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Testing Higher-Order Cognition: MCQs Versus MEQs
The popular perception of multiple-choice questions (MCQs) is that they can only test recall. They are also more often than not used for this purpose. For more “serious” testing—that is,…
For organisations looking for the first time at e-learning in training, the first step is to get a clear idea of what e-learning is—and what it is not. Ideas that were true some years ago might not hold now. Here are five notions about e-learning…
We’re all aware that fonts have a psychological impact, even if we aren’t sure exactly what the impact of a particular font is. I’ve always suspected that the psychological effect translates to an effect on cognition, or learning. (Some of you…
I’ve often found worthwhile food for thought at the Internet Time Alliance. A recent post by Harold Jarche mentions a distinction between Collaborative Learning and Social Learning. I wasn’t aware of one, so I looked at the definition by the…
Managers, whether in HR or in Training, need to know employees at various levels. The process of getting to know employees happens in diverse ways: A recruitment manager finds out about potential candidates through interviews and written tests. A…
Probably the most common complaint about e-learning courses is "long, boring bullet lists."
For writers, it's all too tempting to put together many lines (from the source material) on one page and segment them into bullets. It takes work…
Apart from Google alternatives, it’s nice to see search engines designed specially for children and teenagers. Credibility, safety, and an orientation to learning are the common themes of these relatively new sites. Here are some.
Fact…
In terms of attitudes to Internet use, we see all sorts today. Some still use paper and pen, only occasionally looking up information online, while others do everything online. Just the same way, some read print newspapers, others read their news…
Is listening to a podcast—or watching a video podcast (a Vidcast)—really that appealing? Effective?
On the topic of podcasts and m-learning, I saw an article that said: “Learning from podcasts has many benefits over learning from books…
Any e-learning courseware designer knows about Bloom’s Taxonomy of the cognitive domain. The taxonomy works as a theory that can directly be applied to e-learning. Others, like Multiple Intelligences, can be used to promote (or discourage) this…
Ever since wikis emerged, I’ve loved the idea of using them to learn as a team. That’s a large part of what we now call Informal Learning.
We once had four fresh recruits who needed to have just a few Photoshop basics before they could…
Taking a conceptual look at the idea of "Social Learning", a string of ideas is apparent. Ease of access to information means that more people are on the network, and that information exists in more locations. This in turn causes more people to…
By “knowledge checks,” I’m referring to the short evaluations that punctuate a learning package. They’re also called recall screens, recall exercises, quizzes, or something else. Here’s a mix of ideas, random thoughts, and tips about knowledge…
Online clutter is annoying, but we spend many hours a week surfing anway. Here are some Firefox add-ons to help with getting more done while we browse!
“Learn more” add-ons
As we read pages, unfamiliar phrases catch our attention…
The value of training often needs to be declared in monetary terms before a programme begins. The value might need to be demonstrated after the training ends. Various members of an organisation—the training manager, upper management, the HR…
It’s sometimes an important question for a course/presentation designer: “How long is the average attention span?” or “How long can a person stay focused on a topic?”
It’s a practical question, and you can make important decisions based…
YouTube EDU is news to me. I'm still wondering how I missed it—it’s pretty much like TV channels and classrooms right on the funny-videos site! So I took a good look, and here are the channels I liked best.
Many of the big universities are…
If you’ve decided to use an e-learning course for your training needs, you might hear the terms “Level 1 course,” … up to Level 4. These numbers indicate many things — the level of interactivity in the course, the complexity, the sophistication.…
Knowledge workers deal with larger amounts of information every year, and avenues of knowledge dissemination increase at a similar rate. The knowledge manager needs to ask more and more often: Is my training programme working? And, further: Are…
Ask “What is the role of colour in our lives” and you’ll get one of two responses -- “Yes, colours influence us in many ways,” and “Hmm, perhaps they do… I don’t really know.”
Ask “What is the role of colour in our lives” and you’ll get…
More and more people are talking on the Web about the basic, yet the most important stuff: Is managing e-mail is worth your time? What should you use the Web for? What’s really important in life? Along those lines, here are notes about how to…
PowerPoint has been used, abused, and used again. Millions of people have made, viewed, and analysed presentations, so there’s a lot of existing wisdom about best practices. Also, PowerPoint is being increasingly used in e-learning development.…
I’ve been reflecting upon learning theories, and it just came to me that ID itself is based upon sound theories. (We don’t usually think of “doing ID” as “doing science.”) Pretty obvious, I know. But in my defence, it’s been a long time since I…
Gardner's theory of multiple intelligences (MI) is roughly about the aspects of a person's brain (or perception/expression). When you look at just the theory, well, some people like it, some don't. The point is, it does relate to learning—in an…
A long time ago, illustrations and photos—in magazines, newspapers, books—used to be pretty much a straightforward affair.
