are many days when I have unexpected convergences. Today was one. For the past several months, I’ve been working to jump-start projects associated with accessibility. It started when we surveyed our Designers for Learning network last year about the topics designers were interested in learning more about and accessibility was the #1 topic on the list. I…
Mind the gap. From our early days in school, we’re told of the importance of conducting literature reviews as a means of finding “the gap” in the literature that will guide our work. However, most of us ignored this advice and launched into our early projects doing things backward. Instead of starting with a literature…
The AECT annual convention call for proposals is fast approaching and participants on our various projects are getting ready to submit SEVEN Designers for Learning related proposals. There are a couple that I could cut as they aren’t directly reporting on our work, but instead focus on topics that are near and dear to our mission….
Instructional design is all about choices. Well … and constraints. Oh, and requirements. And, let’s not forget preferences. Pretty soon our choices feel limited. I’ve been told my designs are too text heavy. However, there are reasons: Openness: David Wiley notes in his overview of the 5R permissions (i.e., retain, reuse, revise, remix, redistribute) that…