July 29, 2015 “ . . . Education is not only about knowledge. It is about inspiration. It is about passion. It is about the belief that what we do in life matters. It is about moral choice. It is about taking nothing for granted. It is about challenging assumptions and suppositions. It is about truth and justice. It is about learning how to think. It is about, as James Baldwin wrote,...
July 27, 2015 Instructional Design (ID) is so much more than the formulae taught today in many universities. ID, in order to be effective, combines creativity and analysis that, ideally, places the profession into an interpretative arts category. Yet, higher education — dominated by its Enlightenment-influenced academic departments — tends to look down on fields of study that cannot trace their research directly to the scientific or mathematical disciplines. As a former...
July 22, 2015 “For any learning experience to be truly effective, people must be motivated to go through that experience. With elearning, when there’s often little input from other people to cajole or encourage, that motivation needs be engendered by the materials themselves. . . . . . . good elearning will cause people to reflect on what they currently do/think and start working the way the elearning is suggesting. . ....
July 20, 2015 “Optional Word-for-Word Audio Capability” is the number one and most essential factor necessary for effective e-Learning! Without it, the courses you provide will fail to significantly improve on-the-job performance and increased retention for nearly half of your trainees. You want your trainees to learn, retain, and apply the information you present. But, you must never forget that 40% of your workforce is not reading-fluent (typically, able to assimilate little...
July 15, 2015 UNICEF in its discussion of a “Child Friendly Learning Environment” defines the term as: To survive and succeed, children depend on the support of their parents and families, of their teachers, even of each other. More than a half century of research clearly shows that greater family involvement in children’s learning is a critical link to achieving high-quality education: • What PARENTS do to help their children learn matters...
July 13, 2015 As the United States continues an uphill battle to reform its education system and to re-establish its manufacturing dominance, many educators are seeking new and innovative programs to better prepare workers and students. Tomorrow’s students need more effective training solutions and today’s workers need upgraded skills in order to cope with the ever-changing technologies of today and tomorrow. Unfortunately, the delay in converting traditional classroom instruction into the more...
July 8, 2015 Every now and then one is fortunate enough to discover a gem among all the opinion columns that are published (or, posted) every day. Such was a piece that appeared in THE WASHINGTON POST a couple of weeks ago. “College is not a commodity. Stop treating it like one” by Hunter Rawlings succinctly scores such a bullseye. Rawlings is president of the Association of American Universities and a former...
July 6, 2015 For decades, decentralized companies have had to cope with training challenges that included lack of standardization, inconsistency, and facilitation challenges. An absence of centralized record-keeping has also negatively impacted their efforts. We’ve seen how modern LMS’s have addressed the latter issue and, today, e-Learning has proved capable of solving the other challenges. One multi-national company has commented publicly about their transition to e-Learning solutions for their training challenges: “At...
July 1, 2015 Some training vendors promote their courseware pre-tests as prescriptive tools. If a trainee passes certain sections of the pre-test, she will be automatically directed only to those learning units she did not pass. She will not be directed to the other learning units. There is a real danger with this practice! Pre-tests provided by vendors’ courseware are incomplete testing units. They typically have only one-to-five questions pertaining to each...