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Applying the Principles

Principles are great, but how do we apply them? How do we transform this great advice into online courses that are more interesting and effective for adult learners?

In our experience over several decades of developing and delivering traditional and technology-enhanced training in the corporate world, we have often witnessed the gap between good principles and their application. In the remainder of this article, we suggest ways to avoid this gap by examining one common online teaching strategy — the instructional article — in detail and explaining how the ideas we have discussed so far can be put into practice.

Instructional Article Principles

While adult learning tends to be more problem-centered than content-centered, it is still usually necessary for students to learn specific knowledge prior to moving on to more advanced levels of performance. In many classroom courses, this knowledge is gained through the time-honored instructional method called a lecture. Unfortunately (fortunately!), reading long lectures on the web will not work.

Exercise:   Based on your experience, what are some of the reasons that students are disinclined to read written lectures online?




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