Our Gold Winner shares her secrets

After winning GOLD for Best Talent: Instructional Designer at the 2016 LearnX Impact Awards, GB’s Cathy James, Learning and Development Specialist, was invited to speak at the iDesignX Live Learning Design Summit in Brisbane last week.

This event focused on Instructional Designers working in e-learning and other areas of corporate Learning & Development.

Topics this year included advancements in Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality in learning, video in e-learning and scenario-driven learning.

Cathy spoke about the importance of assessment design and her approach to creating effective online assessments.

As part of the presentation, Cathy shared her top three tips:

• Make the assessment an important part of the design process. Start the process by defining your assessment questions, and then use these to inform your content decisions for the online module.
• When creating an assessment, put aside the notion of what the learner can recall from the module, and ask them to apply that knowledge. Use cognitive and affective engagement to create real-world scenarios and consequences, and include learner feedback as an important part of the learning process.
• Ensure there is an assessment review built into the development process, where the designer and SME analyse learner responses and evaluate the success of the module and the assessment, making changes as required.

The presentation proved very popular, with GB receiving a compliment via our website requesting Cathy’s presentation to share within their organisation.

“Thanks for your excellent presentation at iDesignX last week. Your assessment hacks were wonderfully simple in the way that advice can be when delivered by someone who really knows what they’re doing!

I was hoping to get a copy of your presentation if possible (with acknowledgement of course) to share within our learning design team here.”