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Best Practices & Tips
See All Best Practices & Tips Articles
Best Practices/Tips
Should Instructional Designers care about the Tin Can API?
The Tin Can API is an extremely hot topic in the elearning industry. But what exactly is it, and what does it mean to today's instructional designer? In this article, David Kelly and Kevin Thorn explain what the Tin Can API is, and explore just how much it may impact the world of today's instructional designer.
» [Full Article]
TAGS: Delivery Technology, News and Trends
Best Practices/Tips
PowerPoint as a Graphics Editor
As a preview to the Training 2013 Conference & Expo, this article will serve as an introduction to Kevin Thorn's session "PowerPoint as a Graphics Editor." With a focus visual design and communication, Thorn delves into how our brains work and perceive visual signals.
» [Full Article]
TAGS: Design and Development, News and Trends
Best Practices/Tips
7 Student Myths of the Online Classroom
Students have misconceptions of online college course. This article discusses the top seven common myths, and presents remedies for instructors to resolve these inventions. The focus is on specific resolutions of student issues before they become student problems.
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TAGS: Design and Development, News and Trends, Program Evaluation
Best Practices/Tips
Disruptive and Transformative Education: Designing learning in the digital age
Emerging changes to the way education is being delivered means that educators need to increase their technological domain of knowledge as well as improve their information and communication technology (ICT) skills to be able to design and facilitate learning in the digital age. These disruptive and transformative learning experiences will then better equip learners for a life of learning in a rapidly changing world.
» [Full Article]
TAGS: Design and Development, Digital Literacy, News and Trends
Best Practices/Tips
Teacher Preparation Trends
Online learning can no longer be considered a "fad" that may quickly pass. Instead, teachers and teacher educators alike must prepare themselves for the increasingly technological learning of the 21st century. This article focuses specifically on the benefits of YouTube as a means of reflection, modeling, and assessment for online education courses.
» [Full Article]
TAGS: Delivery Technology, Program Evaluation, Social Learning
Best Practices/Tips
In the Google Age, Information Literacy is Crucial
Students having instant access to information through Google or Yahoo is a double edged sword. While students can find answers through public search engines quickly, many are unable to discern valid information from bad information. Students must develop good habits before they enter the workforce. This article highlights higher education teaching strategies for information literacy.
» [Full Article]
TAGS: Digital Literacy, News and Trends
Best Practices/Tips
eLearning in a Foreign Language
In this article, the author explores the challenges of learning a foreign language online and how the process differs from that of learning other subjects in ones native language. The author suggests adjusting first year credit hours to provide more language practice, increasing variety in lesson plans, and keeping up with instructional technology and the virtual classroom. Leadership themes and the magnitude of student autonomy in the virtual foreign language classroom are also discussed.
» [Full Article]
TAGS: Design and Development
Best Practices/Tips
How to Fail When Using Internal Social Media
Advice on how to do internal social media is abundant. We constantly hear about best practices, case studies, and seminars, which relate successes. But as the industry has matured it has had its share of failures-companies who have badly botched their internal social media initiatives. From those, lessons are learned but rarely shared. This article shows five ways companies have failed implementing social media and extracts learnings from them. Studying these failures-and how to avoid them-help us to avoid the same fate.
» [Full Article]
TAGS: Lifelong Learning, Social Learning
Best Practices/Tips
How to Build and Lead Successful Online Communities: Behaving appropriately
In this final part of his series on learning communities, eLearn contributor Nic Laycock discusses how to avoid bad behavior and foster a real sense of community.
» [Full Article]
TAGS: Program Evaluation, Social Learning
Best Practices/Tips
A Practitioner's Dilemma: How can I calculate the value of communities of practice?
The purpose of this article is to describe a process for evaluating the return on investment (ROI) of communities of practice. Adapting Kirkpatricks four-step model, Wenger, Trayner and deLaat produced a revolutionary new method for connecting specific CoP activities to organizational results. This article describes the method in order to help practitioners "prove" the value of CoPs to executive-level decision makers.
» [Full Article]
TAGS: Social Learning, Theories and Principles
Best Practices/Tips, Reviews
Rapid Power Tools: The top performers of eLearning authoring software
Not all authoring tools are created equal. Some require programming skills and a long lead time for development, others are too simplistic to effectively address all of your needs. Enter "rapid power tools." They are easy to use and powerful enough to to create custom learning experiences. In this article, Judy Unrein looks at what's available on the market. Find out which ones make the cut.
» [Full Article]
TAGS: Course-authoring Tools, News and Trends
Best Practices/Tips
The Classroom in the Palm of Your Hand
In this article, the use of student mobile learning technologies is discussed. The author then goes on to examine how he, as a college instructor, needs to implement better mobile learning interactions in his math classes. By connecting to the current literature on mobile learning, the author has tried to show how the development and implementation of mobile learning should occur. It is the authors hope that this article will motivate other college instructors to implement mobile learning interactions in their courses.
» [Full Article]
TAGS: Digital Literacy, Mobile Learning
Best Practices/Tips
How to Build and Lead Successful Online Communities: Getting Started With An Online Community
In Part 3 of 4 in his series on learning communities, eLearn contributor Nic Laycock discusses how to get started in building an online community by having a clear purpose and having all your ducks in a row at launch.
