Bill Brandon is the editor of Learning Solutions. His experience in the learning and development field goes back to 1968, and in e-Learning to 1984. He has developed and managed e-Learning in a variety of environments, from mainframes to desktops to online. Bill lives near Dallas and works from his home office.

 

Articles by Bill Brandon

Apple's iPad: What does it offer for e-Learning?

(1/27/10)
After months of speculation and much hype and punditry, Apple launched the iPad today at a Special Event. Is it a device that will change civilization as we know it? Is it doomed to failure? Here is our fearless assessment!

New Features Added to Google Wave: More useful for e-Learning

(1/26/10)
Google Wave, still in limited Preview, continues to advance in capability, becoming more user-friendly. “Undo/Redo” became available for editing in December, and now two new features, “Read-only” capability and “Restore from Playback,” make it possible to control user input and discussion drift.

Mobile Learning Coming Sooner Than You Think

(1/22/10)
Mobile learning (m-Learning) has been the topic of discussion and speculation for almost a decade. We are finally at the threshold of seeing practical applications of mobile technology for learning. Here’s the latest news.

Book Review: Learning Online with Games, Simulations, and Virtual Worlds: Strategies for Online Instruction by Clark Aldrich

(1/4/10)
Clark Aldrich has produced a great guide to the selection, justification, and development of Highly Interactive Virtual Environments. Readers will find it useful, whether they are new to design of such applications or highly experienced.

2010 Predictions

(12/21/09)
Every year at this time, we gaze into the crystal ball to see what the next 12 months may bring for e-Learning design, development, and management. This year is no different.

DevLearn 2009: Building the Future of Learning

(12/2/09)
Each year, DevLearn gets better, and this year was no exception. Over 1,300 people attended this premiere event in the e-Learning community of practice, and all went home tired, happy, and with expanded horizons and much larger professional networks. Read all about it here!

Catching the Google Wave

(11/2/09)
Google Wave has generated much discussion among educators and trainers in the last five months, as the potential of this communication platform has begun to be known. Learn what the status of Wave is, where its current strengths and weaknesses are, and how it may be useful in the design, development, delivery, and management of e-Learning.

Employee Engagement: A Roadmap for Creating Profits, Optimizing Performance, and Increasing Loyalty, by Brad Federman

(9/14/09)
E-Learning is only one element in the broad field of human performance improvement. There are many other factors that affect business results, and almost all of them affect employee engagement. This is a book that will help you find the key to unlocking engagement in your organization, as a complement to learning.

Visual Language for Designers: Principles for creating graphics that people understand, by Connie Malamed

(8/10/09)
How to design visuals that will totally engage your learners and add value to your e-Learning applications!

aLearning: A Trail Guide for Association Learning

(7/20/09)
Writers of books on instructional strategy have seldom addressed the design of online curriculum for professional and non-profit associations. A new book by Ellen Behrens has corrected that oversight, and the result is an outstanding contribution that may belong in your library even if you don’t work for an association!

Programming for e-Learning Developers, by Jeffrey M. Rhodes

(7/13/09)
Most designers and managers, and many developers, do not have unlimited time to become familiar with every authoring tool in existence. This week’s book review presents a resource that will help you hit the ground running in a hurry, in four essential environments. This one belongs on your shelf!

Book Review: e-Learning 2.0: Proven Practices and Emerging Technologies to Achieve Real Results by Anita Rosen

(6/22/09)
Sometimes, if you are just starting out in e-Learning, or if you want to keep projects simple (because your world is already complicated enough), all you need is a little basic guidance. If that describes your situation, this is the book for you!

Book Review: Michael Allen's e-Learning Annual 2009

(6/15/09)
Pfeiffer has published the second in a series of Annuals edited by Michael Allen. This is an essential reference for e-Learning professionals who are interested in the most current thinking about instructional design and management.

E-Learning Evolution Panorama: Annual Gathering 2009

(3/23/09)
Hundreds of e-Learning professionals met in Orlando, Florida for The eLearning Guild’s Annual Gathering 2009 Conference & Expo. This week’s article summarizes the conference for those who could not be there. We hope to see you at DevLearn 09 in November!

What's Ahead in 2009?

(1/19/09)
In 2009, recession will shape the e-Learning world far more than technology developments. The trends will be simple and few in number, although that will not make them easy to deal with. Here's a look at what may be the three big trends, and tips for dealing with them.

Surviving 2009

(1/5/09)
When the economy takes a turn for the worse, all organizations tighten their belts and adjust their priorities. This includes e-Learning activities. While the situation is serious, there are many things that managers can do to ensure that online learning supports corporate strategy and direction in a recession. Here are some of the things you should be thinking about.

Profile: David Wilkins

(12/15/08)
The learning economy is changing, as social software on the Web becomes more widespread and more accepted. Employees are becoming “prosumers” – producers and consumers of information, and the role of instructional designers could change dramatically. Demographics are shifting; companies are downsizing, and the need to capture expertise has never been greater. A leader shares his thoughts.

