Elaboration / What Is Elaborative Interrogation? Getting Learners to Explain Why
Asking learners to explain why a fact is true, or how a step works, helps them understand it. But the explanations take time, and wrong ones can do harm, so a course has to be built to catch them.
Course design / Bloom's Taxonomy Examples: Using It to Design an Online Course
Bloom's taxonomy is most useful as a checking tool: plot each objective, activity and quiz on the same grid and the gaps show up. It isn't a ladder learners must climb one rung at a time.
Learning styles / Are Learning Styles Debunked? What the Research Actually Shows
People do have preferences about how they learn. What the research hasn't found is that matching lessons to those preferences helps them learn more. Design for the content and the learner's prior knowledge instead.
Assessment / Writing Multiple-Choice Questions That Teach as Well as Test
A multiple-choice question can do more than check an answer. With plausible wrong options and feedback that explains, it becomes practice that learners remember. Here's how to write one, step by step.
Instructional design / How to Storyboard an eLearning Module, Screen by Screen
A storyboard is where most of a module's learning design gets decided, one screen at a time. Here's a seven-step way to write one, with the research that should shape each screen and a cheap way to test it.
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Every platform, scored the same way. In the open.
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Online Learning Trends for 2027: Seven Shifts in the Data
From the Library
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Microlearning / Microlearning Defined: What It Is and When Short Lessons Work
Feedback / Characteristics of Effective Feedback: What the Research Says
Dual coding / Dual Coding Theory in Education: Making Visuals and Narration Work
Cognitive load / Cognitive Load Theory in Instructional Design: What Fits in a Lesson
Latest
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Trends / AI Course Creation Comes to Course Platforms: Check the Quizzes
LearnWorlds and Thinkific now draft courses and quiz questions for you. The research says AI-written questions can pass for human ones, but they lean easy and factual, so the review is where the learning is won or lost.
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Course design / How to Create an Online Course That Sells (and Teaches)
Courses keep selling when buyers get the result they paid for. Validate the problem before you build, design the final task first, put practice in every module, and let a paying pilot group show you what to fix.
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Trends / Microcredentials in Higher Education: What Changed This Term
This term, the people who fund and recognise microcredentials started asking what they prove, not how many exist. That shifts the work from issuing certificates to designing assessments worth trusting.
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Course design / How to Write Learning Objectives Learners Can Actually Meet
A good objective names something a learner will do that you could watch and check. Write the assessment alongside it, be sceptical of verb lists, and show it to learners as a question rather than a statement.
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Careers / Entry-Level Instructional Design Jobs: What Employers Ask For
An entry-level instructional design job rarely means no experience. Employers want to see design work you've already done. Here's what the job-ad research shows they ask for, and how to build that evidence.
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Trends / AI in eLearning: What Changed This Term, and What It Means for Courses
Your learners now have an AI tutor whether your course offers one or not. The trials suggest that's a problem only if the AI does the thinking for them, and course design can decide which way it goes.
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Careers / Instructional Design Jobs for Former Teachers: Where Skills Transfer
Teaching gives you more of an instructional designer's toolkit than most job ads let on, and less than many career-change courses promise. Here's what transfers, what doesn't, and how to show it.
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Course design / An Online Course Design Checklist, Grounded in the Research
Most course checklists ask whether things exist: a welcome page, objectives, a quiz. This one asks whether they'll help people learn, and points to the research behind each check.
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Instructional design / The ADDIE Model, Explained by a Working Course Designer
ADDIE is less a method than a checklist of the work every good course needs. Here's what each phase should produce, why it's less rigid than its critics claim, and how to run it on a real online course.