Instructional Designer Existential Crisis

Hey all of you Instructional Designers, Educational Developers, Distance Education Online Learning Specialists! It is time to lay off with the complaints that the emergency response to online learning as a result of Covid-19 is not real online learning. Because it is. There has been a lot of gnashing of teeth regarding definitions and nomenclature, […]

Taxonomy of Online Development Business Models

I received some funding in 2018-9 to clarify a taxonomy of business models that are in place at the institution where I work for developing online courses. I couldn’t find if there was ever a deliberate attempt to define what I say was a diversity of practice. My attempt was to define what I had […]

Turning Competencies into Learning Outcomes

Here’s what I did with one set of trade instructors to turn competencies into learning outcomes: Re-translating the program outline We started with the provincial program outline for their trade (owned by the BC Industry Training Authority, here’s an example for Carpenter). This outline is deceiving: it is originally intended to communicate performance competencies for […]

Competencies vs. Learning Outcomes

There’s buzz growing around competency-based learning and something called “competency-based pedagogy”. Much of it appears muddled, particularly when someone wants to throw in a technology to enable this “competency-based pedagogy”. Perhaps it’s important to make sure we are all speaking the same language. Fallacy 1: Competencies are equivalent to learning outcomes Fallacy 2: A series […]