Have you ever watched The Magic School Bus? What about Bill Nye the Science Guy or Schoolhouse Rock?

These entertaining childrens television programs have an important common approach to education: they explain complex subject matter in easy-to-understand ways by using likeable characters in fun narratives.

Here's a radical idea: maybe we've been thinking too small when it comes to instructional design.

Relying on proven principles while purposefully expanding the scope of our vision can help us accomplish organizational goals and empower learners to better navigate their modern workplaces. We believe in a more thorough model so much that we practice and preach perpetual learning design.

Our new video explains the concept in under three minutes - click here to view. 

When designing and delivering content, we need to balance five elements of the learner experience: technology, design, people, place, and time.

In order to achieve this balance, we need to focus on the learner experience. We need to define and leverage how learning is structured, including when it is taking place, where it is taking place, and how it is being delivered.

Do you remember the first time you experienced a non-traditional approach to learning? For most of us, we didn’t learn important life-lessons inside a classroom. For Jennifer Hofmann, classic Saturday morning programming introduced her to self-paced learning, and the rest, as they say, was history.

Jennifer recently shared the surprising connection she made between her love of popular Schoolhouse Rock episodes and modern blended learning in this short (but insightful) video: https://youtu.be/Hd-ITHrroXc

Blended learning is all about connecting the dots – for our learners and our businesses. What content conveys the information our learners need to improve business results?

By using proven instructional design models, aligning them with learning objectives, and deploying personalized learning pathways using available instructional technologies, we can support modern organizations and "search engine" learners.

What do you know about the changing demographics of the United States? Pew Research Center found that, “Americans are more racially and ethnically diverse than in the past, and the U.S. is projected to be even more diverse in the coming decades.” With the U.S. becoming more diverse, and with this shift in the population demographic, comes the need to diversify learning solutions. 

As L&D practitioners, the demands of our job now require us to not just expect different faces in the room, but learners with different needs and abilities, both in person and online. The popularity of blended learning has increased exponentially over the years and is now being heralded as one of the most cost-effective ways to distribute information and impact behaviors across organizations. 

How can you ensure your blended learning strategy meets these diversity demands?

When we begin creating eLearning or video elements for blended learning, our first thought often includes technology. We invest in platforms to create high-end designs. The polish usually ends there. When it comes to adding narration to our finished products, we turn to someone in the learning department and call it a day. This, Marie Hoffman argues, does a disserve to our learners and our instructional designs. 

In this episode of our Modern Learning on the Air podcast series, InSync Training’s Phylise Banner explores the topic of audio narration with voice talent Marie Hoffman.

The term blended learning has come in and out of vogue in corporate training for the last several decades. For so long, in fact, it feels like an old-fashioned term. A term that is not modern enough for the current learning landscape.

The reality is, modern learning strategies, techniques, and technologies seem to be custom designed for blended learning approach. But we need to stop thinking about designing a blend only after the so-called “important” content is developed. As I state in my new book, Blended Learning: What Works in Talent Development (ATD, 2018):

"…modern blended learning is more than sequencing different media and activities that happen to be related by topic. It is about aligning learning objects with the most appropriate instructional strategies, techniques, and technologies, while meeting the needs of the organization and modern learners."

Virtually There Session Recap

So your organization has made blended learning a priority. But while you know you need to move your training programs into the future, you wonder how doing so will affect learning results. And though some of you have tried blended learning before, the programs didn’t meet your expectations and you worry about trying again. 

A strategic plan quells these fears and improves the likelihood of program success. Get started with Jennifer Hofmann’s exclusive blended learning instructional design and implementation model: Campaign Blueprints. 

eLearning has been a viable training option for a while now. Thanks to tools like GoAnimate and Camtasia, instructional designers can quickly and easily produce a high-quality learning product. But just because we have access to technical tools, that doesn’t automatically result in a seamless creation process.

As expert Jennifer Hofmann points out:

“Instructional design is still relevant to blended learning. It’s evolving, and it’s mission-critical.”

As a helpful component in many blends, we need to thoughtfully plan out our eLearning modules and connect them to defined learning objectives.

But how?