Worth Reading

Experienced instructional designers or those new to the field will find this text helpful. It takes us back to basics, but also pushes us to the future by looking at principles, frameworks and practice. It uses current thinking and research on learner motivation as its starting point and explores practical approaches to harnessing motivation at every stage of a learner’s course experience, including assessment. Clearly written, focused and practical.

This easy to read, non-technical book offers a high-level, if sometimes simplistic analysis of the challenge of shifting demographics coupled with emerging technologies, of which artificial and machine intelligence are just two, will present to society and the likely impact that these forces will have on work, communities, organizations and people. It documents the critical role education will play in both enabling these developments and in dealing with their aftermath. The policy argument is that this is the time to invest more in creative, imaginative and innovative approaches to education and that doing so is critical to ensuring the coming social and economic transitions are managed well. The book ends with what Seldon calls "Recommendations", but which are in fact action frameworks. A good read, challenging material and ideas presented simply, but well.

Assessment is fast becoming the new black, with programs now available that only require learner assessment of competencies and capabilities. How we assess students is also changing, as AI enables both automated assessment and marking, in addition to LMS systems having adaptive assessment engines within them. So how do we design appropriate, authentic and effective assessment for learning? This book helps those of who do so, do it better. The book misses some opportunities to look at new developments but is nonetheless helpful - a valuable resource.

A practical, helpful and insightful book full of advice and support for the faculty member seeking to develop meaningful, authentic formative and summative assessments for and of learning. Written by two of the most experienced professionals in ODFL in North America, their experiences shine through on every page – making this both an immensely readable, useful and practical collection of insights, practices and suggestions. Since assessment will become increasingly important – more and more students are seeking and are able to find assessment only qualifications and credentials – and also an area where quality of learning can best be seen, this is a must-read book for faculty members. It is fully downloadable, either chapter by chapter or as a whole e-book.

For those seeking to introduce an online program for the first time or are new to the management of online learning, this is a step-by-step guide to practice – full of case examples, suggested practices and warnings about potential pitfalls. It also explores how to evaluate and assess a program and its components and maintain a program over time.

How do you assess and evaluate the effectiveness, efficiency and impact of your course and its design elements? Here is a helpful collection of tools and measures that will help you do this well. Gathered from around the world, this compendium is one of those books you need to have on the shelf for when you need to do this work. It is also a book you should look at two or three times during a course design, development and deployment process to help you think through the “how will we know this is working?” question.

This is a second edition of this insightful book. While focused on the US and the various machinations of policy they appear to revel in, the book is really focused on competing ideological frameworks for education beyond school. For those with a strong commitment to equity and social justice as a cornerstone of higher education, this is a must read: it will help clarify why others do not accept equity as a key driver for the work of colleges and universities. In particular, deepening an understanding of neo-liberal and conservative agendas, understanding the downside of market-based approaches to higher education and exploring the legitimate and illegitimate role of the State is well handled here. These authors write well, understand the nuances of public policy. Given potential changes of policy to reflect new economic and social realities, this new edition is timely.

This is not a new book, but it is well worth a read if it is new to you. It explores principles and practices of powerful learning design, sharing examples from a variety of disciplines all focused on design for student engagement. It is based on three bodies of knowledge: active learning, multiple intelligences, and universal design for learning. The emphasis is on visual aspects of design – getting past just text – and there is strong and growing evidence that visual elements have been shown to increase student participation, engagement, and success in an online course. Well worth reviewing again if you read it some time ago.

Chatbots enable powerful and effective conversations between a learner and the platform they are learning on. They use machine or artificial intelligence to create routes to dialogue and engagement. Many readers will have heard of the use of such support systems from the story of Jill Watson – the IBM Watson bot used as a tutorial assistant at Georgia Tech (for details, see here). This book explores the details of the design process and provides concrete examples of designing bots for a range of use cases. It looks at everything from use case specification to actual designing of a bot, all the way to validating our design with users. While written for business-to-business and business-to-customer, it is not difficult to translate from these environments to learning environments. Chat bots are already in use in a variety of educational organizations. This will help you add this functionality to your designs.

New faculty or faculty new to online learning will find this book helpful. It helps translate learning design principles and the evidence on what works from a student engagement perspective into actions which faculty can take. Practical, full of step-by-step design advice and examples, faculty will better understand how they can translate their “content” into engaged learning designs. The chapter on writing as instruction and assessment together with the chapter on teaching effectively are the heart of this book. There are also great examples of collaboration and imaginative design. It's a fun book for those seeking to significantly improve their teaching.

