58 tips for articles/elearning guild...58 tips for breakthrough elearning instructional design 1...

58 TIPSBreakthrough eLearning

Instructional Design

Contributing Editor, Chris Benz, The eLearning Guild

for

58 Tips for Breakthrough eLearning Instructional Design i

© 2012 by The eLearning Guild. All rights reserved.

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Contributing Editor: Chris Benz Copy Editor: Chuck Holcombe Publication Design: Nancy Marland Wolinski

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58 Tips for Breakthrough eLearning Instructional Design ii

58 Tips for Breakthrough eLearning Instructional Design

Introduction. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .1

About Our Tipsters. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .2

Twelve Tips for Research . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .6

Twenty Five Tips for Design . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .8

Fourteen Tips for Development . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .13

Seven Tips for Project Management . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17

58 Tips for Breakthrough eLearning Instructional Design 1

Introduction

Dear Colleagues,

Instructional design (ID) is — or at least should be — the foundation for effective eLearn-ing. ID drives both development and delivery, and can mean the difference between successful eLearning and something that just wastes people’s time and your organi-zation’s money. But whether you are new to ID or have been designing eLearning for a while, it’s easy to get stuck in certain ways of doing things, and difficult to come up with new ways. So how do you develop something new in your eLearning designs?

In early 2012, after completing the program for The eLearning Guild’s May 2012 Online Forum on “eLearning Instructional Design: Advanced and Breakthrough Tech-niques,” we realized that we had a wonderful opportunity. By gathering ID tips from each of the 14 ID design experts we had lined up to present at the Online Forum, we could share some of that expert knowledge far beyond the event. This eBook is the result of that effort.

All 14 presenters submitted tips, for a total of 58. Presenters submitted tips directly relating to their Online Forum presentations or to ID in general. The Guild then edited the tips and organized them into four categories: Research, Design, Development, and Project Management.

I hope you get great value from this eBook, and are able to use many of the tips to en-hance the way you design eLearning. I also hope you consider attending or presenting at an upcoming eLearning Guild Online Forum!

Sincerely,

Chris Benz Director of Online Events, The eLearning Guild


About Our Tipsters

Michelle Costello, Education and Instructional Design Librarian, Milne Library, SUNY Geneseo

Michelle Costello has been at the State University of New York (SUNY) at Geneseo’s Milne Library since 2007. Michelle recently became Education and Instructional De-sign Librarian, serving as the library’s liaison to the University’s School of Education and providing reference help and library instruction to students, faculty, and commu-nity members. Prior to this new position, she was part of the Circulation Management Team, where she designed and implemented a new service model combining the li-brary’s reference and circulation desks. Michelle holds a M.L.S. degree from Syracuse University and a B.A. in Psychology and Elementary Education from St. John Fisher College.

Jennifer Cote, Curriculum Developer, Salesforce.com

Jennifer Cote has over 10 years of experience developing instructor-led training (ILT) and eLearning courses. She took one company from zero to multiple eLearning courses within the first year. She has expertise using rapid eLearning tools to create stimulating and effective eLearning courses using narrated presentations, interactive software demonstrations, simulations, and scenario-based activities. She has taught technical courses to high-tech companies worldwide.

Kimberly Davies-Hoffman, Coordinator of Instruction and Reference Services, Milne Library, SUNY Geneseo

Kimberly Davies-Hoffman has worked at the State University of New York (SUNY) at Geneseo since 1999. As an indication of Kimberly’s passion and diligence to out-standing library instruction, customer service at the reference desk, and overall collab-oration with colleagues and departments across campus, in 2006 alone, she received a continuing appointment, was promoted to Associate Librarian, and received SUNY’s Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Librarianship. Kimberly earned her M.L.S. degree at SUNY Buffalo and her B.A. degree in French and International Relations at the Uni-versity of New Hampshire.

Julie Dirksen, Independent Consultant, Usable Learning, LLC

Julie Dirksen holds a M.S. degree in Instructional Systems Technology from Indiana University, and has had nearly a dozen years of experience designing interactive eLearning environments for Fortune 500 clients. She has been an instructional strate-gist with Allen Interactions, and an adjunct faculty member at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design, teaching courses in Project Management, Instructional Design, and Cognitive Psychology. She also believes that we need to learn how to use the addictive powers of Tetris for good rather than evil.


