One way I stay connected with the community and what’s happening in the field is by reading blogs by instructional designers, elearning professionals, and educators. I use Feedly for my RSS reader, but you can use other readers or subscribe via email.
If you don’t want to subscribe to all these blogs individually, check out eLearning Learning. This is my favorite blog aggregator in the field. You can sign up and choose your interests for a daily or weekly/monthly/yearly emails. You can also search the archives if you’re looking for something specific.
35+ Instructional Design & Elearning Blogs
In (sort of) alphabetical order*:

  1. Always Learning is where Kim Cofino writes about her experiences as a technology coach in international schools.
  2. Ashley Chiasson is an instructional design and e-learning consultant. She writes about the experience of working independently and about creating e-learning in Storyline. Her “Terminology Tuesday” posts illuminate jargon in the field.
  3. Bozarthzone by Jane Bozarth isn’t updated as regularly as some others on this list, as Jane is more active on Twitter and writes a column for Learning Solutions Magazine. Her posts revolve around the practical realities of supporting learning–and that doesn’t mean just formal training courses.
  4. Cathy Moore is on a mission to “save the world from boring training.” Her action mapping model guides instructional designers to create engaging learning that focuses on what people need to DO rather than what they need to KNOW.
  5. chat2lrn is a regular Twitter chat. Prior to each chat, the discussion topic is explained in a blog post.
  6. Clients from Hell isn’t actually an instructional design or elearning blog, but any freelancer or consultant in the learning field will recognize the scenarios. If you need to chuckle about endless client requests for revisions, vague feedback, and communication failures, this is always good for a laugh.
  7. CogDogBlog is about educational technology, social media, Creative Commons, and a number of other topics that author Alan Levine finds interesting.
  8. Dave’s Educational Blog by Dave Cormier often focuses on his theory of rhizomatic learning. Cormier is the person (with George Siemens) who coined the term MOOC and has been involved in MOOCs literally since their very beginning in 2008.
  9. David Kelly (Misadventures in Learning) is best known for his curated backchannels for conferences. If you want to learn from a conference that you can’t attend in person, David’s blog and Twitter feed are the ones to follow. He also writes about curation and e-learning in general.
  10. The Edublogger is a team blog focused on blogging and educational technology with K-12 students.
  11. The eLearning Coach by Connie Malamed is full of useful tips on visual design and elearning design in general.
  12. The eLearning Leadership blog by Allen Interactions writes about e-learning as explained in Michael Allen’s books, including the SAM method and focusing on scenarios.
  13. On E-Learning Provocateur, Ryan Tracey writes about the future of L&D and the big trends in the field like curation, gamification, and augmented reality.
  14. E-Learning Uncovered posts about once a month about creating e-learning. This blog is published by the same group that writes the E-Learning Uncovered books (Diane Elkins, Tim Slade, et al).
  15. Ant Pugh’s eLearning Architect shares experiences from someone who is in the trenches every day working as an elearning consultant.
  16. The eLearning Guild’s TWIST blog shares highlights from their conferences and #GuildChat. They also provide curated content each week, a great way to find some new articles or authors you might otherwise have missed.
  17. Stephen Downes calls Half an Hour “a place to write, half an hour, every day, just for me.” Because Stephen’s interests and expertise are wide ranging, so are the topics of this blog–connectivism, philosophy, the future of learning, MOOCs, learning technology, research, etc. This blog tends towards longer posts and more theoretical content. Stephen is one of the originators of MOOCs and connectivism.
  18. Harold Jarche is a thought leader in personal knowledge mastery/management, leadership, and workplace learning.
  19. I Came, I Saw, I Learned by IconLogic: This is a group blog with multiple contributors on topics including tool tips (Captivate, Camtasia) and writing tips. When I’m troubleshooting Captivate, I often find myself referring to their old posts.
  20. In the Middle of the Curve by Wendy Wickham is a blog I have been reading for many years. In fact, her blog is one of the first ones I linked to and quoted way back in 2007. Wendy writes about the practical, real-life challenges she faces as a training and technology specialist and how she is working through them.
  21. Janet Clarey specializes in research on learning and performance.
  22. Kapp Notes is where Karl Kapp writes primarily about games for learning, including resources and notes from his many presentations.
  23. LearnDash is a WordPress LMS plugin, but the blog discusses many broader elearning topics, not just their own product.
  24. Learning in the Modern Workplace is Jane Hart’s blog on “modernising workplace learning” by moving beyond traditional training to supporting social and informal learning.
  25. Learning Solutions Magazine from the eLearning Guild is an edited online magazine rather than a blog. There are regular columnists, as well as contributions from practitioners in the field.
  26. Learning Technologies Blog is ATD’s blog on elearning and learning technology
  27. Learning Visions is written by Cammy Bean, author of The Accidental Instructional Designer. Many of her recent posts have shared what she’s learning at conferences, as well as sharing notes from her own presentations.
  28. Clark Quinn has been blogging at Learnlets for over 10 years. Quinn is a thought leader in workplace learning.
  29. OL Daily is where Stephen Downes has been curating daily and weekly collections of interesting links in the learning field for 15 years, since before “curation” was a hot trend. If you’re feeling overwhelmed by the size of this list of blogs, subscribe to just eLearning Learning and OL Daily. That will give you a good cross section from a wide range of corporate and academic writing.
  30. The Rapid E-Learning Blog by Tom Kuhlmann is one of the most popular blogs in the field because it shares practical tips that even beginners can apply.
  31. Rapid eLearning Adobe Captivate is Adobe’s official blog on Captivate.
  32. The Science of Learning Blog is a place where ATD summarizing research on learning for practitioners.
  33. The New ID posts a comic every other week about “the joys of training.”
  34. Will At Work Learning by Will Thalheimer shares evidence and research about what actually works in learning.
  35. Will Richardson has been blogging for 15 years. In that time, he has helped countless teachers learn ways use technology and social media in their classrooms and to build their own personal learning networks. He writes often about how to improve education in the US. Will is the person who inspired me to start my blog in 2006 when he was the SME for a course I developed.
  36. Write Spot is about both technical writing and instructional design.

