That's Awesome ID! – Details, episodes & analysis

Head of Learning Engineering, Kristin Torrence joins me to share her experience as a first-time presenter at DevLearn Conference and Expo in 2021. Kristin gives a play-by-play of her process, from submitting a proposal, to preparing her presentation, to delivering her presentation to a somewhat sleepy crowd. She also gives some tips for how to find resources if you are interested in speaking at conferences. 

Connect with Kristin on LinkedIn. 

Watch the video series "I Have Questions About Speaking at a Conference".

Sara Johnston, Cofounder at motive.io, joins me to share tips and tricks on how to design learning for immersive environments. She offers some common mistakes, pitfalls, and traps to look out for to make sure the learner has a good user experience. Her biggest tip, keep things simple! More realistic isn't always better. 

Connect with Sara via email (Sara at motive.io) or on LinkedIn. 

Director of Development and Innovation at RedSaberes, Emily Justin-Szopinski, joins me to talk about the overlap between digital marketing best practices and instructional design best practices. She also shares a little bit about user retention models that have been most successful for her company. Spoiler alert: let your learners know there is a human on the other side of the course!

Connect with Emily on Linkedin.

Kate Udalova, founder of the micro-learning authoring tool 7taps.com, joins me to discuss the surprising and diverse ways in which 7taps is being used by course creators. We also take some time to answer crowd-sourced questions about microlearning from members of the Linkedin community. 

Special thanks to everyone who submitted questions: Bhavani Nadakumar, Priyanka Wheatley, Chris Karel, Richard Mendoza, Diana Salazar.

Try out 7taps at 7taps.com. 

Connect with Kate on Linkedin. 

Training Manager Stacy Salinas joins me to talk about the ways in which instructional designers must navigate a lot of gray spaces to carve out a career path. Inspired by the article "61 Ways to Know You Are Talking to An Instructional Designer", Stacy talks about the ways in which careers in L&D often involve a lot of liminal spaces. We are always navigating the spaces between projects, clients, technologies. We also discuss how instructional design is a growing field and how we are uniquely suited to address future learning needs; needs for jobs that haven't even been invented yet! 

Connect with Stacy on Linkedin. 

Play and game consultant, Alyea Sandovar, PhD, joins me to talk about some myths around gamification. Alyea has done a lot of research around play and games, and provides consultation on gamification through her company tint hue. Throughout her career she has come across many misunderstanding about gamification, and she shares some of those insights with me. She also discusses the Playful Creative Summit, which is a virtual conference on the importance of playfulness and creativity to many different facets of our lives. 

Learn more about the Playful Creative Summit here.

Check out Alyea's company at tinthue.com.

Connect with Alyea on Linkedin or Twitter. 

Learning Experience Designer Kristin Torrence joins me to discuss stealth assessment, particularly within immersive environments. Kristin has designed learning solutions ranging from educational games, mobile applications, e-learning, Instructor-Led Training (ILT), and virtual reality (VR). 

In this episode we talk about what stealth assessment is, the history of its development by Valerie Shute, and why it is the optimal form of assessment for learning within immersive environments. We also talk about the importance of the state of flow for immersion, the future of adaptive learning, and some of the drawbacks of stealth assessment...mainly, it's a lot of work!

Connect with Kristin on Linkedin or Twitter.

Project Manager Mark Cunningham joins me to share his thoughts on how to go about onboarding new clients to a project in a way that ensures a successful outcome and builds strong working relationships. Mark discusses some of his own process, which involves using empathy to understand your client's needs, and asking the right questions to get a better sense of what success looks like for your client.

You can connect with Mark on LinkedIn. 

Andrea McEneaney and Parker Grant join me to talk about breaking into freelance instructional design. Andrea and Parker are the co-head honchos at IDLance.com, an awesome website dedicated to providing guidance to anyone looking to embark on a freelance ID career. They share some of the motivation for starting IDLance, which is that basically there really isn't another good place to find practical information all in one place. They also share the most beneficial tool a freelancer can have - mindset!

You can connect with Andrea and Parker on LinkedIn. 

Instructional Designer and founder of Learning Carton, Chris Karel, joins me to discuss communities of practice. We talk about what makes a community of practice and ways in which it might differ from a class or cohort. We also talk about how communities of practice might be used to describe different learning communities of the past, and think about how social media applications might enable the communities of practice of the future. 

You can connect with Chris on Linkedin.