Hello! I’m pleased to make your digital acquaintance. My name is Emily Moore, and I have a confession to make. I’m aggravated. 

There.  I said it.

Why am I aggravated?  Because it’s taken me over two decades to figure out on my own what I should have walked out of my master’s program in educational technology knowing: namely,

1. How to use technology to communicate effectively online, and
2. How to measure the effectiveness of that communication.

Not too much to ask, right?

Unfortunately, when I think back on my master’s program, two things stand out:

• The complete lack on the part of either my professors or required textbooks to attempt to tie theory to practice with meaningful, representative, real-life examples; and
• My incredulity that neither my professors nor my required textbooks appeared to know, or want to know, anything at all about UX (an online user’s experience), UI (presenting and laying out text and images for online audiences), or the differences between video for entertainment and video for instruction.  It was as if none of the best practices for presenting information online that had been previously identified and proven to work were relevant—as if none of them could or should be applied to education or training targeted for online delivery.

It’s as if a bunch of farmers refused to apply standard agricultural practices because they planned to freeze their product, not can it.

Unfortunately, at the time, I—like most students, I imagine—thought it was me who was missing something. So by and large, I kept my yap shut.

But as I continued to study and log more and more years in the trenches of online communication and assessment, it became clearer and clearer that all effective online communication and evaluation follows the same set of rules—and most of those rules were nowhere to be found in any textbooks or classrooms.

If only someone had thought to document those rules, organize them, differentiate them, and explain how they work, with actual examples!

Well, someone finally did: me. (Because I’ve always believed that if you can’t find what you want, it’s up to you to create it.)

This blog is the result. My goal for this blog is to share with you, dear reader, the things I wish I’d known twenty years ago about how to use technical and psychological best practices to communicate online effectively using text, images, audio, video, and interactivity—and, when appropriate, how to measure and quantify the effectiveness of that communication. 

And to all my former instructors and colleagues: “Education and training are subsets of communication, people! Let’s take advantage!”