Instructional Design Website Reviews

Hello Everyone,

This is my first blog and I am writing it for a class at Walden University where I'm attaining a Masters in Instructional Design. Our assignment was to review blogs or on-line newsletters and write about our opinions of each one, so here are my reviews:

The first one is Instructional Design Open Studio located at: http://id.ome.ksu.edu/blog/

This blogs home page is very simplistic and easy to follow, which is what drew me to reading more about it. It opens with different blog entries discussing instructional design and points on learning. The posts just describe different types of learning like e-learning, "gray or fugitive" literature, and some posts discuss effective design techniques. The posts come from instructors and designers giving their opinions on learning, discussing research they've conducted, or their own first-hand experiences. This site also has something called "ROUNDTABLES" where there are presentations done by various people and comments are made on those. This site is one I see myself continuously referring to during my career to read some great ideas on how to more effectively design my material.

The second blog is Williams Instructional Design, LLC at: http://williamsinstructionaldesign.blogspot.com/

This blog is conducted by Mary Williams who is an Instructional Designer and Training professional. She has her own company called Williams Instructional Design and she's started a blog to get some more ideas flowing for everyone in this industry and to share her own experiences. The posts in this blog all refer to instructional design and different tools on it. People are posting different graphs explaining where designers should aim their material for and different tools designers can use to better their material either on-line or on paper. Another neat feature is it has an area for blog archives that breaks down by months so if you've been a user of this site for awhile and want to refer to a post, you can just go to it based on the month instead of searching through hundreds of posts at once. This is another site I plan on using often to advance my knowledge in instructional design and just learn more tips and tools on this topic.

The third website I thought was useful is not a blog, but an on-line newsletter called Train-Ease, Inc. located at: http://www.train-ease.com/news.html

This on-line newsletter is about learning and performance solutions. It has articles on different types of learning (on-line, webinar, mobile, etc.) and discusses different tools and tips people in the Training and Instructional Design field can use. It also has articles that discuss the company and their plans for now and the future. The company is based in Columbus, OH, which for me is local and I like to support local businesses. The newsletter has some interesting articles that I have read and used in the past. I've referred this newsletter quite often as my main field is Training, but I am the creator of our training material. This site helps me with the design aspect of my job, but also gives me some tips on how to create the material for the Trainers who are facilitating it.

Those are the three blogs and newsletters I have found while searching for material on instructional design. I hope these will be helpful to you as well as you continue, or start, in the Instructional Design field. They have certainly provided me with some great ideas that I can use at the office.