I’ve covered agile software development methodologies in a favorable light from a journalistic perspective for a number of years, and last month at The eLearning Guild’s DevLearn 2016 Conference & Expo, I was thrilled to see Megan Torrance promoting the use of agile’s best practices in the training industry. The agile manifesto, compiled more than […]
A Letter To Senator Regarding Betsy DeVos
Dear Senator Grassley, I’m a public school teacher in Iowa. I have even voted for you a couple of times (although in honesty I didn’t vote for you this time around.) There was a time when you were considered a moderate. There was a time when Iowa was a state that took some pride in […]
Campus Sail’s Online Orientation platform
A brand new company in the EdTech space just released an online platform for new student orientation. Campus Sail’s Online Orientation platform fully integrates with a school’s existing system in order to automate the onboarding process. The company was born out of the higher education field. “Working at a college, we sat through countless hours […]
A Guide to Virtual, Augmented, and Mixed Reality
Media enthuse about the latest gear or games employing virtual reality or augmented reality; scholarly treatises pontificate about how virtual reality and grounded reality interact. Then there’s something called mixed reality… It’s easy to get lost among the realities. Here’s a primer to sort out the terms and understand how each might apply to eLearning. […]
User-Centered Design and Universal Design-Buzzword Decoder
Both user-centered and universal approaches to eLearning design focus on the end user—the learner—in that they aim to improve the usability of the end product. The approaches differ, though, in that universal design is more conceptual and philosophical, while user-centered design is more process-focused. User-centered design User-centered design includes end users in every aspect of […]
Overview of Virtual Reality and Mixed Reality in eLearning
Welcome to the newest monthly column at Learning Solutions Magazine: a column dedicated to virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR), mixed/modified/merged reality (MR), games, and gamification as they relate to eLearning, corporate training, education, and instructional design. In this first column, I’ll provide an overview of VR and MR within the eLearning industry. Future articles […]
Accessible eLearning Benefits All Learners
“Accessible eLearning Benefits All Learners” explores the reasons for creating accessible eLearning content. This Spotlight concludes a four-part series on how to remove different types of barriers that learners might face: “Accessibility from the Ground Up: Build Captions and Usable Design into All eLearning” describes accessibility for learners who are deaf or hard of hearing. […]
Catchting The Learners’ Attention with Multimodal eLearning
We’re bombarded with headlines and statistics about the growth of online and mobile video viewing; daily viewing of video—social media content, news, and advertising—continues to increase. Yet a recent Pew Research Center study found that younger adults are more likely to read news, albeit online, than to watch it, compared to those over age 50. […]
The Reason Why The Free Market Fai
Donald Trump has proposed that we just get rid of Obamacare and replace it with free market forces. This is as original as any of his policy ideas (i.e. not at all), but it’s still a bad idea because health care is like education in that the free market cannot possibly succeed in accomplishing what […]
ELearning and Reimagining the Virtual Classroom
It’s time to snap out of black-and-white thinking when it comes to eLearning and reimagine the virtual classroom. The concept of synchronous learning, where the instructor and learners are online simultaneously and interaction occurs in real time, is practically baked in to the definition of a virtual classroom. Why would you need a “classroom”—metaphoric or […]