A Few Good Instructional Design Blogs

Here are a few blogs that are specific to instructional design. I have found good useful information in each of these sites. My favorite of the three listed below is the Rapid E-Learning Blog as it just has so much information available to instructional designers, however all of the listed blogs are great resources.

The Rapid E-Learning Blog

http://www.articulate.com/rapid-elearning/

The Rapid E-Learning Blog is designed to give readers insight into developing and designing the best e-learning instruction possible. The blog is full of great discussions about instructional design from designing an e-learning course on a budget to PowerPoint tutorials & free templates. The site is hosted by Tom Kuhlamann who has over 15 years of experience with instructional design and training in the industry. One of the things that I like so much about the blog is that not only do you get the perspective of the writer, Tom, but you also get the feedback of so many other professionals in the industry as the site has over 69 thousand readers and many of them comment and tweet about the posts. The comments add a lot of depth to the discussions and give other points of view and experiences about the topics. I have posted the main page link for the blog above this posting; however I am adding a second link just below to one of my personal favorite blogs in this series. This blog is from a few years ago but it really puts into perspective an instructional designer’s role and how we as instructional designers need to set clear goals and get our learners focused on the right things.

http://www.articulate.com/rapid-elearning/what-everybody-ought-to-know-about-instructional-design/

The Instructional Design Open Studio (IDOS)

http://id.ome.ksu.edu/blog/

The Instructional Design Open Studio (IDOS) blog is hosted by the instructional design team at Kansas State University. The blog discusses all types of topics; a great recent post was all about herding online traffic to a web site. The post discussed reasons one would want to drive online traffic to a site and also offered some suggestions on how to drive online traffic to educational resources on the web. One of the things that I like on the blog is the layout. It is very easy to follow and search for blogs or videos. Each blog is also divided up by several headings that make reading the blog easy. Besides having a blog, the site also has a roundtable forum where different instructional designers post videos that give insight to different things that an instructional designer can do with videos with the different tools at their disposal. The videos are full lectures from the school where instructional designers share their insights into various topics. It is a great resource but some of the lectures are rather long. One of the most recent videos entitled Prezi: Single Canvas, Dynamic Design, Presentation Pizzazz shares tips on making a presentation more visual with more impact however it is 73 minutes long.

Making Change: Ideas for lively e-learning

http://blog.cathy-moore.com/

This blog is written by Cathy Moore who has over 25 years in instructional design working with fortune 500 companies and designing e-learning. Her blog is full of realistic ideas that will help any instructional designer create powerful e-learning for adults. This blog is really geared toward corporate training and the business environment unlike some other blogs on instructional design that are about education and schools. Her recent post is all about creating job aids and how they can benefit employees. Moore goes on to say that these job aids can have the typical how-to information that a job-aid has but the can also include other content like thought-provoking questions and motivational messages often found in a course. She has another recent blog that really captivated me that talked about whether learning styles are worth our time. That reminds me of a recent video that I saw with Dr. D. Willingham, a researcher and professor at the University of Virginia, talking about how learning styles don’t exist. It’s worth a watch and can be seen here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sIv9rz2NTUk. Moore’s blog is very user friendly and each blog has hyperlinks that will take you to items that she references or to other sites that are referenced. She also uses pictures and/or videos to strengthen the posts. Besides Moore’s blog, she also tweets about instructional design where you can get a daily idea to spark your instructional design creativity. You can follow her on twitter at the link below.

http://twitter.com/CatMoore#