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Helpful ideas. Squeaky value.
Helpful ideas. Squeaky value.
Everything about creating online training and courses, from the thinking behind good instruction to the tools and tricks used to build it.
Last week I had a kidney infection that almost put me out for good. Stuck in bed with nothing to do but think, I reflected on three things about how people learn. They changed how I approach every course I build.
When a course has nothing to do with what learners face at work, they disengage. Building engagement isn't about adding more interactivity. It's about making the content matter.
A well-designed course isn't enough on its own. Learning requires the person taking the course to actually want to engage. Here are three things you can do to build that motivation into your design.
Most compliance training is about certifying exposure to content, not changing behavior. But there's a performance angle buried in many of these courses. Knowing the difference shapes your design choices from the start.
A manager once told me the people who designed his company's e-learning were "e-learning fascists." He wasn't wrong. Locking navigation doesn't solve the underlying problem. Here's what does.
Most e-learning is built as a one-shot event. The problem is that people learn constantly, not just when they're in a course. Here's how to build a strategy that works with those 2000 learning hours.
Most e-learning problems start before anyone opens an authoring tool. The questions you ask at the beginning shape everything that follows. Here's a practical checklist for getting an e-learning project off on the right foot.
Not all images help learners. Some get in the way. Research shows that decorative images can actually make learning harder. Here's how to choose images that pull their weight.
After sharing a Rise interactive scenario demo, I got a lot of questions about how the graphics were built. The headers, flashcard images, and character graphics all came from PowerPoint. This post walks through the exact workflow, including how to set slide sizes and export images for Rise blocks.
Older PowerPoint scenarios can be hard to manage and even harder to update. Rise offers a cleaner alternative that's fully responsive and easier to maintain. This post walks through one conversion, from planning the interaction design to working around Rise's constraints.
Someone emailed me a question I've been asked a lot: what is the role of the instructional designer, and how do you explain it to clients and SMEs? An awareness test video I stumbled across does a better job answering that question than any explanation I could write.
Great e-learning doesn't happen in a vacuum. Even the most independent developer relies on a network of people to deliver a course that works. Here's a breakdown of who those people are and what they each bring to the project.
Most course developers struggle to get what they need from subject matter experts. It's not a content problem — it's a relationship problem. Here's how to fix it before the project goes sideways.
AI voices have gotten so good that most course developers skip the debate entirely and just use them. But there are still situations where a real human narrator is worth the cost. Here's how to think through the decision.
Before you build anything, there are a handful of questions worth asking. Getting clear on them upfront saves a lot of rework later.
