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

How to Get Started Creating an Instructional Design Portfolio

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If you’re reading this post, you’re very likely either getting ready to create your own portfolio, or considering how you might revamp an already existing one. If so, that’s great! It means you’re taking the time to invest in yourself, share your work, and have dedicated examples showcasing what you can do.  On the other hand, If you’re on the fence about whether you actually need a portfolio, you might want to check out the DIY ID post 4 Reasons Why you Need an Instructional Design Portfolio first.  4 Reasons Why you need an Instructional Design Portfolio Either way, getting your instructional design portfolio together can seem like a daunting task, but it’s not nearly as complicated as you might think. Basic steps for creating an instructional design portfolio As someone who has had several portfolio iterations, I find that creating an ID portfolio generally means considering 3 main factors: Deciding what to include in your portfolio Deciding what
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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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Creating Better Learning - With Less

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This week I'm excited to talk about one of my all-time favorite tools. It's an oldie but goodie that often gets a bad rap which, in my opinion, is because most people don’t use it well. Okay, so enough introduction already. What is it? It’s Microsoft PowerPoint - and I plan to feature it fairly often on this blog because it’s incredibly versatile.  For anyone trying to find simple and cheap tools for creating learning content, PowerPoint is a real winner. If you’re just starting out, or on a tight budget, consider using PowerPoint for these instructional design deliverables: Self-paced eLearning Graphic design Instructor led training (ILT) Virtual instructor led training (VILT) Over time, I’ll create blog posts showing you ways to use PowerPoint for all of these, but for now, we’ll just start with some basics of self-paced eLearning . Self-paced learning The most simple format for eLearning is a straightforward presentation of material, slide by slide. In this format, learner
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