I create learning experiences that help people understand complex topics and apply them immediately. 

My Approach:

• Everyone’s got better things to do. Learning should respect the learner’s time. Sometimes this means being mindful of how long an elearning course is. Sometimes this means understanding that an elearning is not the solution. Corporate L&D often asks people to take time away from their job duties to complete a course. They don’t want to complete the course. They want to do their job duties. Time away from the job should always be a consideration in choosing the appropriate medium to deliver learning. 

• Sometimes you need a station wagon, not a sports car. Not every learning medium is appropriate for every situation. Elearning doesn’t need a branching scenario to be effective. An ILT isn’t always the best way to deliver a training. In some situations, a short video can get the point across better than a 20-minute course can. The context, the content, the constraints, and the learners should be what drives the decision-making.

• Engaging is not a synonym for entertaining. Creating an engaging learning experience does not mean making it gamified, nor does it mean giving a learner a lot of things to click on. Engaging learning gets the learner to engage with the content. It gets them to think about it, to apply what they’ve learned, to consider how they will apply their new knowledge and skills when they return to their job duties. Engagement comes from carefully chosen learning objectives. From knowledge and skills learners can apply to their jobs immediately. From practices and assessments that ask the learner to do more than recall facts. Not games and cartoon characters. Meaningful thinking is what creates engagement. 

Click on the links below to see my instructional design principles in action.