They followed one rule: Put in the picture that's needed here.
That is to say, they were descriptive, or of…
Pedagogy is about teaching things differently: differently based on who is being taught, who is doing the teaching, what is being taught. I tried to look at it from a clean slate, but that got muddied by too many established conclusions — each of…
The big tech news item for me in the past couple of weeks has been about Google Cloud Connect. It allows users to use MS Office within the Cloud. This is real news, and good for users—in the Cloud, on the fly, (almost) seamless between Office…
This three-part white paper explores some possibilities and ideas in creating multiple choice questions (MCQs). In Part I, we look at:
Framing questions with the correct focus Best practices in MCQ creation Making distracters plausible…
This three-part white paper explores some possibilities and ideas in creating multiple choice questions (MCQs). In Part II, we look at:
The types of knowledge (by Bloom’s taxonomy of cognitive objectives) that you can test for using MCQs…
This three-part whitepaper explores some possibilities and ideas in creating multiple choice questions (MCQs). In Part III, we look at alternatives to the basic MCQ. The “basic” MCQ has four options from which the examinee must select one as the…
Can Twitter be used as a learning tool, in conjunction with — or independent of — the classroom? Rather, as David Parry says, the better question would be: “Is there a type of communication I want students to practice more, and can Twitter help…
Making a course interesting, engaging and interactive is the subject of instructional design. Here, we’ll do a quick round-up of dos and don’ts that can save your course from being clicked straight through to the end!
Avoid long bulleted…
Einstein was once asked to leave a classroom for talking back to his teacher, saying that memorising history dates was useless: “When you need one, you can look it up in a book,” he said. But what happens when an entire generation grows up with…
Reading and listening are at the foundation of most learning. While we don’t need to be taught how to listen well, many of us read suboptimally. We might spend more time reading something than we should, or maybe we can’t recall enough. Or, a…
Standardised tests, such as the SAT and GRE, are often criticised for not doing a good job at measuring what they are supposed to. Critics question the accuracy of the evaluations themselves, and also what the tests are supposed to achieve (…
The convenience and utility of e-book readers is undisputed. A few years ago, resolution and readability were an issue; as of 2013, they are amazingly close to physical books. The first time one uses a virtual book is usually an amazing…
In Part 1, we looked at three negative implications for e-book readers as a medium. Here in part 2, we will look at what five authorities on language, informatics, and neuroscience have had to say about the medium.
A New York Times Blog…
A post on readwrite from March 2012 speaks about the "infographic trend." Author Dave Copeland says, "this latest visual Internet fad of telling almost every story with a dense infographic is something that I'm hoping will soon be played out."…
How does the brain learn? The question might seem too broad, and the answers might seem complex. But if we were to state it in a word, the answer would be Analogy.Analogy, defined as “Similarity ... between things that are otherwise dissimilar,"…
Rote learning, or learning by heart, got a bad name quite some decades ago. A Time Magazine article in 1986 showed Japanese schoolchildren in a classroom, with words and numbers in neat columns on the blackboard. The caption read, “...In Japan,…
Subtlety works... In advertising, in movies, in arguments, and in learning material.
There’s an infographic at teachthought.com about how social media is “hurting productivity in learning.” There are many creative and informative aspects…
What Merits Are There To The 19th-Century Schooling System?
Modern learning theories and teaching methodologies have overturned the 19th-century schooling system. From informal learning to social learning, from learning styles to learner-…
Can music in the background actually help you read, work, and comprehend written material better?“Turn that thing off, I’m trying to work here!”
“How on earth can you blare that music while you’re studying?”
We've often heard…
In military instructional institutions around the world, it is customary to begin lessons with a couple of minutes of jokes. This is done with military precision, so it might or might not have the desired effect of lightening up the audience —…
While memory has been a topic of research and speculation for centuries, good educators have long known — from experience — how to improve recall. It is relatively easy to think about the material being presented, to analyse it, and to comprehend…
If you’ve properly viewed an autostereogram, you know that it can be hard to get the picture — literally. An autostereogram is an image that, at first sight, looks like random dots or pattern sequence (click to view original image at…
A new concept is often best explained by means of an example or an analogy. It is not easy to come up with a good metaphor every time: Some educators and instructors are more adept at it, some less so. That said, we can list what to avoid while…
With user interfaces, there's always been the tussle between cluttered and minimalist, what people are used to versus what is better, aesthetic versus functionality. What garners the most debate is minimalistic versus rich interfaces. Each has…
What makes traditional, pre-1990s books so different from today’s popular books and e-books? To generalise somewhat, the presentation differs in almost every way: Paragraph structure, bulleted lists, visual elements, boxed islands of information…
A lesson on how to do something is inherently more engaging than a lesson on what something is. For an instructor, it is “easier” — to use the term loosely — to teach “how to” than to explain “this is what it’s all about.”