Corey Ha, Instructional Technologist, Milne Library, SUNY Geneseo

Corey Ha has been a technology enthusiast for the past 20+ years with a wide range of experiences. Corey has been involved with K–12 and higher education as an appli-cations specialist, learning developer, Web programmer, and systems administrator. In his current role on the Milne Library’s Instruction Design Team, he assists users with integrating technology in instruction. Corey earned his M.L.S. degree at SUNY Buffalo and a M.S. degree in Information Technology at Capella University.

Dick Handshaw, Founder and President, Handshaw, Inc.

Dick Handshaw is a consultant, speaker, and champion for real innovation and quality in ID. Dick is a pioneer in the field, with more than 30 years of experience as a learn-ing and performance-improvement professional and entrepreneur. In 1985, he founded Handshaw, Inc., a company that today is a leading provider and innovator in the design and development of learning services and solutions. Dick has served as a consultant for many organizations to help them establish a results-oriented learning strategy, meth-odology, and practice, and he is a respected thought leader who has presented at vari-ous international conferences.

Charles Jones, Instructional Systems Specialist, U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs

Charles Jones has been developing interactive Web-based training games and course-ware on healthcare topics for the U.S. Government since 1998. In 2010, the Strategic Health Care Communications Group gave Charles an e-Healthcare Leadership Award for Best Internet Site in the category of business and process improvement applica-tions or products for a physician-oriented Web-based learning game. In 2004, Nielsen Norman Group named his government intranet site as one of the world’s Top 10 gov-ernment and public-sector intranet designs. Charles holds a Master’s Degree in Educa-tion with a specialization in distance learning for adults.

Jean Marrapodi, Ph.D., Chief Learning Architect, Applestar Productions

Jean Marrapodi currently works at New England College of Business as an ID and fac-ulty member, teaching communications and management courses. Jean has more than a decade of experience in the eLearning field, where she has worked in the financial, retail, and healthcare arenas, and serves as a volunteer in the non-profit sector. She holds a Master’s degree in Online Instructional Design and a Ph.D. in Adult Education, both completed online at Capella University. She is a Certified Professional in Learning and Performance, ASTD’s highest credential.


David Metcalf, Ph.D., Senior Researcher and Director, Institute for Simulation & Training METIL, University of Central Florida

Dr. David Metcalf explores leading-edge innovations in learning. Specific areas of focus include learning-business strategy, performance measurement, operational excellence, outsourcing, blended learning, and mobile learning. David was formerly the Chief Learning Technologist at RWD Technologies. He joined RWD with the sale of his NASA Kennedy Space Center (KSC) laboratory spin-off company, Merrimac. Prior to the spin-off, he was the Lead Multimedia Designer at NASA KSC. David is the author of several recent works including Blended eLearning: Integrating Knowledge, Performance Support, and Online Learning; mLearning: Mobile Learning and Perfor-mance in the Palm of Your Hand; and mHealth: From Smartphones to Smart Systems.

Brendan Peterson, Manager, Training and Certification, Salesforce.com

Brendan Peterson has designed, developed, and managed eLearning for over a de-cade. He has worked as a Learning Strategist at DigitalThink, as a Learning Solutions Architect at Apple, and as a Curriculum Developer and Manager at Salesforce.com.

Gina Richter, Instructional Designer, First Data

Gina Richter is an action-oriented lifelong learner with a zest for life, a good imagina-tion, inquiring intellect, ingrained ethics, and a desire to excel. That is why online learn-ing was the perfect way for Gina to obtain her M.S. in Instructional Design / Online Learning and move forward in her career. She is now pursuing her doctorate. With over 10 years of experience in the analysis, design, development, delivery, and implementa-tion of learning, she continues to bring passion to the table in her pursuit for the right learning solution, at the right time, through the right delivery methodology.

A.J. Ripin, Director, Future and Emerging Technologies, Moving Knowledge, Inc.

