Evaluation of my expectations for this course

1) Have a clear understanding of successful instructional design in the real world.
I believe the class was successful in attaining creating successful instructional design. However I feel it would have been tremendously helpful to spend at least some time looking over actual examples of professionally created instruction. I realize the book had some samples but these were all made up I believe. I know you have many years of great experience with a multitude of campaigns and it would have been very insightful to spend some time going over some examples of work you have done in the past, why certain decisions were made, challenges you faced, etc. One of the most interesting conversations I remember having with you was in your office regarding an old project you worked on and how you came up with theme ideas.


2) Having the knowledge to implement a plan of my own.

Through the readings (some of them, mostly the out of print book though) and classroom notes I found this to come true. I do feel confident in coming up with a basic plan on my own at this point.


3) Awareness of current and future trends.
I would have liked to have spent more time discussing current and future trends. Even if just a few discussions or links to additional resources regarding interesting ways, whether design or implementation of instructional design documents. I think it is incredibly important to learn from quality examples and using the past students examples was good but they were not perfect as it was their first attempt. Often I found myself leading down an incorrect path due to following someone else’s previous project that wasn’t entirely correct.


4) Having a pressure free environment to ask questions.
I do believe we were able to ask questions at any time however I do wish some of your responses were more encouraging. You are very knowledgeable on the topic and very matter of fact when someone has an incorrect answer. This is probably just a style preference of mine but I enjoy when a teacher tries to find some reasoning for why someone gave a certain answer instead of just saying no, you are incorrect.

Thank you for listening to my opinions. Overall I thought the class was a great way to introduce this topic and prepare me for advanced ID.

The Evaluation Phase


The evaluation phase proved to be very interesting. I interviewed three people who all had good comments and suggestions. I only wish I had more time with the evaluation phase to dig deeper and revise more but I suppose you could do revisions forever. My revisions were fairly short because most of the comments I received were fairly good. I can see how this is such an important part of the design process and can be infinitely helpful in creating better instruction. I look forward to doing another project with the knowledge I have now and then seeing what different comments the formative evaluation brings.

The three people I interviewed are below.

Sarah
Sarah was a great help as she was an English major and was very helpful in pointing out many grammatical errors I had made. She also has experience with iTunes so it was helpful to see her point of view on how the instruction flowed. Sarah had the most time to spend with the instruction.

Shawn
Shawn is an instructional designer and used to be an English teacher. His help was also very valuable in terms of adding assessment items. This is something I had a lot of trouble with. I’m hoping to spend more time with this area in the future and better understand how to create quality assessment items.


Greta
Greta had the least amount of time to spend but did like the layout, color used and objectives. She had mostly good things to say about the instruction including wanting to go through it herself and learn to use the program.

The development phase of the instructional design process



I enjoyed the development phase of my instruction because I was able to take screenshots of my software and include it in my participant guide. There were complications along the way however with capturing screen grabs and keeping the quality high enough so you could actually read the text on screen. Initially I was intent on showing the whole program in every screenshot as I didn’t want the learner to ever wonder where they “were” in the program. This was impossible to do and keep the resolution high enough to read the text. After much playing around I realized it was actually unnecessary to have the whole program showing. What I ended up doing was cropping just the sections that were being talked about at the moment and everything worked fine with this technique. I really wanted to include quality screenshots because when I learn software myself I love to have easy to see and clearly marked step by step screenshots. Learning in a classroom setting is one thing but if you as a student look down or miss one step it is easy to become lost very quickly. Having the step by step screenshots in the participant guide for the learners to take home was key for the learners in case they forgot any steps from the instruction.

Originally I had many items in the IS that had to be changed or taken out because once I got to the design phase I realized they were either impractical or unnecessary to include.

One of the resources that helped me with the design phase was talking to and looking at other students design choices in terms of headers. More artistic students had great headers and that pushed me to try harder and create something that was more visually attractive. Most of the self paced instruction had a great look to it and I was a bit unsure of how far to take that with the instructor-led materials. Photoshop was my best resource for cropping and importing images into my word document.

Chris Carro
10/29/05

Reflection on the design phase.


There was an enormous amount to be learned during the design phase. Writing performance objectives was very interesting as it was the first time I had to create them as my background is not in education. It took a while to understand the condition, behavior and criteria layout and I actually still find it a bit difficult to come up with a well written performance objective. I believe it would have helped me to perform the task while writing the objectives. Sometimes it seemed as if the information to be taught was going through a lot of redundant steps. I understand in concept why you need these for every step of the way but the process is taking time to get used to. I also felt this way about the AI. It seemed if you had to break everything down into extremely small steps and that was something that I found to be difficult to implement well. Sometimes the test items seemed to be so small that they were meaningless. I understand the testing phase though and believe it to be incredibly useful. I also found it incredibly helpful to have practice tests in the out of print book we used for class and can definitely see how practice tests can be of great help to learners.

