Well Designed e-Learning Portal: MyJewishLearning.com

Its amazing to me how often I stumble on e-learning stuff even when I'm not trying...

My good friends Mike and Cristine invited my family over to their house sunday night for dinner and to celebrate Hannukah with them. Not being Jewish, but wanting to be a good guest, I decided to brush up on the meaning of Hannukah's candle lighting ceremony. Low and behold, I quickly found MyJewishLearning.com which is one heck of a good e-learning site.

Among the many things they are doing right:

• the interface is warm and friendly, and easy to navigate
• open-text search box and help that is prevalent on every page
• Mix of "learning objects" from tips and tutorials to quizzes and recipes
• interactive elements include discussion groups
• tutorials use Flash for animation and audio

To improve the site, the producers should include more tutorials, more interactivity in the tutorials (fairly passive and linear at this point), and better use of audio narration. This isn't a knock against it at all -- the site is relatively young and I'll bet huge additions are made on a continuous basis.

MyJewishLearning.com is a tremendous resource for anyone who's interested in Judaism and also for anyone who wants to see an example of a well designed learning portal.

The Analysis Phase of e-Learning

The classic instructional design model ADDIE is an acronym for Analysis, Design, Development, Implementation and Evaluation. The analysis phase simply identifies the gap between actual behaviors against desired outcomes, and obtains information about the learner, environment, and technology that are relevant to closing the gap. This phase is the first and most crucial phase, with all subsequent work based on the outcomes of the analysis.

Click here to learn more about conducting good Analysis

Need Your Help: Articles on Marketing e-Learning?

Last week a reader sent me a note saying we have big gaping content hole in the are of how to market e-learning internally to learners. He's right.

If you happen to know of any great articles, presentations, or white papers that I can link to please send me a note at kevin.kruse@aol.com.

Here's to living and learning,

-- Kevin

Kevin Kruse is the e-learning columnist for CLO, Chief Learning Officer magazine, author of Technology-based Training (Jossey-Bass), and Principal with Kenexa. He can be reached at kkruse@e-learningguru.com.