That's Awesome ID!

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.

Senior instructional designer Mike Peacock returns to the show to talk about interactive PDF's. Mike shares what motivated him to want to get more out of the training manuals he was creating for his company, not just for his own satisfaction, but also because he knew he could better support his trainers. He gives recommendations types of interactive elements can be added, as well as tools you can use to create the documents. Mike loves his interactive PDF's so much he just got done presenting them at the ATD TechKnowledge Conference. 

You can connect with Mike on LinkedIn. 

Instructional designer Brenda Peterson joins me to discuss how to respond to a layoff. She shares what that process typically looks like and walks through the emotions and considerations that come along with it. She also gives some pointers on how to prepare yourself for what most hope will never come, including building your network, growing your skill set and knowing how to ask for help.

Connect with Brenda on LinkedIn, check out her blog at brendalearns.com, or find her at Condition Orange Preparedness.