What I Learned
Mostly what I learned in my Instructional Systems Design courses this semester about the whole design process in general was due diligence. In my job, I am constantly rushed and meet with faculty who are tempted to jump in and start using the technology tools to get something up and ready for students to view in their online course. Partly this is because I work for an open enrollment community college and there are times when a course must be put together quite quickly in order to meet the last minute enrollment demands. But other times, I think we just rush past what we know is the right process for creating a quality online instructional design.
Even the title of our textbook, “Rapid Instructional Design,” spoke to this need to move fast. It was helpful to learn tips on what can be skipped in a really rushed production timeline and what should never be skipped. I especially liked how to think about using a part of a design that works in other designs. I found this helpful when I could refer to the layout and evaluation of my first project when working on my second project. For my first project, I created an evaluation survey that the client found leaned towards negativity. I made the revision and then for my second project I was able to build a survey that met the client’s immediate approval. This was a huge time-saver.
I learned that taking time up front to listen to the client and understand their problems helped me create and more targeted and effective training session. Formally defining the problem to address in a written document became a touchstone to keep in mind what my design should solve. The analysis phase is so tempting to skip and seems to be the hardest part for designers to face. I find myself in meetings with my department discussing how we are going to deliver advanced training to our faculty about online learning. There are many assumptions posed about what faculty want in advanced training. This course has prompted me to ask my work team, “Have we actually asked faculty what they need?” I also asked, “What exactly is the problem we wish to solve with this training?” I’m still hopeful we can gather the data we will need and give our due diligence to this phase of the instructional design process. I believe that by pausing to start with analysis will help save time in the long run and certainly produce a better and more acceptable product.
Just this week I got to put my development skills to the test. I was working with a welding faculty member who is offering his program’s fully online capstone course for the first time. I’ve learned that opening up our learning management system is an immediate distraction and keeps us from first looking at the “what” needs to be developed before we get to the “how” are we going to develop the course. So this time I pulled up past syllabi and the learning outcomes before we opened his course. This got us started talking about what the students needed to accomplish in his capstone course and what he could assign to help them reach the course objectives. It was interesting to see how the semester-long welding project he wants his students to complete in stages mimicked what we needed to do to build his course. He got it when I reassured him that if we spent this time planning out what we need to build in his course that once we got to the actual building stage it would go much quicker and be exactly what he and his students needed. By the end of our meeting, we had all his assignments mapped out and matched to his course objectives. Paying due diligence to development phase got us both excited about his new course.
Before this course, and during this course, I was most comfortable with the design and implementation phases. I am not afraid of learning new tools. I often with I had more leisure to figure out how to incorporate them into my instructional design. I can see where virtual and augmented reality are already influencing new and better ways of instruction. Adding more human storytelling elements, interactivity, social learning and gamification are all interesting challenges to bring to the design phase of creating instruction. Exposure is good, but I look forward to actually incorporating new tools into my own instructional design. For this course, I mostly used tools I already knew or were similar in nature due to the rapid timelines required to meet due dates.
Implementing beta tests, gathering feedback and evaluation are often the most skipped phases of instructional design and they are often the most helpful in producing a product that meets all expectations and quality standards. I was fortunate that I got to do both a beta test and a full implementation of my first project. The beta test helped me revise my project before presenting it to a class full of faculty. I know going through the whole ADDIE process of design on the project made my training session a success. My evaluation from the true implementation was extremely positive. There are some minor areas to tweak, such as the pacing of the instruction, but overall this experience has boosted my confidence in several areas of instructional design. I promise to keep paying due diligence to the instructional design process.
Tags: LTEC 5210