The resources I found most useful were the out of print book that we use for class and talking to other teachers in the class. Speaking with other students who have spent time in the undergraduate degree of education seemed to have a much better grip and understanding on writing clear performance objectives and useful test items as they have had a lot of experience doing this.

I found the chapters in our main textbook to be awful for the design phase. The chapters were unnecessarily long and confusing. There was such a great amount of information to explain such an easy concept. Conceptually the design phase makes perfect sense to me, when explained well, however when reading the book, it just confused me greatly.

Overall, it was a very interesting experience to think about my project and implement the design process to it. I am excited to finish cleaning up my PO’s and AI’s and to get my Instructional Strategy down. Creating the Instructional Strategy was the most fun part for me as I love to motivate people. Having the opportunity to motivate a group of people and get them excited for what they are going to learn is more lined up with my background in PR then anything else we have done so far in class. I spent many years motivating journalists about a product before I would educate them on it so I definitely feel the most comfortable with this aspect of the project. I wish I would have learned about PO’s and AI’s before working in PR just for the knowledge, however I believe they would be very difficult to implement in an environment other than the classroom. I don’t necessarily believe journalists would want to be tested on what they were taught but perhaps I could have used it for my own knowledge or created some creative testing that wasn’t so obvious to assess how effective my demo’ing was.

Reflection on the analysis phase of the instructional design process.

My learning experience on the analysis phase of the instructional design process has gone from confusing in the early stages to a state of further understanding the big picture as it has come to a close. I still feel however that this is a massive topic to fully understand.

Needs Analysis:

Creating a needs analysis was very interesting in terms of learning that by doing this you could find out if the current stated problem was accurate or if the actual problem was something else entirely. The variety of ways you can extract information out of a group and when to use each tool was also helpful. It was useful to have strengths and weaknesses of each tool laid out in the power point presentation in class. Choosing two tools and adding our own data was helpful in seeing how helpful these tools could be. Combining the “fictional” data into the current and desired situation and determining the gap was difficult for me. I wish we could have stayed away from the “community center” option and instead stuck with real companies and real world problems and tried to dissect those or help with possible problems in real companies.

Instructional Goal Analysis:

Having a detailed Instructional Goal Analysis has been a helpful guiding path through the whole project. Creating a flow chart layout of the main steps was a great way to visually layout and see how the instruction will move on later. Understanding how different learning domains will change your structure was also very interesting.

Subskill and Entry Behavior Analysis:

Due to the fact that we were mostly all using intellectual domains and hierarchal models made creating this portion of our project more manageable. The book was full of examples of other models which were very useful but also a lot to take in and remember at once.

Learner Analysis:

Clarifying who we wanted the target audience and our assumptions versus what was learned by interviewing a sample of the target population was an interesting experiment and very useful to see how dangerous it can be to assume too much about your audience. The study and consideration of where the training and the performance will take place was also very helpful to look into. These issues change so drastically for every topic that I believe some are more pronounced than others. My topic of someone sitting at a computer to learn a program felt like there was very little difference in the two environments. I understand that there are many regarding the comfort level of the person and having someone around to help answer questions but feel this would have been even more pronounced and easier to understand had I chosen a topic where the differences were more about physical changes in both contexts.

On a side note, for my learning style personally, I think it would have been nice to have seen a full professional Instructional Design document early in the class. Having a chance to briefly dissect all the parts would have been helpful to get an overview idea of what is involved in the process and why it is so beneficial. Regarding the instructional materials, I found the book to be incredibly confusing at times with the amount of topics/words that had multiple alternatives. Even though I could have made my own list it would have been helpful to have a handout either before each chapter or just one handout at the beginning of class with all the words and alternatives they have. Are all of these words used interchangeable in the real world? Is there a reason no standard has been set?

Personal expectations for my Instructional Design course

My expectations for the Instructional Design course are to have a clear understanding of successful instructional design in the real world, the knowledge to implement these ideas/theories on my own, the ability to have open discussion and analysis on new trends facing the future of instructional design and a pressure free environment to ask questions and learn from each others experiences.

Real world applications of Instruction Design are of great interest to me for many reasons. For one, I find it incredibly helpful to see where a need was and what company or people involved felt Instructional Design was the key to fixing their problem. It is also interesting to me to study real world applications so I can look back and learn what success and failure the project had when transplanting the project from theory to reality.

Having the knowledge to implement a plan on my own is crucial for the obvious reason of having the best skills possible when entering the workforce so I can confidently enter a job and produce successful results. I would also like to learn more about which companies choose paper Instructional Design over CD or web based and why. After the class is over, I would like to feel equally proficient in all practices being used in the field.

Current and future trends also interest me as I would like to be aware of what techniques are on the cutting edge for people in the field. I would like to discuss thoughts and views from leaders in the industry regarding how far they feel the current technology can be pushed and what advantages future technology will hold for this field.

Having a pressure free environment in the classroom is also a desire of mine so that any question can be asked at any time in case information was not understood the first time around.

If we can go through the points of interest listed above in addition to several topics I am sure I am currently unaware of, I will feel this class has truly been a success.