Week 1 - Discovering the World of eLearning

This week I am researching and then reviewing blogs or other websites I found pertaining in some way to instructional design. It is fun to have an assignment like this because on my own, I have shied away from subscribing to blogs, and really for no good reason. Now because of this assignment I am having a great deal of fun reading about and discovering more information about my chosen field of study. In this blog, I will review three of the sites that I have discovered.

Experiencing E-Learning

This site is authored by Christy Tucker who states she is an instructional designer for Performance Learning Systems. I liked this site for a number of reasons.

First off she has a section that provides information about what instructional designers do, what are some of the skill sets of an instructional designer and some possible instructional design jobs; all information was useful.

Second, she has a section entitled Categories with a drop down menu consisting of 25 topics to choose from providing information that could be useful to instructional designers.

Third, she seems to add new activity to the site on a consistent basis (close to daily), most recently providing bookmarks to other useful sites.

Overall, this blog promises to be a good resource: there is an abundance of information, consistent activity, and her writing style is easy to follow.


Instructional Design and Development Blog

This site is maintained by the Instructional Design and Development department at DePaul University. A number of staff members are contributors to the site, and when I looked at their brief biographies, I noticed each of them had a different background or specialty. The stated goal of the site is "to provide information on enhancing instruction through the use of technology.”

The site content includes a section called Categories with a section on Web Tools, which I found very useful. Another section entitled Recommended Resources also had some interesting information albeit brief.

Another useful blog site with information helpful to an instructional designer. I like that it is a site managed by an Instructional Design and Development Department at a University. The archived blogs include information over the last two years, and provide at least one post each week.

the eLearning coach

This site is authored by Connie Malamed.  Connie has a graduate degree in Instructional Design and Technology, and has 20 years of developing information, new media, and training products. In addition, she has a consulting company that produces online courses and Websites.

This website is wonderful. It is chock full of information. The site content includes categories on design, the use of, Web 2.0 technology, cognition, the use of audio and visual media, the use of eLearning in business and book and software reviews. Also included in the site is a section providing links to other interesting websites.

Overall, this is a site I plan to spend a great deal of time reviewing. I think there is quite a bit of useful information for anyone interested in eLearning and Instructional Design.

Another site I liked as an honorable mention

Design for Learning