Distance Education List

Subject List

Order Form

Home

MindMeld:
Micro-Collaboration between eLearning Designers and Instructor Experts

by Jon D. Aleckson and Penny Ralston-Berg

In MindMeld, Jon D. Aleckson and Penny Ralston-Berg draw on a great many years of experience in educational technology to describe how the benefits of learning from an accomplished expert (a professor, for instance) can be translated into an online format. Industry professionals know that the online format presents an opportunity for highly interactive pedagogy, a pedagogy by which students synchronize learning with doing, replicating the information-processing habits that come from real-life work in the field. According to Aleckson, the key to creating an ideal eLearning product is to meet the challenge of micro-collaboration.

In order to develop sophisticated online learning activities, we must find a way to convey the tacit knowledge of someone with real-life experience using the tools of software design. This requires us to micro-collaborate: individuals with very different backgrounds and very different skills sets have to work in harmony to achieve a common goal. It may sound simple, but anyone who has labored on an eLearning project knows otherwise. In MindMeld, Aleckson and Ralston-Berg take us step by step through the leadership, management, and communication strategies that make effective micro-collaboration possible, using stories of actual projects to illustrate his points. In addition, they provide a collection of documentation tools to assist in keeping an eLearning project on spec, on time, and on budget.

This concise, readable volume contextualizes each aspect of eLearning development and highlights the ways in which different team members interact. It will prove invaluable to readers in both the business and academic worlds.

As a bonus to readers, the authors have created an exciting set of "tools" for helping conceptualize and implement the process.