Curated Industry Content for the Week of 09/12/16

Every Monday we curate a number of articles and blog posts that have relevance to members of the eLearning Guild Community, and to the learning and performance field as a whole. Each piece of content that we share includes a brief introduction from the member of the Guild Community sharing why they think the content is important.

Here’s the content for this week:

Students are not hard-wired to learn in different ways – we need to stop using unproven, harmful methods by Stephen Dinham
The belief that you can increase learning by catering instruction to an individual’s learning stye is very common in the education field. The problem with this belief is that there is no research to back it up. And yet, millions of dollars are spent each year on programs that tailor instruction to learning styles. This article explores the lack of research associated with learning styles and more importantly, explores the potential danger in leveraging learning styles in spite of the lack of evidence available to their value. While this article has an academic narrative, it can easily be applied to corporate environments as well. -David Kelly

9 E-Learning Project Management Resources to Add to Your Toolkit via E-Learning Heroes
While design and development of an elearning project is often the main focus for an instructional designer, what often determines the success of failure of a given project isn’t design or development related; it’s how the project is managed. Some organizations have dedicated project managers to monitor and track the various moving parts, but many of us are not that lucky. Project management often falls to the instructional designer, which many see as a challenge. This post shares a number of great free resources that can be used to manage elearning projects. -David Kelly

I Used Microsoft Hololens and I Can’t Stop Thinking About It by Jared Petty
What Oculus Rift is to the Virtual Reality conversation, Microsoft’s Hololens is emerging as within the Augmented Reality conversation. If you want to see the most cutting edge examples of what AR can do, you really need to see what Hololens is capable of. However, before you can explore the learning and performance potential of technologies like Hololens, you first must understand what it means to experience the device and consume content through it. That’s what this post does; it vividly describes the user experience of Microsoft Hololens. -David Kelly

Dos and don’ts on designing for accessibility by Karwai Pun
Accessibility is an critical part of design that more and more instructional designers are becoming aware of. However, while a growing number of designers are aware of it’s importance, many struggle to understand how to incorporate accessibility into their design practices. This post does a nice job of identifying some things to do, and things not to do, related to a number of accesibility-focused design challenges. -David Kelly

VR Pioneer Chris Milk: Virtual Reality Will Mirror Life Like Nothing Else Before by Jason Ganz
Virtual reality is a transformative platform for content. That, in itself, presents us with a host of questions to explore. If the platform is transformative, how does that affect the content? This article presents an exploration of just this question, examining how VR is changing the very nature of storytelling itself. -David Kelly

These Tools Will Help You Become A More Persuasive Writer by Tomas Laurinavicius
Writing is a critical part of the elearning professional’s job. We use our writing not only in our content, but also in our communications with others through email and other mediums. Putting it bluntly, the stronger our writing skills, the stronger our ability to communicate through content and written communications will be. Thankfully, there are plenty of tools available that can instantly improve your writing, and this post shares a number of great ones. -David Kelly

What are you reading?

If you have an article, blog post, or other resource that you think we should consider sharing in a future Curated Industry Content post, please feel free to send a link to the resource to David Kelly along with a few sentences describing why you think the resource is valuable.