It’s the…
Here's an imaginary Q/A session about simulations I had in my head. Why do so many people talk about simulations in learning?
I’d never considered using simulation-based training. I’ve been hearing too much about it recently, so I’m…
An earlier post looked at a range of ways in which post-quiz remedial feedback can be constructive. What about pre-course assessments, or pre-assessments? Apart from setting the tone and context for a course, a pre-assessment is useful for…
What is the importance of feedback after a quiz or test? Here’s a useful analogy: What quizzes are to the material, feedback is to the quiz.
Quizzes complete the loop. In that sense, saying just “Correct” or “Not correct” reduces the…
Is text plus audio really reinforcement—even when they convey the same thing?
We process information from different channels; we process them differently, too. There are some incorrect conclusions based on this, one being that text plus…
Creating a How-To presentation is quite different from many other types of mini-course. You’re explaining how to do something you already know, so words fall short. That is, words don’t have as much of a role as in other kinds of explanation, but…
Too much multimedia in learning content is analogous to too much Flash on websites. Not in terms of what purpose the multimedia serves, but in the sense of visual/auditory overload.
This Dutch site is my current favourite example of too…
The Greek roots of “Pedagogy” translate to “leading a child.” In that respect—a teacher leading a learner—not much has changed in the shift from pedagogy to andragogy, or from “teaching” to “adult learning,” even if the methods have.
…
Searching online for open courseware, I found phrases like “get your degree online real quick” and “your university degree is only a step away.” Now these seemed to combine the ideas of online degrees and “get instant access,” so I looked at a…
Should you listen to music while working?
Well, it's an individual preference. While it is scientifically proven that listening to music enhances your ability to focus and concentrate, some individuals work better in complete silence.…
This is a follow-up on a previous post about the application of brain research (whether neuroscience or any other) to instructional design, courseware design, and learning in general. There are three things I'm sure about.
Many of the…
Between July 2010 and now, there have been many opinions and posts about brain research and ID, so I thought I'd take a first-hand look at what research I could lay my mouse on.
Here’s the background: The ASTD Learning Circuits Blog once…
Here's an non-technical Q/A session about SCORM. “SCORM Explained,” at scorm.com, is concise enough, but it can seem vague if you’re new to the term. If you’re not involved with the technical side of things… and you’ve seen the terms “SCORM” and…
The Age of W-Learning is here. Another buzzword? Yet another gimmick? Before we write it off, let’s take a closer look. (By the way, “W-Learning” is “Wiki-Learning.”)
The funny thing about the human brain is that it has a mind of its own…
An earlier post looked at open courseware—free online courses from universities. From 2002 to 2010, the idea has caught on in so many places, Free does seem to be the way ahead!
Apart from entire courses, educational and other…
Open Courseware, or OCW, has been around for almost a decade now. OCW is the term for free online courseware corresponding to actual university lectures (or, in some cases, other course material at a reputed university).
Some history: MIT…
Those of us who have given a serious thought to using some other search engine—other than Google, that is—have usually ended up staying with Google. It's a habit.
Then there are meta-search engines (like Metacrawler) that mix results from…
In various “e-learning prediction lists” at the start of 2009 and 2010, Mobile Learning was near the top—many people spoke along the lines of mobile learning "really taking off" this year.
A notable exception was by Tony Carrer, who spoke…
Search is harder in 2010 than it was in, say, 2006, even though search engines are better. But we can help the search engines help us!
It’s hard to find good information without wasting too much time, so here are some broad search tips we…
Lifehacker started off as a site that helped non-geeks get along with computers. With the now-famous “geek to live, don’t live to geek” motto, it provided answers, tips, and tutorials for software and online stuff—anything to do with computers.…
Of all notable critics of e-learning methodologies, Roger Schank comes across as the ultimate cynic. In fact, he doesn't just criticise methodologies; Schank's complaints are about all of e-learning, about which he's been writing for a decade.…
Just four or five years ago, "productivity tools" was only a category of software.
The typical examples were calendaring and scheduling applications, software that saved time and reduced desktop clutter, and so on. The category expanded…
We wrote about self-directed learning a couple of months ago. We like the idea, and we also like the buzzword!
Wikipedia is the easiest example of the promise and the problem in one place: You can potentially learn a lot, and you can get…
8 Pros and Cons of E-learning for Training
Is e-learning right for you? Should you consider an e-learning package for your training needs?
The most obvious advantages of e-learning over classroom sessions (or instructor-led…