Check out my elearning course: Sticky Learning - Learning Design for Attention and Engagement

Julie Dirksen

Julie Dirksen is a leading expert in instructional design, elearning, and behavior change. She's a frequent speaker at industry events, an eLearning Guild Guild-master, and the author of one of the bestselling books on instructional design, "Design for How People Learn."

Is learner motivation your responsibility?

by

Just had this quick interchange with Patti Shank on twitter: This is a totally fair comment on Patti’s part — you can’t force someone to be motivated (and undoubtedly some of our disagreement stems from semantics – not that THAT ever happens on twitter).  A lot of the conversation around gamification (for a heated throw … Read more

How do you add friction to learning?

by

After the last post, a few people discussed in the comments about how you actually go about adding friction to learning. Kathy Sierra in particular referenced Dan Meyer, a math teacher/blogger, who is my favorite resource on this. He doesn’t specifically reference friction, but he talks about how to “be less helpful” for learners. This is … Read more

Why “Clear and Easy to Understand” can be bad

by

So, as an instructional designer, part of my job is to make things clear and easy to understand, right? Well, it turns out that’s not necessarily the best option. Cathy Moore just put up a blog post that has her checklist for evaluating your own e-Learning design.  You rate where your learning falls on a … Read more

Promises and Pitfalls of Gameful Design

by

Quick post to point to this fabulousness from Sebastian Deterding (via @bertbates): Don’t Play Games With Me! Promises and Pitfalls of Gameful Design[slideshare id=8160769&w=425&h=355&sc=no] View more presentations from Sebastian Deterding Added: You can get the audio track here: http://www.webdirections.org/resources/sebastian-deterding-closing-keynote-don%E2%80%99t-play-games-with-me-with-me/ (highly recommended). Sidenote: I’m currently at the LEEF Conference (http://www.goleef.com), and it’s interesting to see the backlash against the … Read more

Where do you get new ideas?

by

Design inspiration can sometimes be in short supply in Instructional Design, so it can be really helpful to get inspiration from other fields (lots more to say about the shortage of design in ID, but that’s a rant for another day). I’ve already waxed rhapsodic about being inspired by game design with sites like gamasutra … Read more

ID Webcomic #4 – What’s the route like?

by

So there have been a few hundred folks coming to the blog the last couple of days for the last ID Webcomic I did, and I realized it’d been over a year since I did one of these (Btw – Hi to all the new visitors <waves>.  Delighted to see you.  What brought you all … Read more