Having spent over a decade training and mentoring educational content developers and instructional designers, I have come to the conclusion that there are two qualities (or perhaps personality traits) that are nearly impossible to teach to someone who doesn’t already possess them: precision and creativity, both of which are important for creating effective and engaging… Read More
An important part of maintaining online course materials is keeping them up to date. Over time, an online course can become out of date as textbooks are updated, current events change, or new research occurs within a particular field of study. Sometimes the motivation for updating online course materials is pedagogical: It’s clearly important pedagogically… Read More
The English language has several easily-confused horizontal-line punctuation symbols: Hyphen: – En Dash: – Em Dash: — Minus Sign: − Underscore: _ Although these punctuation marks look similar at a glance, they are actually distinct punctuation marks with specific intended uses and with distinct unicode character values. Let’s look at these different punctuation symbols and… Read More
At its best, there is a playful hands-on aspect to the creative design process. Well-known creative and innovative product design studios (say, the design studios at Apple or LEGO) are known both for their creativity and for their designers’ hands-on exposure to the raw materials from which a product will be designed and eventually manufactured…. Read More
Why Should Instructional Designers Have a Working Knowledge of HTML? Almost anyone in the field of educational technology, but instructional designers in particular, can benefit from having at least a basic working knowledge of HTML. “HTML” stands for “Hypertext Markup Language,” and it is the backbone of almost every website or webpage on the internet… Read More