Atlas Icons
Over 2000 free icons available in mutliple formats, including webfont and SVG. You can adjust the size, color, and stroke thickness before downloading. These are under an MIT open source license.
Blog posts
The Inclusive Learning Pledge - inclusiveLXD
Interested in making learning inclusive for everyone? Sign the Inclusive Learning Pledge. Worried you have to be perfect and 100% accessible and diverse in everything you create to sign it? See principle 9: "We won't let pursuit of perfection get in the way of progress."
Information to Miniscenarios - Learnlets
Clark Quinn digs into the process of mapping information from SMEs into miniscenarios for assessment. This is about what information you need to get from SMEs (context, decisions, misconceptions, consequences, models for good performance). Those aspects of the information are then maps to parts of the miniscenario (e.g., misconceptions become wrong answers).
So, first, let’s talk about the <a href="https://blog.learnlets.com/2018/11/making-multiple-choice-work/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">structure</a> of a mini-scenario. I’ve suggested that it’s an initial context or story, in which a situation precipitates the need for a decision. There’s the right one, and then alternatives. Not random or silly ones, but ones that represent ways in which learners reliably go wrong. There’s also feedback, which is best as story-based consequences first, then actual conceptual feedback.
Miniscenarios aren’t necessarily the best practice, but they’re typically available in your authoring environment. Writing them isn’t necessarily as easy as generating typical recognition questions, but they more closely mimic the actual task, and therefore lead to better transfer.
TeuxDeux: the to-do list app for organizing everything
A paid to-do list app designed to mimic the look of a paper list and calendar. You can set up other lists for "someday projects" or other categories.
Recordings - IDEAL22: The Inclusion, Diversity, Equity, and Accessibility for Learning Conference
All recordings from the IDEAL 2022 conference by the TLDC. Hear Bela Gaytan, Kayleen Holt, Bridget Brown, Devin Torres and others speak about inclusive learning. This was a free conference, and the recordings are available even if you didn't attend live.
Free Vectors, Stock Photos & PSD Downloads | Freepik
Freepik's images require attribution, but this is a popular site for finding free images. A paid subscription removes the need for attribution. This site has a collection of illustrated character creation sets, where you can assemble a character with expressions and poses
Just When You Thought It Was Safe To Go Back into the Google Image CC Search Waters Again… – CogDogBlog
Alan Levine explains the challenges with searching for Creative Commons licensed images via Google Image search. You have to really dig to be certain the images are licensed correctly.
Free Stock Photos, Royalty Free Stock Images & Copyright Free Pictures · Pexels
Free stock photos, no attribution required
Fontpair - Free, beautiful fonts and font pairings curated just for you
Looking for fonts for an elearning project? This site has free fonts to download and suggestions for pairing.
The Ultimate Guide to Font Pairing — Learn
A guide to font pairing with examples for different industries and purposes
Stark: The suite of integrated accessibility tools
Plugins for checking for accessibility. Check for color contrast, alt text, typography and more. The tools also include a vision simulator so you can see how a site will look to people with color blindness. h/t Tracy Parish
Upload and share screenshots and images - print screen online | Snipboard.io
A free site for sharing screenshots without needing separate software. This is great for sharing on sites where you can't upload an image and need to share a link to an image instead. Just grab a screenshot and paste it in this website to generate a link to the image.
Planning Your 2023 Projects and Projections • Kai Davis
If you work independently, now is a good time to think about planning for the new year. I suspect most people in our field can't really make projections a whole year in advance as this free spreadsheet template shows. However, projecting even a few months in advance helps you see where you're already booked solid and where you have gaps to fill.
Projects and Projections Worksheet - Google Sheets
Free spreadsheet for projecting your annual income based on multiple freelance projects or income streams. This format is different from how I do my own projections, but it's a good starting point. You can make a copy of the template and use it yourself.
Online Course Side Hustle tips
LinkedIn post by Dr. Philippa Hardman with tips for creating an online course as a side hustle. While I don't think most people are going to be making the kinds of profit she is, the pricing tiers made sense to me. More time spent by the instructor and lower ratios = higher prices.
Course creators consistently under value their courses. Completion rates are 61% higher when online courses cost $200 or higher. Per-seat prices are higher when courses offer a "beyond YouTube" experience - i.e. participation, creation & connection.<br><br>These tiers work well for me: <br><br>Premium: ~4 hrs of my time per week: £500-£1k per seat, cohort-instructor ratio of 1:20 <br><br>Mid: ~1-3 hrs of my time per per week: £250-£500 per seat, cohort-instructor ratio of 1:50 <br><br>Scale: ~1-3 hrs of my time per per month: £100-£250 per seat, cohort-instructor ratio of 1:infinite
The minimal relationship between simulation fidelity and transfer of learning - PubMed
Does a high-fidelity simulation produce better results than a low-fidelity simulation? This meta analysis didn't find a significant advantage, at least in training for clinical and patient care skills. That doesn't mean some other skills wouldn't benefit from high-fidelity simulations, but it does support the idea that the lower cost simulations can still provide positive results.
