The Support Team’s Lament
The Unsung Heroes:The shoutout in our last blog to IT support alongside the benefits of regular updates led to a little groan session in our weekly team meeting. If you work in support you know what we mean…so to make the world a bit better for you unsung heroes,...
The Case For Keeping Your LMS Up To Date
Another Day, Another Update:You’ve invested a lot of time and money setting up your Learning Management System (LMS) and filling it with content. Everything seems to be running smoothly—management is satisfied, learners are using the system, and things are going well....
Learning on the Go: An Advantage you can’t ignore
" …‘mobile sets Learning Free’ … we can now learn virtually anything, anywhere and anytime.” (Attribution uncertain)Learning on the Go:Do you remember a time before the word ‘google’ became a verb? (As in, ‘Did you google it?’) Those of us who remember using...
The Great AI Debate: The pleasures and the pitfalls.
"The emergence of artificial intelligence (AI) and the technological singularity is a threat to human survival." - Stephen Hawking, physicist. BBC interview, 2014What is all the fuss about?In November 2022, OpenAI released a demonstration of ChatGPT to the public and...
Creating Quality Content
What is content? Content has many meanings. In our context content is the text we present to convey information, the graphics we use to enhance meaning and understanding, and the methods we use to test and assess successful learning. To slightly misquote Bill Gates1:...
Ensuring Engagement through Gamification
Why is engagement so important? One of the main goals when creating and framing learning content is to keep our learners’ attention. As instructors we’re always looking for ways to make content engaging as well as educational. What makes engagement so important? We...
Overcoming obstructions to learning
Overcoming obstructions to learning It's the age-old question - what can you as a teacher, instructor, coach or trainer do to make sure that your audience actually learns? If there is one concern that brings dread to the heart of the instructional designer (or ID), it...
Moodle 4.0 – All new
Just another update? We're all resigned to the perpetual requirements for updates from the products we're locked into using, and more than a little jaded by the demand for yet more financial outlay for what is mostly cosmetic and often irritating. So it's truly...
Cognitive load and effective digital learning
In a previous blog, we discussed cognitive load theory and how understanding it can guide the discerning manager to finding effective learning solutions. This time we thought it would be useful to have a closer look at what instructional designers do to reduce...
What is Cognitive Load?
What is cognitive load and how does understanding it improve course design? Dig a little deeper into learning technique discussions and articles these days, and you will find that the concept of cognitive load is becoming more and more prominent. It’s not a new...