Tuesday, February 27, 2007

Creative Instructional Design

In a recent article by Tom Sehmel in eLearning Guild's Learning Solutions Magazine, Sehmel describes a growing disatisfaction with the design and development of many learning projects.

The rethorical questions he asks in the abstract highlight the frustrations felt by many:

  • Do standard templates and rigid development processes have you feeling like you are stamping out identical parts instead of creative instructional solutions?

  • Do you worry that your learners are going to find content and treatment repetitive and boring after the second course?


  • In part one of his article, Creative Design Solutions for Three Training Projects, Sehemel overlays the ADDIE Process (Fig. 1)

    with what he calls the Document Flow Process (Fig. 2)

    to illustrate how these compliment one another to produce more creative training solutions.

    What do you do to ensure more creativity in the courses you develop?

    1 comment:

    Anonymous said...

    I am a member of eLearning Guild and have read through the article.

    I must say, while I like the idea of creative design, I'm not sure the outcome they produced in the case study was all that creative.

    One thing we are doing to ensure more creativity in our courseware is to include the creative types earlier in the process. The article talks about developers, which is great, but I have found that the "artsy" types are great and coming up with off-the-wall ideas, that actually work well with our workforce.