About Me


 

I'm an instructional designer and eLearning developer with a passion for helping others achieve their professional development goals. 

That's why I started this blog — to help new, aspiring, and accidental instructional designers. Early in my instructional design career, I had to pull information from various sources. Along the way, I thought to myself that it would be nice to aggregate the answers to common questions and make it easier for others to start and/or progress in their journey. So when the opportunity arose, I thought "why not now?" And so DIY ID was born. I hope you'll enjoy reading the content, benefit from what you find, and share the resources with anyone else who needs them too.

- Esther Matthews, M.Ed

Want to talk? I'd love to!
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Popular posts from this blog

Top Podcasts for New Instructional Designers

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  As a new, aspiring, or accidental instructional designer, you probably recognize the need to continue growing your skill set related to all things learning. The good news is that there’s no shortage of advice on this topic. Such advice typically centers are studying learning theories, instructional design models, and software. These are important things to learn about, and they’re essential parts of your growth as a newer instructional designer.  At the same time, as a newbie or maybe the only person creating learning in your department, you might at times wonder what else you might be missing related to ID. Maybe you want to learn more about certain technologies, learn interesting ways to apply instructional design models, or just hear how colleagues are approaching their work. If so, that’s natural and makes complete sense. Even designers who have been at their craft for years express some of the same concerns. If this sounds relatable, there’s one more facet of your perso...
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How to Share eLearning Projects Online Without an LMS

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So you’ve decided that you need to create a portfolio of your work and even created a website to host it. Congratulations - that’s a huge accomplishment! Now there’s just one more tech issue to handle. At this point, you’ve got to figure out a way to make your elearning course(s) visible online. Normally, this is easily handled by publishing your course and hosting it within an LMS. But in this situation, you’re hosting your personal learning deliverables for public consumption, so you’ll need another method of course hosting. Before going into exactly how to do that, let’s start with an understanding of why that’s necessary. If you already know this information, feel free to drop down to the part of the post where we’ll explore how to host your Storyline and Captivate files online. What is online hosting? Information hosted online lives on a server, a computer hard drive that contains the files and makes them publicly available whenever a specific URL is entered into the address bar o...
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What to Include in Your Instructional Design Portfolio

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  There’s no shortage of opinions on the topic of what should be included in an instructional design portfolio.  Like any good instructional design project, I’d challenge you to start by considering your audience and your intended outcomes. Afterall, isn't the goal to teach someone a little more about yourself and what you can do for them? So, start by thinking about your personal objectives and what you want to achieve by having this portfolio available to share with others. Consider your objectives  Most people want to use a portfolio to do one of the following: Land a new job at a different company Land a new role at their current company Land some job - any job! Compile a history of past work If you’re not sure what you want to do with your portfolio, you might consider it helpful to read the post 4 Reasons Why You Need an Instructional Design Portfolio first.  No matter what your reason is for having the portfolio available, you’ll want to tailor the content in...
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