In his current role, A.J. Ripin leads collaboration and discussion with world leaders from industry, healthcare, academia, military, and nonprofit organizations. Before joining Mov-ing Knowledge, A.J. served as a Co-founder and Principal of Mem-Cards Corporation, where he worked with the likes of Tom Peters, Jeffrey Gitomer, Stephen Covey, and Ken Blanchard, and developed hundreds of job aides and mobile-performance-support guides. He also participated in the U.S. Secretary of Education’s Innovators’ Roundta-ble on the Integration of Education and Technology. He is a graduate of the University of Hartford, where he earned a B.S. in Business Administration with a concentration in Entrepreneurship.


Judy Unrein, Senior Instructional Designer, Nike, Inc.

Judy Unrein specializes in designing eLearning and blended-learning solutions. Judy speaks and writes regularly about learning design and technology for a variety of or-ganizations and publications. She holds a Bachelor’s degree in English, and both a M.B.A. degree and a M.Ed. degree in Instructional Design. She has worked in the learning and development industry since 1997 as a trainer, project manager, and learn-ing designer.

Inge de Waard, eLearning Coordinator, Institute of Tropical Medicine

Inge de Waard is an internationally engaged eLearning coordinator and researcher at the Institute of Tropical Medicine Antwerpen (ITM) in Belgium. She is an international speaker who has consulted for eLearning start-ups in South Asia, Africa, and Latin America in addition to eLearning projects within ITM. Working frequently with partners from developing countries, she is involved in mobile and Web-based learning projects in different low-resource regions throughout the world. Involved in eLearning since 1999, Inge has a background in pedagogy and IT and she combines both spheres to ensure optimal Technology Enhanced Learning for all stakeholders. She is also an ac-tive member of several international learning organizations.

The eLearning Guild | 120 Stony Point Rd., Suite 125 | Santa Rosa, CA 95401 | +1.707.566.8990

http://bit.ly/olf94info | +1.707.566.8990LEARN MORE

May 17 & 18, 2012

Advanced and Breakthrough Instructional DesignHow can you take your instructional-design skills and techniques to the next level? What are some of the newest innovations in instructional design? What does the research tell us about which design techniques really work and which ones don’t? If you want to design increasingly compelling online learning experiences, or just need some fresh ideas, join the authors of this eBook at this upcoming Online Forum. Learn more at http://bit.ly/olf94info

Register for an individual Online Forum for $495 ($395 for Guild Members) and get access to the live event plus the recordings of all ten sessions for 12 full months.

Register Now at http://bit.ly/registerolf94

Become an eLearning Guid Member-Plus and get access to all Online Forums — the live events plus the 700-ses-sion archive — for 12 full months, all for only $695.

Join Now at http://bit.ly/joinolf94

How to Attend...

OPENING SESSION

101 - Demonstrating Instructional Design Value through Results, Dick Handshaw, Handshaw, Inc.

CLOSING SESSION

601 - Evolving Possibilities for eLearning Design, David Metcalf, Ph.D., University of Central Florida, and A.J. Ripin, Moving Knowledge, Inc.

ADVANCED DESIGN TECHNIQUES

201 - How Rapid Development Tools Influence Your Design, and How to Not Let Them, Judy Unrein, Nike, Inc.

301 - Flash and Beyond: Making eLearning Accessible, Charles Jones, U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs

BREAKTHROUGH DESIGN TECHNIQUES

202 - Library as Catalyst to Collaborative Instructional Design Initiatives, Michelle Costello, Kimberly Davies-Hoffman & Corey Ha, Milne Library, SUNY Geneseo

302 - Chiropractic ID: Adjusting for Alignment, Jean Marrapodi, Applestar Productions

ADVANCED DESIGN TECHNIQUES

401 - What’s Your Story? Using Personas to Focus Your ID, Brendan Peterson & Jennifer Cote, Salesforce.com

501 - The Advantages of MOOCs for an International Learning Audience, Inge de Waard, Institute of Tropical Medicine

BREAKTHROUGH DESIGN TECHNIQUES

402 - Designing for Flow: Creating Compelling User Experiences for Learning, Julie Dirksen, Usable Learning, LLC

502 - Beyond ID: Moving from Filling Training Requests to Improving Performance, Gina Richter, Behavior Learning Systems, Inc.

