It was a good experience.  I learned a little bit of a lot of different things, which is what usually happens at conferences.  I met some really amazing people, some of whom I now follow on Twitter.  I played the Networking Game, for what it was worth and a few of those people are now […]

Many of the best tips for creating rich, engaging digital assets for learning come from sources that are probably not first-of-mind for most learning designers or IDs, much less trainers, professors, or instructors. Case in point: My so-called seven steps...

Found this video a while back and meant to share it here. Ioannis (Yannis) N. Miaoulis is the president of the Museum of Science in Boston, the organization behind the award-winning Engineering is Elementary curriculum we are embracing in the K4STEMLAB. In this six-minute video, Mr. Miaoulis explains why we should be teaching engineering in US schools, particularly at the elementary level. He contends: Technological literacy is basic literacy Engineering is a great integrator of other disciplines Engineering makes math and science relevant Engineering opens career opportunities for all students Please watch this video. It helps explain why we are incorporating the study of engineering into our K-4 Computer Lab this year.

Motivation is the force that drives people to fulfill a need. If you can tap into a learner’s intrinsic motivation—where an individual is rewarded by the learning itself or an internal goal—you’ve got it made. But in both workplace and academic environments, people are often unmotivated because they are required to take courses in which they have no interest. That puts designers and developers of learning products in a tough position. We need to work hard at creating experiences that get audiences engaged and motivated. Here are some strategies you can use to motivate adult learners, based on their characteristics. Create useful and relevant learning experiences. Adult learners appreciate immediate relevancy. It’s a great incentive when training is immediately valuable and helpful to one’s work or personal life. Focus on practical knowledge and skills. Related to the strategy above, try to concentrate on workplace (or real life) performance, rather than on extraneous facts and theories. Provide options. Adults usually like choices that promote self-direction. When possible, allow learners to choose the courses they will take within a curriculum or subject category. Even if you provide a suggested order, allow learners to take lessons in a sequence that works for them. Facilitate exploration. Provide resources, references, videos and podcasts to create an ideal environment for personal exploration. Adults have a breadth of experience. Exploration provides an opportunity to construct knowledge in a way that is meaningful for each learner. Build community through social technologies for learning. Implement a social media strategy as part of a learning experience. Use social networking applications and services to build groups with a common interest or goal. Sharing knowledge and experience through informal networks is a motivating and natural way to learn. Accommodate group interactions. Provide opportunities for group discussion, collaboration and group problem solving. Enable testing out. Allow learners to test out of courses for which they know the content. Create active learning. As a general rule, most learners are motivated by engaging and active learning events over passive ones. You’ll find specific strategies for making learning active in this list. Put a face on it. When it fits with your goals, let learners know that there is a real person behind an online learning course. Provide opportunities for this expert to interact with the audience through live or online question and answer sessions. Challenge through games; entice with immersive environments. When your audience members are involved in the challenge of a game or focused on solving problems in a virtual environment, learning becomes an incidental aspect of winning or finding solutions. Although this usually requires a higher budget than other strategies, look around for pre-programmed games that work with your tool set. Use a witty character. Humor is a great way to keep learners motivated. Use humorous characters that reflect familiar situations and personalities to arouse interest. Accommodate busy schedules. Create learning experiences that can be mastered in small segments of time. Make it easy for learners to access individual learning objects for just-in-time answers. Chunk information. Another reason for organizing information into small chunks is to build confidence, which is motivating. Small bits of information are easier to process, comprehend and retain than large chunks. Add a dose of suspense. Don’t give away everything at first. Make learners want to find out more by starting out with a suspenseful scenario that learners need to solve. Mystery is a great motivator. Use creative treatments. Many online courses can be tied to a theme, a dramatic presentation, a compelling narrative or an unusual metaphor that can be carried through the instruction. This adds novelty and interest, which are  motivating forces in learning. Individualize the learning. During interactive events, use context-sensitive feedback for a more accurate response to the learner’s input. Even better is if you can provide multiple paths through a course so that learners are guided by the choices they make. This type of individualization can help a person build accurate knowledge structures, which improves competence and confidence. Accommodate individual interests and career goals. Each learner is a unique individual with his or her own goals. Empowering a person to work toward these goals through training is a powerful incentive to learn. Stimulate the mind. Ask thought-provoking questions and offer problems that don’t have one right answer. Challenge learners to think about exceptions to a rule or to question conventional wisdom. Learners appreciate it when you respect their intelligence. Let learning occur through mistakes. In our everyday life, we learn from our mistakes. We can simulate this in structured learning experiences by offering context-sensitive feedback during games, reviews and tests. Offer just-in-time resources: No one can retain all the content in a course. Provide learners with job aids, online support systems, like wikis and micro-blogging technologies to get just-in-time support in the workplace. Get emotional. When you tap into the emotional dimension of your audience, you can get them hooked and engaged. Add realistic stories, refer to an individual’s cherished memories or say something controversial. Do what it takes to get the audience emotionally involved. Encourage mastery learning. Help learners gain confidence and competence as they learn. Make sure courses are at the right level for each learner. Provide opportunities for people to retake courses until they have mastered the content. Provide real world practice activities. Ensure remediation presents content in a new way. Make it visually compelling. It may be hard to make a course look like it was produced by 3D experts, but there are low-budget ways to make it aesthetically appealing. People are hard-wired for pictures, so use visuals to motivate your audience. Simulate the workplace. Take your cues from the workplace. Uncover the issues or difficulties your audience is experiencing and base scenarios and practice activities on real-world experience. This makes learning meaningful. Respect the audience. Let your audience know why it’s important to take a particular course. Avoid a cynical or condescending tone and honor the learners. You may be the only advocate they have in this big world. Get learners to create graphic organizers. Encourage learners to visually represent the content they are learning. This can keep them engaged and help them structure their new knowledge for easy retrieval in the future. Use good design principles. Make sure your online courses are legible by using a font that can be read by adults of all ages. Ensure graphical text can be easily read too. Keep the screen clear from clutter. It’s demotivating to struggle through a course because of legibility issues. Ask for feedback. Find a way to let your audience contribute to a course. Let them know they can provide feedback to help you improve it. This might help some learners buy in to the program. Present the benefits. Sometimes motivating learners is as simple as presenting the benefits of a course. "This course will help you become more productive with your time, probably saving you 20 minutes every day. In one year, that adds up to 121 hours!" Create an experience, not just a course. What can you do to make a course unforgettable? Create an online and offline learning experience. Market your course to the audience to create buzz, get buy-in from key people, throw a related event, incorporate sophisticated activities to enhance learning, provide personal support for those having difficulty and provide follow-up. What strategies do you use to motivate adult learners? Comment below. Related Articles: Characteristics of Adult Learners 10 Social Media Tools For Learning Social Media and Learning Chunking Information Games and Simulations The Future Of Learning Design Post from: The eLearning CoachGet Your Audience Pumped: 30 Ways to Motivate Adult Learners Tweet This! Share this on Linkedin Share this on Facebook Buzz up! Share this on del.icio.us Stumble upon something good? Share it on StumbleUpon Email this to a friend?