Predictive analytics and the use of analytics for systematic improvement in recruitment, retention, student support and learning design is a growing focus for many in higher education. Two reports published early in 2017 suggest that, while the prospects for the use of analytics are significant, adoption is currently modest. This book explains why. Implementation, as in all significant change, requires process redesign and the re-imagination of key roles in the college or university. It is an edited collection, written by practitioners as well as “imagineers”. It is well written, accessible and informative. There are excellent contributions by Paul Prinsloo and Sharon Slade, Matt Hora, Jennifer DeBoer and Lori Breslow. It's a book that will help readers think this opportunity through, warts and all.

This edited collection of some seventeen chapters is a comprehensive look at the current state of play (2017) in open education resources, MOOCs and related developments. For instructional designers seeking to integrate OER into their work or to significantly improve production times and reduce costs, there are insights here worth exploring. For those more interested in policy developments, which are enabling OER and MOOCs for credit, there are some relevant chapters here too. With examples and case studies from around the world and insights from some of the gurus in the business – Stephen Downes, for example (one the creators of the first ever MOOC) – this is a valuable collection with real insights and resources.

Assessment is the new focus for a great many innovative activities. Whether we look at video-based competency assessment, project and team assessment, simulation driven assessment, or new forms of artificial intelligence supported assessment, significant change is happening. This book looks at the underlying issues as well as some of the practical developments, with a strong focus on K-12, with the book intended for those pursuing teacher education. All of this is transferable to post-secondary education. The strength of the book is in the connections between theory and practice, between best practice and innovation.

While focused on ideologies and policies that affect compulsory schooling, the book also reviews ideological shifts which impact higher education. Those who run colleges and universities need to be attuned to the shifts in thinking taking place in relation to education at all levels – the global education reform movement, neoliberalism, and “work-ready” education are all part of the current conversation amongst Canadian Ministers of Education, including Ministers with responsibility for higher education. Getting beneath the surface and understanding the determinants of policy are key to designing appropriate responses. This book helps clarify (in so far as this is possible) just what is happening in relation to the politics of education.

It is getting easier to produce quality video and audio, simulations and games. Using well-designed tools can make a significant difference to the learning experience of students. At the same time, the rapid expansion of open educational resources (OERs) is making course design and development both easier and yet more demanding – easier in the sense there are a great many free-to-use materials available; more complex since more design decisions must be made. This is a practical, helpful and useful book. It is of particular value to instructional designers, course developers and learning innovators, offering useful ideas for innovative practice.

This focused book offers help to faculty and instructors new to online learning design and its challenges. In addition to providing a brief history, the book offers help for course design, student assessment and course evaluation. Practical, yet grounded in a body of learning theory, the book has a great many insights which faculty and instructors will find helpful.

Change is a constant. Learning from change is an option. This truism shapes a lot of the thinking and writing in this book. Change management and change leadership require a great deal of thought, effective communication and adaptability. As we now expect more change – demography, austerity, technology, employer expectations, new knowledge – leaders of colleges and universities need to become more adept at change management. This book advises on how to shape the process of change and avoid some of the common pitfalls. Not new, it is still a bedside book for those about to embark on a major change.

Though not a new book, this revised and updated 2013 edition provides those engaged in course design with practical tools for increasing student engagement, encouraging completion and providing learning assurance. The author also provides real insights into how to overcome resistance to innovative approaches to teaching and learning. While not focused on online learning, skilled instructional designers can leverage the constructs and approaches for an online environment.

As the role of faculty members shifts from "sage on the stage" to a coach, guide, mentor, trainer, knowledge safari leader and other roles, many struggle with these changes. They are unsure just how best to engage and secure success with their students. This collection of materials helps faculty members better understand these emerging roles and what their peers are doing to make them work for their own practice and their students.

This collection of materials explores the work in a great many universities around the world to respond to shifts in demography, austerity and the rapid emergence of learning technologies. With case studies and concrete examples, the book is a must read for college and university presidents anxious about the sustainability of their institutions. In all, there are ten case studies with an insightful introductory and concluding chapters from the editors.

This is less of a "how to" book and more of a "why" book. It helps instructional designers get back to a key question: what is the learning we are designing intended to do? It is a critical assessment of the current preoccupations of many engaged in online and distance education. It's not long (134 pages), but makes you think long and hard about what the work of instructional design really is all about.

Featuring case studies from elementary schools, colleges, and universities on the practicalities of new learning environments, "e-Learning Ecologies" explains the role of new technologies of knowledge representation and communication in bringing change to educational institutions. There is a strong chapter on collaborative intelligence and another on reflective feedback which are worthwhile to all engaged in the work of online learning.