THURSDAY, MAY 17, 2012 FRIDAY, MAY 18, 2012

Register for this Online Forum Best Value — All Online Forums


Twelve Tips for Research

Before you start designing your next course, do some research on an ongoing basis on general ID techniques, strategies, and trends, as well as on the specifics of your learners and your subject matter. (Reading this eBook counts! So does talking with other designers.) Even if you’ve been designing for years, there’s always something new — or at least new to you — and learners’ needs and preferences can change over time. Research is one of the best ways to ensure that your designs stay fresh and relevant, and that you don’t burn out doing the same old thing. Here are some ways our tipsters stay informed.

If you are able to, regularly attend workshops and conferences on instructional design and instructional technology. These will keep you apprised of the newest developments in the field and are a great way to network. Make sure you take the time to go to events outside of formal sessions; these are often the best times to meet new people and talk about the ideas discussed during the formal sessions. In addition, take advantage of conferences and workshops outside of your specific field or area. (For example, if you are an academic, go to a corporate-focused conference.)

Michelle Costello

Play Plants vs. Zombies. Seriously, play the video game Plants vs. Zombies, www.plantsvszombies.com/, (or some equivalent video game) and look at how the game does a few things. It:

• Provides feedback to help players adapt their performance

• Uses scaffolding to gradually develop skills

• Balances the challenge to match the learner’s ability

• Uses incremental increases in complexity to teach highly complicated tasks

Julie Dirksen

Expose yourself. To other ideas, that is. If you haven’t experienced a wide range of learning experiences, go out and find them. Rather than letting authoring tools tell you how to design, learn from what you like and don’t like.

Judy Unrein

Keep building relationships and asking questions to integrate into the business. This will enable you to create integrated learning experiences.

Gina Richter


Understand your learners. Use focus groups to ask questions, gather information, and define the characteristics of your target audience.

Brendan Peterson and Jennifer Cote

Keep an eye out for peers on your campus or in your organization who are taking on new projects and are asking for help in their instruction. If you can successfully work with this one new person, they will spread the word to others and you can build your portfolio one case study at a time.

Michelle Costello

Ask the subject-matter expert how well the learner needs to perform the task. If learn-ers would do it with the assistance of a job aid, assess them doing the task with the job aid. There is no need to teach something to mastery if people will always look up that something. Think mail merge: After you understand the concept and walk through it the first time, there is no need to do it without assistance unless it will be a daily task. Use the help file as needed in the future.

Jean Marrapodi

Stop thinking about courses and start thinking about integrated learning experiences.

Gina Richter

Training personas should be fully fleshed-out characters with pictures and back-stories that identify characteristics of your target audience such as skill level, experience, and job role.


Offer workshops for any new ideas you glean. If you are able to teach others what you have learned, it will not only help you gain a better understanding of the content, but show those around you what you can do for them.

Michelle Costello

Scratch. In The Creative Habit, Twyla Tharp explores the idea of “scratching” for ideas, or looking for inspiration in small things such as everyday conversation. Some of my best ideas for interactions have come from small nuggets that I’ve added on to. Once the idea is developed, you can figure out what tools you need to make it happen.

Judy Unrein

Provide informal credits or bonuses for learners who offer substantially relevant infor-mation. All organizations have employees that, from time to time, have great ideas on improving efficiency or saving costs. Create a workplace environment where employ-ees can share these ideas with the training department. When you use such an idea, make sure you give that employee credit or a bonus for promoting knowledge sharing. To avoid misunderstandings, make sure you’re clear up front on what is “substantially relevant.”

Inge de Waard


Twenty-five Tips for Design

The core of instructional design entails envisioning learning out-comes and determining the learning tactics and strategies for pro-ducing these outcomes with your learners. Our tipsters share some of their best ideas for designing effective learning.

Design for flow. Match the level of difficulty to be slightly — but only slightly — out of reach of the learner’s current ability, and match that with corresponding opportunities to practice and coast a little. When a challenge far exceeds a learner’s ability, it quickly becomes frustrating. And when a challenge is far too easy for a learner, it’s boring. But something that is slightly too hard can be a satisfying challenge, while something that is a little bit too easy can be a satisfying opportunity to coast for a few minutes.

Julie Dirksen

Don’t take a training order; ask questions to determine the business drivers, processes, culture, and technical infrastructure, and learn how you will measure success. Then, in context, build knowledge and change behaviors and/or attitudes to improve perfor-mance.

