Instructional Systems Design

Course Description

Designing learning experiences for professionals is very different from lesson planning for K-12 students. Learn to analyze professional development needs, select appropriate instructional strategies, translate those strategies into products, and evaluate the quality of your work. The ISD approach produces quality training programs, whether you work for a multi-national corporation or a local school district.(1)

Reflection

Instructional Design is a topic that I've been very interested in, especially how to connect the design of the course to the assessment of those objectives. It was a stroke of luck that I happened to take this course concurrently with an Assessment course, but I found that they played off each other very well.

Many part of the design process were already familiar. In my current position, we already practiced many of the things we learned about in the class. For example, before workshops, we conduct surveys of the target audience to see what it is they are interested in learning. Even though this was the case, one of the more difficult parts of the class was being able to match the terminology to practices.

One of the most interesting parts of the class was the case studies. The discussions about the studies weren't as helpful as the studies themselves. I liked to think about what I would do in a given situation. One of the things I kept hoping for was to see a complete case study, where they implemented a solution, and then reflected on how well it worked out. The problems were interesting, but seeing the case from beginning to end would also have been very valuable.

Artifacts

Footnotes
  1. From the SISLT Course List