I find that visual planning tools can be powerful thinking aids that allow for rapid design and communication of complex ideas. I've just drafted a new tool for designing Communities of Practice that is based on the Business Model Canvas.

This blog post is a write-up of a webinar we did a while ago on virtual classrooms in the 70:20:10 model. Cheryle Walker ran that session, and this post is a combination of her thinking about virtual classrooms as well as my own.

There is often a moment when an instructional designer is designing a blended-learning program when something comes up that is best dealt with as a conversation between the learners.

Great online discussion forums don't just happen – they need to be designed, managed and supported. Sometimes I hear people complain that learners don’t use discussion forums.

There are two major purposes for using an online community and social learning:

as part of a formal blended-learning program
as part of an informal learning experience. The technologies to support these two purposes are radically different.

This post is about an experiment in collaborative storytelling for onboarding that we tried at Sprout Labs. Collaborative storytelling is a facilitation technique that can be used online or face to face.

The idea of online jams was pioneered by IBM. Their online jam events are global brainstorming sessions that happen over a period of 24 hours. For more about IBM events check out https://www. collaborationjam. com.

A common approach when designing learning experiences with the 70:20:10 framework is thinking about using online communities, learner communities or communities of practice to support learners, generate new knowledge or share knowledge. But these types of learning experiences are actually hard to make work.

Some Sprouts and Brian Jones, Web Services Development Officer at Hobart City Council, just took part in GovHack 2015, where we built a mobile augmented reality game using local government datasets. The game is a simple 'Dungeons and Dragons' hack-and-slash-fest designed to raise awareness of council public assets.

The way in which most eLearning modules ‘talk’ with an LMS is based on a standard called SCORM (Sharable Content Object Reference Model).