Comment by jansho | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jansho | Hacker News Reader

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Oh goodness, I'm glad someone found this intriguing, I think I came across as a bit self-promotional before :o

It was mainly accidental that I got into digital learning. I was pretty traumatised from my degree, even today I still feel irrationally reluctant to code.

But I've always been passionate about design and education. I also wanted to "self-heal" if you like, to repair myself as a person and as a learner. And what better way than to learn how to learn and teach??

One of the best parts of my job is I can get away with being "dummy". I tell my subject matter experts that it's helpful to assume this position, so I can be empathic to all types of learners, but really I'm a slow learner myself haha. And yes you do end up designing better eLearning! Being in Learning And Development also gives a good overview of the whole organisation, as you need to understand how it works and where the gaps are in order to tackle them with training (or not.) I learnt a lot, and dare I say I am much more confident as learner, teacher and professional.

Lately though I've been feeling that I have a debt to pay. I consider myself lucky to "survive" depression, and to live in a good country with lots of opportunities. So I am moving to my own edtech project focusing on literacy for children, with lots of interactive eBooks :)) I do have a backup remote gig though.

If you're really interested, google up "Instructional Design" and "eLearning" just to get a flavour of the field. As I said, there are WYSIWYG tools but increasingly organisations are moving towards mobile-friendly courses, which is great news for developers as it means more coding opportunities. Have a look at "Adapt", an open source authoring tool which requires a bit of HTML/ JavaScript knowledge. "Unity" is also increasingly being used ... and there's a growing trend for VR learning.

Hope that's helpful, if not just email me via my profile.

Sorry if this comes off as harsh, but do you approach eLearning with this sort of wishy washy that most people tend to have in this field(as far as I observed), or do you know what you are doing, eg. the educational psychology behind it, and basing decisions on empirical evidence?

"Many institutions move towards eLearning" - the impression I got from this topic is that its pretty much every time one of those "Ipad cases" - spend $$$ on Ipads even if they are useless, just to show how modern your institution is. Almost every time I hear about this, its some news-article over hyping eLearning that is so badly implemented that the teachers hate it.

If you know what you are doing (not the wishy washy way) then I would really like to ask you some questions.

If I know what I'm doing? Hmm, I like to think that I can by paying close attention to the problem itself. Every organisation is unique, and though their problem sounds general and well-defined, it usually isn't. So as part of scoping, you need to dig further in order to gauge the actual problem - you may even realise that it's a symptom of a deeper problem in which case training isn't always the solution. This does mean that you have to immerse yourself in the organisation to understand the culture, biases, IT system, branding, language and so on - all this will also feed into your final design. And build relationships; rarely what people tell you at first actually match up with the real problem.

My rule is to start from first principles and work my way up as logically as I can. This helps to cut through the bullshit - yep, I agree with you that there is too much of it in L&D. However it's also useful to know core pedagogy theories and the latest fads, because it will help you speak in their language. Some of them are genuinely useful, but I find myself drawing mostly from design and behaviour science.

Digitalisation is a serious strategy though. You will be surprised at how dated some systems are in the biggest companies, and the amount of reluctance to adapt in the workforce. The mistake most companies do is to rush with digitalising their training, when there does need to be a proper transition sensitive to the workforce's needs and perceptions.

Although I've sung praises about eLearning here, personally I prefer blended learning - but the best ones require skill in creating the complementary digital component well.

Thats does sound pretty interesting and helpfull too.I will definitely check those things out .Thanks for sharing!

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