7 Better Learning Principles for Custom ELearning - A Free and Useful Guide for Instructional Designers
Dan Keckan
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Description
There is a large contingent of instructional designers out there who are forced by their organizations’ lines of business to take orders and “design” eLearning courses. Stakeholders ask these well-intentioned instructional designers to become order-takers and apply learning objectives, knowledge checks and assessments to their PowerPoints and import them into a Storyline or Captivate published SCORM file.
Once it is loaded into the organization’s LMS it resides there in a deep blue abyss forever. Did I mention that these projects have a completion deadline of 2-3 weeks? Does this sound like you? It’s not your fault. Let me say it again, it’s not your fault! After all, you have a backlog of projects and only so many hours in a day to argue the merits of learner-centric and performance-focused eLearning
They were frustrated with bad eLearning that fails to live up to its promise of improving performance and creating measurable results. So they decided to come up with a set of 22 principles that reflect effective performance-focused eLearning that instructional designers should know and use. I’m a signatory and agree with every principle in the manifesto. However, it falls short of being a useful tool that instructional designers can use to evaluate their design throughout the project life cycle and make changes for the better.
There are other tools out there that evaluate the quality of instructional design based on performance-focused and learner-centric standards. Take the Quality Matters Rubric for instance. This tool is very advanced, has quality assurance standards, certification for designers, and even membership opportunities. However, it focuses primarily on academia not industry, it is very rigorous, and it can take almost as much time to evaluate your course than building the actual course. Therefore, I decided to come up with an evaluation tool for my team and I would like to share it with you. The evaluation tool is called the 7 Better Learning Principles Assessment (of course if someone comes up with a better name, I’m all ears).
Once it is loaded into the organization’s LMS it resides there in a deep blue abyss forever. Did I mention that these projects have a completion deadline of 2-3 weeks? Does this sound like you? It’s not your fault. Let me say it again, it’s not your fault! After all, you have a backlog of projects and only so many hours in a day to argue the merits of learner-centric and performance-focused eLearning
They were frustrated with bad eLearning that fails to live up to its promise of improving performance and creating measurable results. So they decided to come up with a set of 22 principles that reflect effective performance-focused eLearning that instructional designers should know and use. I’m a signatory and agree with every principle in the manifesto. However, it falls short of being a useful tool that instructional designers can use to evaluate their design throughout the project life cycle and make changes for the better.
There are other tools out there that evaluate the quality of instructional design based on performance-focused and learner-centric standards. Take the Quality Matters Rubric for instance. This tool is very advanced, has quality assurance standards, certification for designers, and even membership opportunities. However, it focuses primarily on academia not industry, it is very rigorous, and it can take almost as much time to evaluate your course than building the actual course. Therefore, I decided to come up with an evaluation tool for my team and I would like to share it with you. The evaluation tool is called the 7 Better Learning Principles Assessment (of course if someone comes up with a better name, I’m all ears).
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