Gina Richter

If a SME cannot articulate the big idea of a desired course in a single sentence, they do not know what they are looking for. Help them refocus by asking, “What do you want your learners to be able to do at the end of the course?” Then drill down and ask, “What things do they need to know to do that?”

Jean Marrapodi

Do the right amount of analysis and design before you begin creating eLearning mod-ules. Avoid the temptation to dive into eLearning development until you have a clear task analysis that will help you, your subject-matter experts, and your clients clearly un-derstand the desired learning outcomes.

Dick Handshaw

Start big. Start by dreaming up the learning experience you would like to create if time, money, and skill were no object. Then take the kernel of what makes that experience compelling and whittle down to what your resources let you do while keeping that ker-nel intact.

Judy Unrein

Don’t let informal learning scare you. Embrace the concept, and put structure around it to align the learning with organizational goals.

Gina Richter


Use training personas to ensure that your content is the right tone and level for your au-dience.


Instructional design is vital, and so is information design. One of the first steps you should take as you begin to design for different delivery modalities is to decide on the user interface and experience, and begin with a clear end state. It’s fundamental to en-sure a communication structure that does not get in the way of learning, whether you’re using a social-media tool, mobile delivery, computers, or whatever. Be aware that the user experience can change by interaction — from tablet to mobile to laptop to face-to-face. Information design needs to account for these variables. A good example of this practice is pretotyping, a technique that Matt Landis of Google has been using to rap-idly design the user experience, information design, and instructional design using a simple paper-based method.

David Metcalf and AJ Ripin

Design with accessibility in mind. During the audience-analysis portion of your course design, you might typically ask questions about the diversity of the audience, as well as what kinds of tools or processes they use in completing their jobs. This is where you can consider the needs of your learners with disabilities. These disabilities might include blindness, visual impairment, or color-blindness; deafness or other hearing im-pairments; speech impairments; or issues with mobility, dexterity, strength, or the ability to reach.

Some instructional designers view accessible design as an afterthought, to be in-cluded after they finish developing the course. This is ineffective. You should incorpo-rate accessibility into the training design from the initial stages of development. When designing a button, for example, have you ensured it is viewable to learners who are color-blind? Can a screen reader identify that button and its purpose to a visually im-paired learner? Can a learner who is unable to use a mouse use the keyboard to tab to the button, or use a keyboard shortcut to activate the button? If the button starts some narrative audio, have you provided closed captioning for that audio?

Designing for learners with disabilities is just as important as designing for other learn-ers. Considering these needs in the initial analysis and design steps will help ensure eLearning that is accessible for all.

Charles Jones

Remember, social learning has been around longer than we have been alive. Now we just have tools that make social learning possible globally. Leverage these tools!

Gina Richter

Stimulate your learners to share their information, trust their expertise. When building courses, leave room for learner input. Learners are on the work floor or in the field, so they know what is really happening and have relevant information to share from their experiences. Add a “real-life cases” section for each learning topic and ask learners


to upload videos or pictures right from the field. This has a double benefit: you get rel-evant examples you can use in future courses and the learners feel respected in their work.

Inge de Waard

Instructional design should be an iterative process. Throughout the process, don’t for-get to circle back to goals, objectives, business drivers, and success measures.

Gina Richter

Scaffold the learning. Give learners lots of support in the beginning, then take away supports little by little to move them toward independence.

Jean Marrapodi

Design for accomplishments. Use a combination of immediate, short-term, medium-term, and long-term goals to have your learners accomplish things with your content. So instead of having a sales course that’s structured with a module about determining customer needs, followed by a module about product features and benefits, followed by a module about the sales process with the client, learners instead have a series of goals, and if learners fail at any goal, they must practice and try again until they suc-ceed.

Here are some sample goals:

• Immediate: “Gather relevant data about different customers and their needs.”

• Short-term: “Determine a product and sales approach for different clients based on their needs.”

• Medium-term: “Succeed in closing with the client (make the sale, get the meeting, get the referral).”

• Long-term goal: “Hit your sales quota for the quarter and win a trip to Hawaii.”

Julie Dirksen

Use your learner research to create training personas that represent archetypes of your target audience.