I’m reading Teacher as Architect, by Shawn Smith, Ann Chavez and Garrett Seaman. I haven’t gotten very far into the book yet, but a truth has become clear to me: how I build the learning structure in my classroom determines the strength of the learning experience for my students.  I now wonder, are the materials I’m building […]

Filmmaker Bruce Branit‘s brilliant, powerful short film, World Builder, has been a favorite of mine for years. We have used the first four minutes, thirty seconds of it in class to inspire students with possibility (click here, scroll down to the entry for 4th grade). If you haven’t seen it, here’s your chance. It’s fantastic. This film popped into my head repeatedly over the summer as I worked in my new room. At times, I felt a lot like the character in this movie. Seriously. This was my holodeck: With guidance from amazing people like Christian Long, Chris Lehmann, Mary Beth Hertz, Kristen Swanson, Gregg Festa, and many others, I immersed myself in the task of creating a truly student-centered collaborative learning environment. Christian began by suggesting I read Make Space, the acclaimed learning space design tome by the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford University ("the d.school.") . He also provided me two fantastic texts on modern school architecture, The Language of School Design and The Third Teacher (by his own firm, Cannon Design. They literally "wrote the book.") These resources were invaluable to me as I mentally constructed the master plan for the space. Then, with a little sweat and the support of my administration and school community (our amazing Parent-Teacher Organization and Education Foundation), the magic started to happen. Working within the constraints presented by immovable walls and permanently-mounted furniture / technology, I started to imagine what the room could look like: Then, it was like … bzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzt … there’s a foam cube, just like they talk about in Make Space: Then, bzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzt … a Z-Rack appeared: Again, bzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzt … a giant whiteboard wall: … and it didn’t stop there. Colorful mats appeared in front of the SMART Board. An old DVD player was repurposed into an electronic signage system. Donated supplies from colleagues arrived. Even some wonderful, serendipitous things appeared, like inspirational quotes painted on the walls by a Monica De La Torre, an active member of our fantastic parent community. There are so many more examples. And I am so, so grateful. We’re not done. Furniture is still enroute. Some technology still needs to be put in place. And, our whimsical "newsroom clocks" aren’t here yet, even though the project was funded by several generous donors weeks ago. (Some things aren’t as easy as they appear in the video.) No, it’s not perfect, but it is excellent. And it’s Version 1.0 - a design sure to be improved, informed by interaction with its most important occupants - our students. What happens now? We’re at my favorite part in World Builder, precisely four minutes and twenty-nine seconds in, the moment just before it all becomes real. Thanks go out to everyone who made this amazing learning space possible, from our school leaders to parents to colleagues near and far, to the sponsors who donated materials, goods and services. All I did was dream it up. In the process, I learned so much. Soon, it’ll be the kids’ turn to dream … and, to learn. -kj-

