Dan Meyer teaches high school math outside of Santa Cruz, CA, and explores the intersection of math instruction, multimedia, and inquiry-based learning. He received his Masters of Arts from the University of California at Davis in 2005 and Cable in the Classroom's Leader in Learning award in 2008. He currently works for Google as a curriculum fellow and lives with his wife in Santa Cruz, CA.

In 1885, Herman Ebbinghaus did an experiment where subjects memorized a list of meaningless three letter words and tracked how quickly his subjects forgot the words.   As you can see from the graph below, known as the Ebbinghaus curve, our learners will rapidly forget information.  In the case of meaningless information, only 20 minutes after they only remember 58% of the information.

Graph from Purdue University

At the E-Learning Symposium, Articulate's David Anderson (@elearning) provided an engaging and practical lecture on using elements of design when building your courses. Doing so makes them more heavily geared toward the topic, as well as aesthetically pleasing to the learners. Topics addressed were:

• working with the "client" to create a look and feel for e-learning using a brilliant mind mapping technique
• creating custom themes
• the personality of fonts and choosing the right font to enhance your e-learning
• simple graphic techniques that reduce text and make your e-learning more inviting

David also answered the question of why there is invariably a rooster crowing on his webinar.

Presentation attached - have to be logged in to download.

AUSTIN, TEXAS—May 25, 2010 - E-Learning Council is proud to announce that Sue Tedford, Distance Learning Specialist at the Texas Department of State Health Services was awarded the 2010 E-Learning Council Outstanding Achievement Award at E-Learning Symposium 2010 held in Austin, Texas.  

The E-Learning Council was formed to advocate the value of training to the leaders of organizations, to provide resources for practitioners to create high quality E-Learning, and to encourage peer-to-peer interaction between the people who create E-Learning.  Ms. Tedford embodies these goals.   Ms. Tedford is the go to resource for the Texas Department of State Health Services for the creation of learning that improves performance.  Indeed, she is often the go to resource for many organizations in Central Texas.   She helped form the Lectora User Group.   Ms. Tedford is a super connector for trainers, managers and practitioners