What Instructional Designers Do and eLearning Certifications

Came across this great post that explains what is instructional design and what do instructional designers do in simple terms. The post Is this instructional design? explains:

Instructional design is the process of identifying the skills, knowledge, information and attitude gaps of a targeted audience and creating or selecting learning experiences that close this gap, based on instructional theory and best practices from the field. Ideally, workplace learning improves employee productivity and value and enhances self-directed learning.

And recently Tony Karrer compiled a great list of elearning certifications and other blog posts that discuss instructional design.

Insights from ASTD’s 2009 BEST Award Winners

Last year I reviewed some of the Brandon Hall award winning entries. In a four part series on her aLearning blog, Ellen Behrens shares 14 things we can learn from the ASTD’s 2009 BEST Award winners.

Read her insights in Part 1, Part 2, Part 3 and Part 4.

Most Discussed Posts on eCube

While migrating to the new platform, I had a chance to look back at all the posts on eCube. Here are some posts that generated really good discussion. Hope you find these posts and comments in them useful. Join in on the discussion by posting your comments.

• Anamika Biswas questions if sometimes the internal team quality standards miss the point of content and client requirements in Who is the Boss – QC or Client?
  
  
• Sonali Malik shares the merits of understanding the real audience of your learning content instead of just creating content for your “client” in Who is your Customer? – The Client or the End User?
  
  
• In the first eCube Ponder question, I asked Do We Need Instructional Designers for Technology Content Projects? that resulted in some very interesting discussion.
  
  
• In response to a Learning Circuits Big Question, Sonali Malik shares what she would like to do better as a learning professional. Others join in adding what they would like to do better.
  
  
• In the May 2008 eCube Ponder, we discussed whether IDs should have skills in areas other than writing and design. The discussion was carried forward by Sonali Malik in a separate post that attracted yet more discussion.
  
  
• Anamika Biswas shares her insight about design in Human Centered Design vs Activity Centered Design?
  
  
• Ranit Massey explores the possibility of a single-sentence definition that applies to all types of designs that we have seen, created, or envisioned in Definition of Design. It resulted in some interesting discussion including questioning the need to define ‘Design’.
  
  
• Taruna Goel explores what is simplicity questions whether simple designs are a myth or a reality.
  
  
• In Can eLearning Help Change Behaviour I explore whether self-paced asynchronous elearning can be a good tool for attempting to change behaviour? Taruna Goel helps carry forward the discussion in a separate post of her.
  
  
• Taruna Goel explores the concept of judging quality from the perspectives of different stakeholders in What is Good Quality eLearning.
  
  
• Sandipan Ray poses two questions about simplicity and plagiarism. If you want to view a good discussion on plagiarism, this is not a post to miss.
  
  
• Taruna Goel uses this blog as part of her training program to discuss Gagne’s Events of Instruction. A great example to getting the learners to think and share their thoughts.
  
  
• Rupa Rajagopalan asks a pertinent question Do Instructional Design Training Programs in India Need a Revamp?
  
  
• Rupa Rajagopalan shares 9 Quick Tips to Create Software Product Tutorials.
  
  
• Rupa Rajagopalan encourages instructional designers to play games to improve their visualization skills, creativity and ways to engage with the audience.
  
  
• Taruna Goel and Sonali Malik share their views on what is good writing.
  
  
• Cynthia Rankin shares 7 tips to write in plain English.
  
  
• In Solve a Business Problem or Create a WBT? I encourage instructional designers to focus on better understanding the business problems that client might be facing and then design a solution for it.
  
  
• In a more recent posts (relatively recent that is), I ask what is one hour of elearning to try to demystify the most common metric in the industry.

Rebooting eCube

A few months back, my hosting service provided informed me that they are shutting down the hosting business. After contemplating options, I have moved eCube to Blogger platform, primarily because it is free even for using a custom domain. URL and RSS feed is the same so you should not have to change anything.

eCube started about two years ago as an experiment of constructivism learning, an attempt to create a collaborative learning environment to share and learn with each other. Over last two years, 15 authors shared their thoughts on more than 100 posts. eCube was also used as part of a training program with participants discussing their thoughts on Gagne’s Events of Instruction.

It’s been a journey full of learning with some very exciting posts. I will continue to share with you things I find interesting and useful about elearning and workplace learning.

Encourage | Engage | Explore

For those interested in the technical gory details, it wasn’t easy to migrate from self-hosted Wordpress to Blogger. There aren’t really any easy tools available for conversion. I tried Wordpress to Blogger Google Code project. This works well but is limited to files less than 1MB only. There’s a downloadable version of this tool also available but that looked too complicated for me to handle. Then I found Blog2Blog tool that I finally used. Unfortunately this tool doesn’t convert comments and tags (labels), so these have been manually updated. The other challenge was that all posts appear under my name. I haven’t yet found a way to assign individual posts to specific authors so I have added a note for who the author of the post is for posts not written by me. Moving post pictures was also done manually. While the pictures were appearing on Blogger, they were referenced to the old Wordpress location, which is not available anymore. So the pictures had to be imported to blogger and references changed manually.