Adobe Systems got some great news today when word hit the street that Apple had decided to modify its previously published App Store developer guidelines. According to an article published by the Silicon Valley Mercury News, Apple will now accept...

In my Entrepreneurial Educator MOOC… we spent last week talking about being an "economy of one".  In other words, what skills do you have that make you an asset in the world and how can or should you use that skill set to create a career for yourself.  In addition, how can you take this […]

Before you just place any old photo into an online course or informational web site, it’s a good idea to think about whether a realistic graphic is required. And if so, how much realism will be most effective? By realism, I mean how well a graphic appears to be a successful copy of its referent. A common assumption is that more realism corresponds to greater comprehension. But this assumption is not based on fact. Surprisingly, a lot of research points to the opposite; realistic graphics are frequently not as effective as those with reduced realism. The Realism Continuum One way to think about realism is in terms of fidelity, or how much an image resembles something recognizable. On a continuum, visuals with the highest fidelity are photographs in full and natural color and photorealistic 3-D renderings. You can tell when a graphic is high-fidelity, because you will see a lot of detail, depth, shadow, texture, and nuance of color that nearly replicates what we you see in the physical environment. In the image below, the photo on the left has the greatest fidelity. On the other end of the continuum are visuals with low fidelity, such as line drawings, silhouettes, and icons. Low-fidelity images use fewer visual elements and qualities that resemble a recognizable object. Reducing realism reduces the fidelity of the image. The line drawing on the right is a low-fidelity image. From left to right - a continuum of high fidelity to low fidelity graphics. Low-fidelity Graphics and Learning Low-fidelity graphics can be more effective for learning when you need to: Provide an explanation to people with limited knowledge of the content Focus only on essential details Ensure viewers recognize an object quickly Strengthen the impact of a message For example, you might choose low-fidelity graphics in a beginners cooking course that is explaining the use of various utensils. In contrast, high-fidelity photographs would work best when teaching more experienced chefs about presentation of the final meal. Advantages of Low-Fidelity Graphics Some of the cognitive advantages of low-fidelity graphics include the following: Quick Visual Scanning: When we read an image, we scan it to extract significant information. A graphic composed of a minimum of visual elements, such as a line drawing, will take less time to scan and assimilate compared to one that is more complicated, such as a natural scene in a photograph. Less Information in Working Memory: Working memory has a limited capacity and is easily overloaded. Distilling a graphic down to its essential visual elements minimizes the amount of information that working memory has to simultaneously manipulate. Fewer Distractions: The presence of unnecessary elements can distract the viewer from focusing on the key message. Fewer Misunderstandings: Superfluous information can potentially cause misunderstandings. A minimalist approach could avoid this problem. Less Information to Process: Many cognitive researchers think that as the brain processes visual information from a graphic, it removes the nonessential sensory input and converts it into a bare-bones representation of crucial information. Low-fidelity graphics, therefore, require fewer transformations and take less time to get them ready for encoding into long-term memory. Many times, you can achieve the most effective visual communication by abstracting and simplifying a graphic. You will need to balance the goal of reducing realism enough to improve cognitive processing, while at the same time, leave enough detail so that viewers will comprehend the graphic as it was intended. The research for this article was taken from my book, Visual Language for Designers: Principles for Creating Graphics that People Understand. Other Articles with Graphic Tips: The Power of Visual Grouping Graphics Primer: Color Post from: The eLearning CoachRealistic Graphics and Learning: What’s most effective? Tweet This! Share this on Linkedin Share this on Facebook Buzz up! Share this on del.icio.us Stumble upon something good? Share it on StumbleUpon Email this to a friend?