My reading this morning took me to Learning Solutions Magazine (http://www.learningsolutionsmag.com), a website I find very valuable with lots of insight around learning technology. Although I read two articles there, the one that really caught my attention was titled: Moving Beyond MOOCs: Experiments in Non-traditional Product Education. You can access the article here: http://www.learningsolutionsmag.com/articles/1327/moving-beyond-moocs-experiments-in-non-traditional-product-education. It was written by Julia Wilkowski from Google’s engineering education team, highlighting some of her experiences designing a MOOC for 10 million people.

One of my new learning goals is that whenever I read anything, I will try and identify three learning points, and no more than that. It does take a lot of discipline as there are often more than three learning points. But I found out that if I can identify just three learning points from any reading and document it, the likelihood of me applying the learning at some point is much higher. So here are my three learning points from the article and writing this blog post helps me to document them:

1. When you are designing any form of digital learning, don’t strive for perfection. release the learning as soon as possible but make sure you gather feedback so that you can keep improving the digital learning based on your audience’s observations.
2. Although videos have become popular, don’t ignore using text. As much as possible provide a text version of your video content. TED (see http://www.ted.com) does this with it’s videos, they will always provide a transcript of all their videos. Also keep videos short, preferably 5 minutes or less.
3. Not everybody who does an online course or engages in some form of formal self-directed digital learning wants to complete it with the aim of getting a certificate. A lot of times people want to learn something specific so that they can do something. Design courses in such a way that people can pick and choose what they need to learn.