Assessment does not always mean a test. How will the learner demonstrate mastery? More often than not, it is through doing something, not knowing something. Knowing enables doing.

Jean Marrapodi

Design for color-blindness: When designing accessible eLearning, most designers fo-cus on the visually impaired who are using screen-readers or other assistive devices. But what about learners who suffer from color-blindness? The National Center for Health Statistics reports that nearly three million Americans are color blind. Not all of your learners view colors the same way. For this reason, you should avoid using color


to convey information, such as “click the red button” or “the correct answer is high-lighted in yellow.” One way to ensure accessibility is to provide sufficient color contrast. Insufficient contrast between foreground and background colors can make a screen inaccessible to color-blind learners. And since most color-blind individuals don’t have low or no vision, they don’t need to use a screen reader or other assistive technology. An easy way to ensure sufficient color contrast is to use a free color-contrast checker such as the ones at http://webaim.org/resources/contrastchecker/ and https://www.ss-bbartgroup.com/reference/index.php/Color_Contrast_Checker. Simply enter the hexa-decimal values of your foreground and background colors into one of these tools, and the tool will tell you if there is sufficient contrast.

Charles Jones

There is a difference between assessment and evaluation. Assessment evaluates the learner while evaluation evaluates the learning with an eye toward improvement and/or results. Formative assessment examines the learner for development or mastery as the concept is forming; it may indicate the need for more work, re-teaching, more practice, or it may identify mastery. Summative assessment occurs in the end state, determin-ing the learner’s mastery at the end of the module or program; you should also use it to evaluate how well the learning enabled the learner’s mastery.

Jean Marrapodi

Write learning objectives for your training persona. This allows you to focus on what your learners need, and omit objectives that are not important for your learners.


Tony O’Driscoll says, “Content may be king, but context is the kingdom.” Don’t just dis-pense information; use simulations, case studies, scenarios, and anything else you can to make the learning relevant to the job task your learners need to perform. Allow imme-diate opportunities for learners to practice their new skills on the job with coaching and feedback. ELearning without coaching usually doesn’t work.

Dick Handshaw

Create a matrix to align all your training activities and content with your anticipated out-comes. This helps SMEs see how their “nice to have” material is not helping to pro-mote the course objective.

Jean Marrapodi

Create social spaces where learners can start, join, or add to the discussion on the subject matter. Creating courses is important to help your learners stay on top of what they need to know. However, it’s crucial that they can discuss the information you pro-vide or the topics you ask them to follow. When learners discuss what they know, or they share their remarks on the subject, they reflect on the content. Reflection is a deeper learning action that allows a longer memorization to take place and it stimulates peers to do the same.

Inge de Waard


Don’t build a spaceship when a wagon will do. The goal is to get learners from one place to another. Handing the learner a wagon may be all you need to do. Think job aid.

Jean Marrapodi

Manage your learners’ cognitive load. Ruth Clark has pointed this out extensively, and plenty of research backs it up. For example, don’t give your learners something to read and something to listen to at the same time.

Dick Handshaw

Sketch. Paper is probably the most flexible sketching medium. It’s also cheap and highly portable. If you are very fluent in visualization or mind-mapping software, that can work well, too, but don’t start designing in an actual authoring tool.

Judy Unrein

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Fourteen Tips for Development

Once your design is ready — or at least ready enough — it’s time to start gathering and developing the learning content, using the tools, and building the structure required to execute and support your learning tactics and strategies. Our tipsters provide some ideas for bringing your design to fruition.

Create a ubiquitous learning environment to meet your (global) learning population and their own diversity of devices. As computing devices continue diversifying, you need to ensure that your learners can access your learning environment independent of device, as well as independent of time, location, and context. Every second lost on searching for the right device is a loss of money and motivation.

Inge de Waard

Develop content that uses context, stories, and characters based on a training per-sona. Creating a narrative-driven, scenario-based training experience is much easier when you have a clear picture of your main character.


Make sure you are evaluating learners against intended outcomes. Each evaluation question should map to an outcome.

Jean Marrapodi

Only use social-media tools whose affordances fit your learning/teaching goals. Social-media tools are just that: tools. Embedding them will not ensure good learning out-comes. To use these tools to their fullest potential, you — the instructional designer — must learn their benefits and downsides in relation to in-depth learning. You must “walk the talk” to create strategic, impactful social-media learning decisions in your de-sign.

