E-learning by design – read and do it!:)

Today I was
woken up by a sound of a drill and hammer. Lying on my bed I was wishing all the “best”
to my neighbor. Having no other option I have decided to eat breakfast and
write down my frustration on this blog (It looked easier than going upstairs
and quarreling with my female neighbor who
has biceps in size of my thigh 🙂   

I wanted to
sleep today a little longer because yesterday I have finished an interesting
book about…e-learning (what else 🙂 and when I decided to go to bed it was a
good long time after 2 AM.

The book is
E-Learning by Design by William Horton. I bought it some time ago after reading
few very positive comments on the Web. They said that it is one of these “must
have” books for everyone connected with e-learning and I must agree.

Horton’s
book is a great source of knowledge and ideas for all content developers. If
you are starting with e-learning production or looking for some good examples
how to make it more attractive of effective than this one is for you. But let
start from the beginning.

The book
can be divided into six main parts:

1)     
Designing
e-learning – This part explains what is e-learning and e-learning design, than
it describes the process of design which includes identifying an underlying
goal and prerequisites , setting learning objectives, defining a teaching
sequence, and selecting tests and learning activities.

2)     
Activities
– Author divides e-learning activities into three groups (absorb, do, and connect
type). Each of them is precisely described with examples and pictures. For
example in “do-type activities” chapter we can read about: practice activities,
discovery activities, games and simulations. Each of these is further divided
and described….and further…and further:).

3)     
Tests
– Tests are a big part of this book. It helps to select the right type of
question, write effective questions, and to combine them effectively.

4)     
Topics
& Lessons – Here we can read about organization of an e-learning course –
how to design  the components of the
topic, design reusable topics, integrate foreign modules, combine learning
activities, organize lessons, and much much more..

5)     
Virtual
Classrooms – This part answers to questions: how to create a VC, what tools to us,e
how to conduct an online meeting and manage VC.

6)     
Visual
Display & Navigation – Describes technical aspects of course presentation
and navigations. It says what fonts, colors, text format to use and much more.

Everything
is enriched with many illustrations which make the topics more clear and makes
the book much easier and comfortable to read. I’ve mentioned here only a few
things that you can find in this book (because I’m a little lazy:). It is really
a great source of knowledge and examples about content designing and it looks
great on a shelf (almost 600 pages in a black cover:). Everything is first
introduced and then very precisely described. The only disadvantage of this
book is lack of examples produced with open source tools (maybe the reason is
that there is a lack of such tools on the market which could compete with commercial
solutions:)

To sum up I
want to recommend this book to everyone who is interested in e-learning
production. Good job Mr Horton:) For all of these who are more interested in e-learning systems I
will have something shortly :).

Here you can read some fragments of this book:  E-learning by Design

Bartek Polakowski

Tag: e-learning, design, Horton

 

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