Practical Instructional Design Basics
Instructional design is the practice of designing learning content and experiences that make it easy for learners to build new skills and absorb new info. There are plenty of folks in the e-learning world who have rich backgrounds in instructional design. But for others who come from a different background, getting your feet wet in instructional design can help you take a thoughtful and practical approach to creating effective e-learning.
Let’s take a look at some of the key instructional design approaches and processes that can help you deliver the best possible learning outcomes for your learners. These articles are chock-full of practical techniques and strategies that will help anyone from beginners to experienced pros.
The ID Basics
These helpful articles explain what instructional design is and how it can help you create better e-learning:
- An Introduction to Instructional Design: Here’s a breakdown of the essential concepts in instructional design.
- Why Instructional Design Is Important: Learn about how ID can help you improve the learning experiences you create.
- An Introduction to Bloom's Taxonomy for Instructional Designers: Get familiar with this theory of the different types of cognitive processes that make up learning.
Putting ID Theory to Work
Now you’re ready to start putting ID to work. Here are a few key ways you can improve your e-learning development practices:
- All About Learning Objectives for E-Learning: Find out why learning objectives are important, what makes them “good” (or “bad”), and how to craft solid e-learning objectives for your courses.
- 5 Habits of Effective Instructional Designers: Get tips from ID pros on helpful strategies for communicating with subject matter experts (SMEs) to get the right info and content for your course.
- 10 Strategies for Motivating Your Learners: See how you can create courses that engage and captivate your learners.
- The Dos and Don’ts of Separating Need-to-Know from Nice-to-Know: Here’s how you can separate the vital info in your course from non-essential, supporting content.
- 4 Tips to Promote Transfer of New Skills to the Job: One of the biggest challenges learning designers face is helping learners see the relationship between content and their day-to-day work. Here’s how you can help learners make those connections.
- 4 Instructional Design Tips To Create Awesome E-Learning Scenarios: Scenarios are a fantastic way to show learners the consequences of their choices. In this article, we’ll show you how to design super-effective, engaging scenarios.
- How to Design Your E-Learning Course Using Gagne’s 9 Events of Instruction: Learn about Robert Gagne’s classic approach to defining the phases of learning—and how you can apply this approach to designing e-learning start-to-finish.
How to Use ID for Project Analysis
Instructional design theory is full of helpful strategies to analyze content, training needs, and learners. Completing robust analysis before you start your project can help save you time in development—and create more targeted, effective content. Here’s what you need to know:
- How to Do a Task Analysis Like a Pro: Here’s how you can break down a new task that learners need to know in order to teach its component parts effectively.
- How to Do an E-Learning Audience Analysis: To create e-learning that speaks to your target audience, it helps to understand where that audience is coming from. Try using this technique to analyze your learners.
- How to Do an E-Learning Needs Analysis: When your stakeholders identify a performance gap, use this approach to see how training can help learners build the needed skills to succeed.
Looking for more info? Check out our e-books and our Building Better Courses hub for tons more helpful resources.
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