Category: Blog

One of the things that can ruin your day is having a project return from the dead. In this video I use the example of a building having it’s name changed. A simple update, just swap out the slide, hire Jack for the easiest 3 second voice over, and republish. Right but without all of…

One of the interesting challenges instructional designers face is talking to friends and family about instructional design. And the inevitable “What’s That?” response. And it’s even further complicated by the lack of job title consistency within the field. A funny story is that my mom’s cousin is also an instructional designer and I could have…

Rubrics Make the Evaluation Easier: For the most part, I find the Quality Matters Rubrics to be the most useful and their professional development is not only a fantastic resource for developing and evaluating online courses and workshops they are also fantastic examples of well planned out online learning products. The annotated Rubrics are worth…

One of the things that I think every instructional designer, every teacher, every instructor, and every trainer should do continually is to take courses. Now not any course in particular but rather always be taking at least one course, workshop, something so that we can observe others in action. Last fall I took an InDesign…

One of my favorite iPhone apps is Adobe Capture which among other things can generate lovely Swatches from the camera and from saved images. You can then save the swatches directly to your Adobe account and use them in most of the Adobe Apps. This can be a lifesaver when you know kinda the colors…

There is a classic debate that is part of most instructional design curriculums. The great media debate between Richard Clark and Robert Kozma. Clark argued that all mediums worked so you should use the cheapest, Kozma argued that the different attributes of different mediums made them easier in different situations. I view this as two…

Today I wanted to share a reminder that just because you should shoot any needed images in as high a resolution as possible doesn’t mean that you should make your learners download the images at that resolution. Images for use in elearning should be optimized. This means they should be resized to the largest they…

When making instructional video there is the risk of just having a talking head, and yes I see the irony there, but there can be some ways to take the long video and make it a bit more dynamic and those options come from multiple cameras and mixing up some of the shots. But what…

As we move through our quick series on instructional video I wanted to share two additional tips. The first has to do with screen resolution for screen capture. I highly recommend having your screen resolution turned down which makes all of the on-screen elements larger. This can go a long way in making the video…

Working in Camtasia today I was reminded of how fun adding every type of transition can be, same in PowerPoint and all of the tools. But it’s important to consider that unless a transition specifically adds to the learning experience it should probably be skipped and instead either use a “Jump Cut” or a “Fade…