Translating Research to the Classroom: the Case of Discovery Learning |Education & Teacher Conferences
<p> They see discovery learning and direct instruction not as <em>two different things</em>, but as <em>ends of a continuum</em>:</p>
<blockquote><p>“No learning experience is pure: students given <em>direct instruction</em> often find themselves struggling to <em>discover</em> what the teacher means, and all <em>discovery</em> situations involve some minimal amount of <em>guidance</em>.”</p></blockquote>
<p style="padding-left: 30px;">We should use high-structure pedagogy with <em>novices</em>, who are <em>early in schema formation</em>.</p>
<p style="padding-left: 30px;">And, we should use low-structure pedagogy with <em>experts</em>, who are <em>later in the process of schema formation</em>.</p>
Stock Photo and Image Portfolio by DREAM Initiative Gallery | Shutterstock
Collection of free images with inclusive representation of disability, race, hair, body type, and more. These are all posed images, mostly with models looking directly at the camera and smiling while wearing coordinated outfits. These probably wouldn't be the most useful for elearning courses, but it's still a source to bookmark for those times when you specifically need to show diversity.
Content Theories Of Motivation
An overview of different motivation theories, including Maslow's hierarchy of needs, ERG theory, self-determination theory, and Herzberg's two-factor theory. This is part of a larger resource on gamification.
FreeFuse | Interactive Streaming
FreeFuse is a tool for interactive video. They advertise that they use AI to convert video into interactive content. I haven't tried it, but it might be interesting to test for creating branching video scenarios.
Here is the 5 steps DnD story framework I use to design stories for my e-learning modules :
A 5-part story structure based on DnD campaigns
Transitioning from education to instructional design
Melanie Knight has been doing some great posts sharing her notes and reflections as she learns about instructional design and transitions her career. This article is a reflection on her journey so far and the ways she has been learning and sharing. She also includes a list of resources that she has learned from.
Submit Button CSS Selectors - Gravity Forms Documentation
How to adjust the submit button style with CSS
Random Plot Generator
A writing prompt tool to generate two characters, a setting, situation, theme, and character action. This could be a fun way to start scenarios if you're feeling stuck. h/t Jean Marrapodi
StorytellingResources - Duets Learning
Hadiya Nurridin's templates and documents for crafting stories for learning. These are mostly for IDs to use, not that would be given to a stakeholder to review.
Bubbly — CSS speech bubbles made easy
A free tool for generating speech bubbles in CSS. Something like this might be usable in Twine with some tweaking to assign this formatting based on tags.
The PARA Method: A Universal System for Organizing Digital Information - Forte Labs
This is outside my usual learning-related resource, but I think it's relevant to IDs and elearning developers because we tend to generate loads of digital files. We also frequently have multiple projects happening simultaneously (and if you do freelance or consulting work, those projects are on different systems). This article is about a method for both clearly identifying your projects and tasks as well as organizing the resources to support them.
The Enduring Allure of Choose Your Own Adventure Books | The New Yorker
The history of the Choose Your Own Adventure series and how it evolved over time. Branching scenario training even gets a brief mention (as "Branching Path Simulations" for training nurses). If you're looking for practical tips for creating branching narratives, this isn't that article. However, if you loved the original books and are curious about the history, it is interesting.
You didn’t necessarily identify with the unnamed “you” who starred in each book. It was more that each protagonist offered you an alternative to yourself, or forty alternatives to yourself. The second person was less like a mirror and more like a costume.
The fact of multiple endings offers a sense of freedom and safety at once, reconciling two conflicting desires of childhood: autonomy and protection.
Randomness was never part of his compositional strategy. “My philosophy was that it should be like life,” he tells you. Smart decisions were more likely to result in a better outcome but wouldn’t always guarantee it. Virtuous choices didn’t always pay off.
Anson always writes one “Golden Ticket” ending where you get exactly what you want, and a few “Golden Ticket minus one” paths where you get almost everything, but not quite.
Standard Operating Procedures: The Foundation of a Freelancing or Consulting Business • Kai Davis
Free Google Doc template for creating SOPs for freelancers. For a one-person business, this documentation doesn't have to be very fancy--but it does help to document processes to improve your efficiency. You don't have to keep making the same decisions over and over about what comes next if you write down some processes, even for yourself.
Urban Library Trauma Study – Urban Librarians Unite