*This is the order I have them listed in Feedly, which is sometimes by the blog title, sometimes by the author name. There’s not a lot of consistency because I have changed my system over the years. I’m actually subscribed to about 100 more blogs than are listed here, but I filtered this list for more active blogs.

More Blogs

What other blogs do you find valuable that I should add to my list? (This is your opportunity to shamelessly promote your own blog too!) Share in the comments what blogs you read and why you appreciate them.

18 thoughts on “35+ ID & Elearning Blogs

  1. Shamelessly plugging my own blog Learningtogo: https://learningtogo.info/learningtogo-blog-archive/. I write about the application of learning science to enhance learning, retention and performance. I also have a podcast that was recently voted in the Top 10 for Learning and Development professionals: https://learningtogo.info/category/podcasts/
    We’ve had some great guests over the years, including Marshall Goldsmith, Jane Bozarth, Joe Ganci and others.

    1. A few of these may be a little too K-12 focused for eLearning Learning (Kim Cofino and Will Richardson’s blogs, for example). Plenty of the other blogs would be great additions to your list though.

  2. Hi Christy – Great list, happy to know that my list has a lot of these fine people – plus some new ones, which I’ll be checking out. As a shameless plug, there is mine “Learning Rebels”. Plus I agree with JD regarding Degreed’s blog. I like what they are saying lately! 🙂

  3. Shameless plug for my personal ‘Just Curious Learning + Performance Blog’ at jddillon.com. I would also recommend the Axonify Blog (www.axonify.com/blog/) + Degreed’s blog (blog.degreed.com/). Great list + thanks for sharing!

  4. Great list Christy and thanks for the mention. I also use Feedly and Instapaper now Google Reader has disappeared… My only remaining wish is for an easy way to send articles to my Kindle and have them marked as read on my Feedly account. One day….

    1. I recently switched to a Kobo reader, which can allow you to save articles to Pocket to read later. I haven’t used it that way, but I thought it was an interesting feature. I sometimes save things to Diigo and mark them as unread so I can come back to them later.

      1. That is interesting. I have found workarounds to enable me to send things from the internet to my Kindle, but the issue is that if I read them on my Kindle, they stay marked as Unread on my computer – which just won’t do 🙂 But reading off an ereader is SO much better than off a phone/ipad/computer…. I guess we’ll just have to wait for the technology to catch up.

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