Reflections

Professional Foundations

The first part of being an instructional designer is understanding your role in the success of individuals and organizations. Inherently, instructional design is a process of improving skills, performance, and even the bottom line. Instructional designers also provide an important service by facilitating learning for people of diverse backgrounds and capabilities. With an understanding of the responsibilities we bear, we can work toward improving the integrity, effectiveness and overall value of what we create.

So far in my experience in the IDD program, I have been able to establish the foundational knowledge and skills I needed to ensure that I am on the right track to being able to apply them in various dimensions. EDIT 704 provided a great theoretical foundation for which to base the strategies and methods employed in EDIT 705 to actually develop an instructional design project. In EDIT 705 performing analyses was one of they key take-aways for me that I was able to immediately apply to my work. This is an area where I hope to be able to continue to grow as it was one of my original weaknesses coming in to the program. EDIT 730 helped to culminate all of the instructional design principles I learned throughout the program.

Design and Development

This is perhaps the crux of instructional design and the actual designing and development of the instruction is the hardest part, because these tasks require being able to successfully apply the results of your analysis to design and manage the development of the actual product. It is during this period that the instructional designer has to switch gears from thinking to doing.

EDIT 704, EDIT 705, and EDIT 564 have given me the opportunity to develop or partially develop instructional material. Based on either an initial analysis or a given scenario, I designed, developed and delivered (EDIT 704) a wide variety of instruction including instructor-led and web-based.

EDIT 732 and EDIT 752 were the most interesting courses in the program related to design and development. Actually being able to go through the user design research process including two rounds of testing was an important experience in providing real-world context for what we’ve learned.

Implementation and Management

Since instructional design involves creating an actual product, teams of people/resources and stakeholders project management skills are extremely important. Having been involved in web development projects in my career experience, I was familiar with managing schedule and resources. However in the specific context of instructional design I had limited experience in dealing with the business side of instructional design implementation and management.

EDIT 573 gave me the opportunity to sharpen my skills in developing a project management plan that includes the scope of the project, schedule, and deliverables. It also gave me the opportunity to work in teams to complete tasks and collaborate on ideas and problem solving strategies. I feel I still have a lot of room to grow in this area especially when it comes to considering instructional design at a higher level in an organization and managing the long term processes of recorded student feedback and maintenance.

Competency Chart

For a table of competencies, applicable course and the level of proficiency for each competency select the link below.

IBSTPI Competency Chart (PDF)