Inge de Waard

Use the accessibility panel: Adobe Flash and Captivate both provide an accessibility panel to help developers create accessible learning products. This panel allows you to provide a name and description of your entire Flash project, each movie clip, and each screen object. You cannot use the panel with graphic symbols or static text, so be sure to convert each symbol into a movie clip and use dynamic text.

Charles Jones


Use prescriptive feedback all the time. People don’t learn much by just reading. The teachable moment in any eLearning course comes when the learner makes a mistake in a simulation, exercise, or when answering a question. When they make the mistake, you have their attention. Use feedback to explain why their particular choice or answer is incorrect and how to figure out the correct approach. Don’t just spoon-feed them the correct answer.

Dick Handshaw

Build your expert learning environment in “The Cloud” for immediate knowledge ex-change. Experts in any field or profession already are at the top of their knowledge. But in this rapidly evolving era, any knowledge has rapid turnover, so even experts need to keep their eyes and ears open for new evolutions and insights. If you bring your inter-national experts together in a learning environment located in “The Cloud” and facilitate active learner participation, you will need only minimal course architecture and you will get an optimal exchange of ideas. From that starting point, you can build knowledge iterations where your experts feed their insights and new knowledge to the training managers, and subsequently to the instructional designers that developed the learn-ing environment. An organization that can keep its top knowledge workers in immediate communication with the training department will be able to keep up with the latest insights and evolutions, which will drive a general feeling of expertise throughout the organization.

Inge de Waard

Test a prototype with sample learners and solicit their design advice. No one knows better than your learners what they need in order to learn. Just ask four to six sample learners to use a prototype module that embodies most of your instructional strategy. In two-to-three hours they can determine whether your instructional strategy will be suc-cessful or not. If it isn’t working, they can probably tell you what to do to fix it.

Dick Handshaw

Use interval spacing of content tied to Kirkpatrick Level 3 (behavioral changes over time) as a solution.1 Reviewing information at spaced intervals based on the learner and the content can help transition material from working memory to long-term mem-ory, and thereby create more effective learning. Linking this to a time-spaced method of evaluating training effectiveness with Kirkpatrick’s Level 3 makes good sense, not only to reinforce the learning but also to show the value of the learning if you access some-one’s actual performance based on what they have learned a week, a month, or a quar-ter ago. This will show not only deep, effective learning but demonstrate putting that learning into practice.2

1 Ebbinghaus, Hermann. Memory: a Contribution to Experimental Psychology. New York: Dover Publications, 1964. Print.

2 Kirkpatrick, Donald L. Evaluating Training Programs: The Four Levels. San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler, 1994. Print.



Don’t apply accessibility to everything: Screen readers will read everything that has a name or description. This includes the entire Flash project, each movie clip, and each screen object. Sometimes, all this reading will be too much. In many cases, the name and description you assign a movie clip will satisfy accessibility requirements. In this case, use the accessibility panel to provide a name and description, but be sure to un-check the option to make all child objects of that clip accessible. This way, learners us-ing screen readers don’t hear a description of the clip and of every child object.

What’s a good rule of thumb? If you were describing this movie clip to me over the telephone, would you give me a general description, or would you tell me about each and every object in that clip? How you answer that question should help you determine the items to which you should apply accessibility features.

Charles Jones

On using audio and Podcasts to deliver instructional materials: While we have all heard of cognitive load theory (7±2 items is what the human brain can hold at one time), when it comes to audio content it may be better to use a rule of thumb of 5±2. When someone hears information, five and seven items may be the logical limit on information clumping. Keep this in mind, especially when delivering audio content over mobile de-vices. Shorter bursts of information may be appropriate.


Closed captioning is not just for the hearing impaired: While many developers ensure their courses work with assistive technology, don’t forget learners who are hearing im-paired. These learners generally don’t use assistive technology, but instead depend on course developers to include closed captioning. Adobe Flash provides components for generating closed captions, and Adobe Captivate supports synchronization of audio with text. But these tools can also help learners who are not hearing impaired. Here’s an example: An employee working the graveyard shift on a hospital ward is completing her eLearning course requirements. Because she does not want to wake any sleep-ing patients, she lowers the volume on her computer to barely audible levels. Giving her the ability to press a “CC” button on the Flash player lets her complete the training without disturbing her patients.