» [Full Article]
TAGS: Social Learning
Best Practices/Tips, Multimedia
Lights, Camera, Learn!: Five tips for using video in eLearning
Video is steadily gaining popularity as a valuable design tool for visually demonstrating soft skills in eLearning courses. But people tend to shy away from them because of misconceptions of high productions costs or the draw on resources. This article provides five tips on when to use video, how to maximize its effectiveness, and how to keep costs reasonable. The article focuses more specifically on using video for behavioral modeling of soft skills, keeping video length short and sweet, generating interactivity with video, considerations for resources and budget, and notes on self-production.
» [Full Article]
TAGS: Design and Development, News and Trends
Best Practices/Tips
Redefining, Reinventing, and Rebuilding Schools for the 21st Century
In the words of acclaimed author, Thomas Freidman, our world has gone flat. The workforce has gone global galvanizing international competition. The billion dollar question is Do our students have the skills to succeed and excel in this 21st century market? According to an exhaustive 2006 study conducted by The Conference Board, Corporate Voices for Working Families, Partnership for 21st Century Skills, and the Society for Human Resource Management, the answer is a grim no. The next question should be "How do we rectify this?" The potential solutions are to redefine, reinvent, and rebuild our schools to mirror 21st century exigencies.
» [Full Article]
TAGS: News and Trends, Program Evaluation
Best Practices/Tips, Interviews
Managing the Unforeseen: An Interview With Abigail Wheeler
Abigail Wheeler talks us through the project management required to develop creative eLearning while remembering the importance of developing yourself along the way.
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TAGS: Assessment, Needs Analysis, Program Evaluation
Best Practices/Tips, Interviews
The Space Between: An Interview with Craig Wiggins
Craig Wiggins prioritizes paper and pencil over authoring tools and talks to eLearn Magazine about storyboarding as the essential for all designers.
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TAGS: Design and Development
Best Practices/Tips
Immersive Learning for Teacher Professional Development
Immersive environments, such as Multi-User Virtual Environments and virtual worlds, are increasingly being prototyped, explored and assessed as tools to help students master content, domain-specific thinking skills, and general problem-solving ad decision making skills. This article suggests that immersive environments may hold the same learning potential for teachers as for students.This article explores a few of these programs while outlining strengths and weaknesses of immersive environments as professional development mechanisms. It argues for more comprehensive examinations of immersive environments for teachers' professional learning.
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TAGS: Games and Simulations, Social Learning, Theories and Principles
Best Practices/Tips
Learning in the Semantic Web
As our use of technology becomes more social, the amount of information shared and distributed has exploded. Understanding how to organize and manage our online experience will be the work of computers not humans. This is the idea behind the semantic Web. In his latest article for eLearn Magazine, Reuben Tozman explores learning in the dawning age of the semantic Web.
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TAGS: Digital Literacy, News and Trends, Theories and Principles
Best Practices/Tips
Power to the Learners
The ISD graduate program at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County is well established in educating training and development professionals. Six graduate students who recently experienced an informal learning course reflect on their transformational learning experience: tweeting, blogging, reading, sharing, and growing personal learning networks. Here's their story, along with a number of tips and tricks for using various Web-based tools to help to discover, create, organize, and share.
» [Full Article]
TAGS: News and Trends, Program Evaluation, Social Learning
Best Practices/Tips
How to Build and Lead Successful Online Communities: How Is A Community Different From A Network?
In Part 2 of 4 in his series on learning communities, eLearn contributor Nic Laycock discusses what distinguishes a community from a network.
» [Full Article]
TAGS: Social Learning
Best Practices/Tips, Multimedia
A Place to Call Our Own
The need to stay up-to-date is becoming ever more important. Sole reliance on traditional forms of education and training, which are orchestrated by others, means a lot of informal learning and practical experience goes unnoticed and unrewarded. To overcome this more and more people are using eportfolios as personal, online learning spaces to capture experiences and earn recognition or credit toward a qualification; gain employment, a promotion or industry accreditation; or simply achieve their personal/professional learning goals.
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TAGS: Digital Literacy, Mobile Learning
Best Practices/Tips
Chasing Down the Elusive Credits for Facts and Fictions in Learning and Improvement
"Only 20 percent of performance issues are rooted in the individual versus the system (or environment)." You may have lost count of the many times this well-known phrase has been repeated. It's popular, but is it true? And more importantly from whence did it come?
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TAGS: Lifelong Learning, Theories and Principles
Best Practices/Tips
A Curator's Tools and To-Do List
A curator takes objects and creates a meaningful experience by organizing them within a useful context. This model is a blueprint for the future of learning, where the role of the learning professional is to enable meaningful consumption of information.This to do list is your guide to start implementing curation in your organization, with recommendations for creating, collecting and sharing-and building a culture of open conversation.
» [Full Article]
TAGS: Digital Literacy, Social Learning
Best Practices/Tips
How to Build and Lead Successful Online Communities: What makes a community a community?
In this first in a series on learning communities, eLearn contributor Nic Laycock defines what makes a community and discusses the importance of online communities for learning and development.
» [Full Article]
TAGS: Digital Literacy, Social Learning
Best Practices/Tips
What Are You Working On?
Is it possible to hold a conversation with thousands of voices? Multinational firm Deloitte uses Yammer to strip away distance, hierarchy, and service line divisions to enable real-time knowledge sharing among its employees. Simon Townsend was there from the start and watched the micro-blogging tool grow from a small virtual water cooler to a global network of more than 180,000 users.
» [Full Article]
TAGS: News and Trends, Social Learning
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