A Fun Time-Waster or Learning Experience?
October 4th, 2022
I was wasting time with this activity where you create the next iPhone. Playing with the site reminded me of a few core principles that are often neglected when building interactive e-learning; so here are a few brief thoughts.
Traditional e-learning is basically boring.
I know there are some good courses out there. But I've seen thousands of courses from large and small organizations and they're mostly bland and uninteresting. There are all sorts of reasons why, but the core problem is that these ...
I'm really excited about the 
When I first learned to build e-learning courses, the general instruction for building e-learning content was to craft some learning objectives, organize and present the content, and then assess the learners using some sort of simple quiz. I think that's how a lot of people learned to build courses with many of them following a similar structure.
Back in those days, the course authoring tools weren't easily available and building something overly sophisticated required a lot more resources. Thus, many courses were relatively simple in terms of the instructional design ...
"Step away from the solution."
I say this all the time when building courses. It helps me and my clients focus on the training program's core objective. The course we're building exists to help meet the performance objective; but the course itself is not the objective.
This takes us back to what we discussed earlier: 
I often see community members asking how to lock down a course. In fact, it is 
A guest post by 
As we've mentioned throughout this blog, the default for many e-learning courses is to focus exclusively (or mostly) on content presentation. This is fine for some courses, but effective online training requires that the content is wrapped around some performance expectations and corresponding activity where the learner can practice and demonstrate competency.
In previous posts we looked at two approaches to the Tell, Show, and Do model:
"Tell, Show, Do" is a common instructional design model. We featured that in 
From an ideal perspective, when we build courses, we're trying to change performance and not just share a bunch of information. That means we need a course design model that goes beyond content-sharing. One common approach for online course design is the Tell, Show, and Do model.
It makes sense because it's simple, covers the basics, and steers us towards the course's performance expectations.
Tell People What They Need to Know
What do they need to know and why?
The goal is to establish expectations and clarity around objectives. This ...
I haven’t taken a survey, but my guess is that most people will tell you they can’t stand when an e-learning course’s navigation is locked. And to compound the frustration, many of those courses are narrated by the world’s slowest talkers.
If a locked course is a frustrating experience, why do so many exist?
There are usually a few reasons. I’ll cover three common ones and some ideas on how to get around them.
Reason 1: Courses need to be locked so that all of the content is viewed.
The last ...
The objective of an effective e-learning program is to create the best courses possible with the resources at hand. From what I see, most e-learning courses are simple, explainer-type content. This is fine in the right context. However, many of those courses tend to be overbuilt with superfluous interactivity.
One way to build the right type of course is to understand the types of courses typically created and where they fit in your e-learning ecosystem.
First Step: Focus on the Right Objectives
We don't always have control over the course ...
With Covid-19, QR codes made a comeback. They're all over the place and scanning them with a phone is so easy. For a recent conference, we created a QR code to access the handouts and examples. They're worth considering as one more way to share resources in your e-learning courses. Here's a simple tip on how to create them for your training.
Why Create a Free QR Code for Training
Some training resources have really long links and make it difficult to share. I know that when presenting in a ...
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