The Learning Designer Playbook

Small Steps Toward Accessibility get you there faster.  How can you possibly take all your potential learners' needs into account?  You can’t. There’s no way to ensure you’re accessible to everyone without also driving yourself down a steady (potentially fast) path to burnout.  However, you can approach accessibility and learner needs in very targeted ways that will give choices and help most of your learners - leaving you time to lift up those few whose needs you couldn’t account for.  Before we dive in, let’s be clear: don’t try to do all this at once. It’s ok to start small and build in more consideration for learner needs as you go.  Accessibility 101. Accessible is a huge word. One of my favorite resources for thinking about accessibility is from W3 because it’s practical and defines access broadly. It can be overwhelming though. So I do recommend starting small with more traditional forms of accessibility, like captions or transcripts or audio. This creat...

Success. When I feel successful - like I’ve gotten what I needed, I’ve had that lightbulb moment, I’ve got a handle on the new skill or mastered the old one. And I did it all without a ton of challenges, well maybe without a ton of unsupported challenges. Leave me too challenged and I’ll get frustrated and stop; don’t give me any challenges and I’ll get bored and stop.  See how emotions impact motivation to continue? It’s not just me. There’s a ton of research that points to similar results (with varying degrees and frustration and boredom being tolerated). While the book the Spark of learning is directed at higher ed, guess who’s in higher ed? Adults. The NCES estimates that 74% of adults in higher ed are non-traditional, meaning they’re adult adults (as opposed to fresh out of high school still figuring out what adulting is).  There’s a special word for the teaching of adults. It’s called andragogy. So anything that applies to adult learning, applies to anyone in higher ed, ...