Category: Blog

Today I wanted to take an opportunity to talk about cultural diversity and the responsibilities of instructional designers to take cultural diversity into consideration to remove barriers to learning. This involves both language barriers as well as other considerations. Probably the largest consideration that I forgot to mention in the video is visual representation. Every…

  When developing assessments Rubrics are an excellent way to communicate expectations regarding performance as well as to assess in a fair and systematic fashion. There are times when an automatically graded multiple-choice test won’t cut it and so that’s where a rubric comes in. In broad terms, rubrics come in two flavors Holistic Rubrics…

The concept of alignment is one that is critical to a good assessment. Essentially instructional designers need to ensure that their assessment and content is aligned to the learning objectives and the learning objectives aligned to the overall goal of instruction. If any of these are out of alignment the entire project can be at…

The first step of developing an assessment plan, and the first step of instructional design, in general, is getting a firm grasp of the actual instructional goal. If you’re lucky you will have the opportunity to do a full needs analysis with resources and access to the learners, chances are you will need to be…

There is a lot to do in the realm of assessment, and instructional designers are expected to do quite a bit of it. Most instructional designers will have had experience with or exposure to The Kirkpatric Model, or the Kirkpatric 4 Levels of Evaluation and Assessment. There is more to assessment than just Kirkpatrick. In…

Where do programming skills fit into instructional design? This is a serious question and I’m sincerely curious. I’ve found that I don’t use my programming or scripting skills much in instructional design with the exception of some light HTML and some light CSS. So I’m raising the question of how important are these skills and…

One thing that can be easy to forget when you dash off to do a video is to remember to watch and listen for your backgrounds. A poorly lit project or distracting background noise can cause costly rework in terms of both time and money. And the wrong type of content in the background can…

Today I wanted to share Gagné’s Nine Events of Instruction which when considered in the design of a lesson can make that lesson much more effective. So just a quick overview of that the nine events are and how they can help make your instruction that much more effective.

Bloom isn’t the only game in town when it comes to trying to describe the different categories of learning and learning objectives. And I’m not talking about those who revised and updated his work such as Anderson or Simpson, no I’m talking about actual alternatives. One such alternative comes from Gagné, can you see the…