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As a former educator and the mom of a precocious soon-to-be five year old, I've spent a lot of time since November 8th thinking about how to talk to kids about the current political climate in the United States. How are we as grown-ups to deal?
For the past several years, I've had the opportunity to facilitate design thinking sessions for educators at the annual Big Ideas Fest. The conference requires its facilitators to tap all their skill and expertise to lead groups of educators through a user-centered design process. I've learned a ton about facilitation through this work, including what it takes to get groups of all sizes to stay engaged and collaborative.
In October, I had the opportunity to present at the annual conference for the Association for Talent Development's Puget Sound chapter. My presentation, "Designing Better Online Learning Experiences," focused on sharing best practices for learning design.
Traditionally, mindfulness has been taught, learned and practiced through independent self-study or through working with an expert. But these days, new technology solutions are springing up to help parents, teachers and other caring adults more easily share mindfulness with children. Here are three we like.
In education, we understand the power of relationships in driving our work. But often, when we try to create community online through discussion forums or social media, our efforts fall flat. To avoid this, start thinking of your online community as a mega-city and yourself as an urban planner.
We're associated with a number of proposals for 2017, all of which are focused on bringing equity and empathy to classrooms and learning spaces. We would really appreciate your support, not just for Open Classroom Consulting, but for these important themes in general.
So you’re considering moving your face-to-face learning content online. Congratulations! Teaching online can be a great way to reach new audiences and take advantage of the opportunities created by the latest learning technology. Unless you’ve got lots of experience with online learning, you’re likely feeling a little overwhelmed and unsure where to start. Don’t worry! Much of what you know about good learning design applies to both face-to-face and online learning experiences. But there is one common mistake many newbies make when first starting out, and it’s crucial that you avoid it.
MOOCs and online courses have the potential to scale and democratize learning in unprecedented ways. But, MOOC platforms are often designed in a way that perpetuates ineffective models of teaching and learning. How might we create our own solutions to the problems we face in creating meaningful online learning? Download this free toolkit makes it easy.
Writing learning objectives is a true art, one that many instructional designers and educators are actually terrible at. We all learn in our teacher education programs that our learning objectives should be SMART (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant and Time-framed). But why do we so often fail to write objectives that meet this simple criteria? The trick I use when writing learning objectives is as simple as it is valuable.
As a consultant who helps organizations develop meaningful online learning experiences, I find that there’s a lot of resistance towards moving programs that have worked in face-to-face environments into an online-only delivery platform. I hear “you just can’t do X online” multiple times a week. While I reject that any of this is true, I do acknowledge that there is something different about teaching online. It’s a simple difference, but it’s one that has big implications for online learning designers.
My name is Melissa Jones and I'm an educator and learning designer. Looking at learning in new and unexpected ways is what I'm all about. Learn more.
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