Julie Dirksen

Ms Dirksen really knows her stuff, and this is an excellent compendium for teachers at all levels. I took minor issue with her prose style (e.g. the use of "really" as an intensifying adverb should be used sparingly, but there is really no justification for "really, really" except wanting to sound like an overly excited adolescent, which strikes me as flatly inappropriate for a book like this) which for this reader, is in places execrable. Nonetheless, this is a book I will retain on my reference shelf, right next to How People Learn by the National Research Council, which it complements well--and that indeed is high praise for Design for How People Learn.… (mere)

This is not a book designed for academic teaching / learning / assessment. However, you will be able to get a lot of good ideas about instructional design nonetheless. The illustrations were a bit overkill, in my opinion, but that's not a big deal.

On the other hand, I was clearly not the audience for this book. It was more designers of the corporate-style e-learning / training (of relatively short duration). Having gone through some of those, they tend to be pretty terrible.

There were some interesting chapters on how people learn. Those sections are useful with any types of learners. But from my perspective, the best practices presented here would not work with academic content to be deployed in term-long courses.

But as I mentioned, you can still get a few good ideas out of the book.… (mere)