So far, I’ve had positive feedback and encouragement from my peers regarding the development of my Learning Framework fully online 16-week course. I only needed to double check consistency between what was mentioned in the directions for the synchronous class meeting and the syllabus.  I have also received feedback from my instructor.  She has confirmed methods I have in place, such as giving online participation grades for discussion activity and synchronous meeting attendance. She also directed me to a Canvas community board post that supported the same method I’m using to provide extra credit scoring in the gradebook. I really appreciated her feedback regarding misalignment of Canvas’ rubric tables when criteria row point values differ for each level. This appears to be a bug in Canvas that is unavoidable. Even though my table columns are not straight, I believe they are still useful, so I will leave them as they are. It is comforting to get feedback from both my peer and instructor when working on this project in my own online course.

I’ve been enjoying the longer timeline and attention I get to pay to the development of this course. I’ve had 8 weeks so far to go through the analysis, design and development stages of the instructional design (ID) process (albeit the time should only be counted as part, since I’m not able to dedicate full work hours to my college courses). I’ve been told that most corporate ID projects typically last three weeks. In my job as an instructional designer for Lone Star College, I can attest that sometimes it is even shorter than that. There are times when at least the first few weeks of a course have to be done in a day or maybe two. Once the course is underway, the instructor and I are struggling to stay at least a week ahead of the students while we build the course as it is being taught. This is not a typical scenario. This is certainly not the best scenario, but it has happened. However, I have developed “canned” content to help in these situations. I have generic first week course materials I can drop into any course and with slight adjustments it is ready to go. This speeds up the design/development process tremendously. I would assume a corporate instructional designer would have the same template structures to help them meet tight deadlines.

However, occasionally I have a project that has the luxury of time. This always produces a more detailed and quality course fully developed before the implementation date. This allows the instructor to concentrate on facilitating the course and ultimately provides a much better learning experience for the students. I’m encouraged that my Learning Framework project is getting this same attention. Ultimately I want it to be an example of what can be designed and developed when proper time is allocated to these stages of the design process.

This entry was posted on Saturday, October 20th, 2018 at 12:35 pm and is filed under Instructional Design. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.