Charles Jones


Build suites of apps for mLearning. As we’ve built a series of mobile-learning solutions in the past years, we’ve discovered there is no one app that can do it all. Instead of try-ing to rely on one app, conduct a proper job-task analysis or cognitive-task analysis to determine the needs of a particular role. Then map those needs to capabilities across multiple apps for learning and human performance. For example, when traveling in a foreign country, learners may need an app that has information about the country, an-other app that has maps like Google Maps, another app that has information on lan-guage, and another app that has specialized information about their role in that country or their business activity while there. To expect one app to do all of these things is not likely to produce success. Rather, provide a suite of carefully organized apps with a checklist or job aid to provide mental scaffolding for which app to use for a particu-lar task within the overall task or mission. Also, monitor the development of Web apps (mobile Websites). The mobile versions of Twitter.com and Linkedin.com look and act just like the native apps, and Web apps offer better flexibility in distribution, greater uni-formity across different platforms, and lower costs.


Google Form is one of the many free “document” types available in Google Docs, http://docs.google.com. Google Form is a great tool for collecting information from learners, such as for a survey or assessment. Although Google provides some op-tions for simple form customization through Themes, controlling the “look and feel” of a form beyond the default requires CSS coding. There are many tutorials available on the Web.

Here is the before-and-after of a form I created, and then customized with CSS:

• Before CSS customization: https://docs.google.com/a/geneseo.edu/spreadsheet/viewform?formkey=dG52ejVZSmZQam9Da1FFemtySExwZXc6MQ

• After CSS customization: http://eres.geneseo.edu/library/instructionaldesign/major-concepts.html

Corey Ha

https://docs.google.com/a/geneseo.edu/spreadsheet/viewform?formkey=dG52ejVZSmZQam9Da1FFemtySExwZXc6MQ

http://eres.geneseo.edu/library/instructionaldesign/majorconcepts.html


Seven Tips for Project Management

These days, many instructional designers also serve as project man-agers. If you’re one of these designers, you need to look beyond in-structional design and development to make sure that you and your colleagues have the resources they need to deliver on time and on or under budget. And even if you don’t manage the work of others, you still need to manage your own work. Here are some great proj-ect-management suggestions from our tipsters.

Plan to fail. One of the best ways to keep tools from dictating your designs is to be an experienced, skillful, and confident designer. That takes practice, knowledge, and time; failure can be one of the best teachers. Make sure your project plans aren’t so tight that you can’t try new things and discard them along the way.

Judy Unrein

Take notes at every instructional-design meeting. It helps you and others keep track of what was discussed at the meeting, it can act as an effective reminder for future meet-ings, it helps minimizes assumptions, and helps keeps everyone on the same page.

Corey Ha

Use training personas to help multiple instructional designers focus on the same learn-ers. By targeting each course toward a specific persona, designers will be able to home in on the specific needs of the audience, creating consistency for learners.


Start with a clear end state. We’ve often heard Gary Walker talk about the importance of having a clear vision of what your end state of success looks like — and following that through in project design as well as instructional design. This will help ensure con-sistent outcomes for key performance indicators and stakeholder expectations. Follow-ing this simple guidance can also help you build a clear pathway to Kirkpatrick Level 4 evaluation of the effectiveness of learning at a strategic level.


As a new instructional designer, you may want to start with small, manageable, and measurable projects. Get your feet wet with projects that have a realistic timeframe and attainable goals, then move on to bigger projects. Make sure you break larger projects into smaller chunks and create timelines. Schedule time on your calendar to work on these projects; this is how to keep yourself on track and make sure colleagues can’t claim that time for meetings.

Michelle Costello


Use training personas to create learning paths, marketing materials, and clear messag-ing around whom your training is for, and what people will learn.


At instructional-design meetings, ask yourself “What are we trying to accomplish dur-ing this meeting?” You can ask the person you are working with “what are the top two areas you’d like to work on today?” It’s always helpful to focus on what’s at hand and work on the task.

Corey Ha

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