DevLearn 2008: Learning 2.0 On The Ground

(11/24/08)
DevLearn is always an exciting, fully-packed event. DevLearn 2008 was no exception, with the Adobe Learning Summit and Training Magazine’s Technology in Action conference-within-a-conference thrown in for good measure. This article presents a summary of the conference, with many links to videos and other content for those who could not be there.

Nine Trends That Will Shape E-Learning in 2008

(1/28/08)
As we began 2008, the Editor looked ahead to see whether there were forces at work that would affect how we produce and deliver e Learning. Here are the nine trends he thought would significantly affect e-Learning in 2008.

Taking a Big Gulp From the Firehose: DevLearn 2007

(11/19/07)
DevLearn 2007 was one for the record books, with more attendees, a significantly larger Expo, more presenters, and more in-depth coverage of what our colleagues are doing. We present the highlights of the conference for your enjoyment.

Virtual World-Building: Designing Environments for Learners

(10/15/07)
Here are three examples of ways in which practitioners are employing virtual worlds in their organizations’ learning strategies. The key realization for all three designers was that in the virtual world we are not bound by traditional ways of doing things. This article will help you find the potential that awaits your online learning efforts.

Give Your E-Learning Some (Second) Life: Simulation Made Easy

(10/8/07)
Simulation and immersive training are topics of great interest in e-Learning today, but many practitioners believe the cost and the effort are too great to permit any but the largest companies to use those methods. Second Life offers a flexible, low-cost environment for building simulations, and it presents few, if any, barriers to entry.

Learning Together: The eLearning Guild Annual Conference

(4/23/07)
Almost 1,000 people participated in the Guild’s 2007 Annual Gathering held in Boston April 10 to 13 — over 30% growth in attendance from last year! Participants benefited from more than 100 content-rich sessions and lots of opportunity to network with their e-Learning peers. Here's a summary of the event!

Looking Both Ways: The eLearning Guild After Five Years

(12/18/06)
The eLearning Guild is completing five years as a community of practice. It seems like a good time to review what you, the members, have accomplished to date, and to look forward to the next five years.

e-Learning Process Improvement: How's Your Content Production Working?

(5/9/05)
In e-Learning, we place a great amount of attention on the design process, and far less attention on the production processes. While design is required to solve performance problems, it’s the production process where the rubber meets the road. Here’s a fresh look at production, with an eye toward process engineering, and with a list of resources that may help you deliver better e-Learning faster.

Insights: e-Learning Gurus, Challenges, and Solutions

(3/28/05)
What do you get when you bring six of the top e-Learning experts on stage and ask them to respond to tough questions from 500 conference participants? You get wisdom and insight, you get good advice, you get the benefit of years of experience — and you get a range of ideas, disagreement, friendly jibes, and a very entertained audience.

Leading Through Design: Five Guidelines for e-Learning Success

(2/7/05)
E-Learning designers must often make decisions without all the information they would like to have. Research, however, offers many leads to methods that can support designers in this situation. While these ideas can be overwhelming in their numbers and specifics, this article provides five guidelines that are the keys to effective application of what we know about how people learn.

Closing the Loop in e-Learning Development: How to reconnect instructional design and project management

(10/11/04)
This is the first in a series of columns that address the relationship between the generic life cycle of e-Learning and the documented processes of project management. The focus of this article is a high-level overview of ADDIE, the generic life cycle description applied to traditional learning materials, and on the generic project management life span. This will include highlighting key concepts.

Style Points: Adapting e-Learning to the Learner

(5/10/04)
Many e-Learning designers are interested in ways to accommodate the differences between individual learners. Some avenues to do this may exist in human learning styles, if the designer knows about them and can find a way to bring them into the design strategy. Read this summary for an overview of the issues, the theories, and some solutions that you can use in your own projects.

Storyboards Tailored to You: Do-It-Yourself Magic Arrows

(5/3/04)
The handoff from design to production is a critical transition in e-Learning development, yet it is difficult to find ready-made tools to support it. The result is that work must often be re-done, budgets and schedules are missed, and sometimes the final product is not everything the designer intended. Storyboards are the “magic arrow” in the development process.

Connect e-Learning to Business Objectives

(4/12/04)
It’s important for e-Learning efforts to support fundamental business objectives. At the same time, e-Learning design teams often hurry past the early steps in the instructional design model. Yet these are the exact steps that connect learning with business strategy. This article shows you, step-by-step, what to do to become central to your organization’s efforts to achieve its objectives!

Quality Assurance for e-Learning Design

(4/5/04)
In e-Learning development, evaluation of the product is the final step of the process, and the one that is most often overlooked or shortchanged. While there are many reasons for this, a leading problem is that many project managers simply do not have an evaluation plan. Here are some steps to include in your evaluation to systematically improve the quality of your e-Learning!

Flash® Development Experts Tell All

(3/29/04)
Flash is widely used for e-Learning development, and yet its power is seldom fully tapped. Believing that expert’ insights, tips, and tricks can be a valuable resource, we have interviewed five top Flash designers and asked them to spill all. If you always wanted to know how experts use Flash, these interviews may help!

What To Do When There's No Time To Do the Job Right

(10/6/03)
We all have projects where the turkeys come to roost. A product has been developed and will be launched next week, and we are asked to come up with online training for the sales team by Monday.