MIT: Connecting STEM Topics to Real World

http://tll.mit.edu/help/stem-concept-videos

MIT has gone into the movie-making business to help engineering students understand how the concepts they're learning about in class apply to the real world. The university's Teaching & Learning Laboratory has produced 47 "STEM Concept Videos," all of which have Creative Commons licenses and are freely available on the school's Web site as well as through its OpenCourseWare site.

The videos cover themes in the courses that are part of first- and second-year engineering curricula, such as problem solving, communications, probability and statistics, equilibrium and nine other broad categories.

The Big Mistake in eLearning?

Thanks to Padraig McDonagh for suggesting this video:

Some talking points:

- eLearning spans both training and teaching, and sometimes all the customer wants is information-level training, they need to figure this out with the instructional designers' help.

- oftentimes Instructional Designers are told that something has to be done yesterday, so they fall back on the old favorites

- eLearning development can be any two of the following three criteria, but never the third: GOOD, CHEAP and QUICK. So if you want it GOOD and CHEAP it won't be QUICK. So if you want it GOOD and QUICK it won't be CHEAP. So if you want it CHEAP and QUICK it won't be GOOD

- We need to champion examples of excellent eLearning,and make all managers aware of how excellent eLearning looks so that crappy (manual on a CD) eLearning is no longer acceptable

- This is a knowledge management problem,instead of _asking_ the organisation what they want, we  have_elicit_ their requirements from them using things like repertory grids and triadic elicitation to fully understand their need, and built what they need as opposed to what they want.

Howard Gardner explains Multiple Intelligences

Bloom's Taxonomy According to Seinfeld

Why we need instructional design more than ever

David Merrill on Instructional Design