Program of Study
9471 Instructional Systems Design
Course Description
Designing learning experiences for professionals is very different from lesson planning for K-12 students. In this course, students learned to analyze professional development needs, select appropriate instructional strategies, translate those strategies into products, and evaluate the quality of their work. Students created a learning system for a specific audience where they analyzed learner needs and tasks, articulated learning goals and objectives, developed tools for assessing the completion of those objectives, and developed teaching sequences, strategies, and materials.
Reflection
During the first week or so of this course, I was relatively overwhelmed with the number of projects, especially group projects, that were required in this course. I was also disappointed that the focus of the course was on developing quality sound instruction for adult learners. After all, I was a high school digital media teacher with a curriculum that had been developed based on backward design. But as the semester progressed, I found myself intrigued with all the steps (or skillsets) that should go into the planning and implentation of training for adults. I was also surprised at how much I enjoyed working in groups for a majority of the coursework.
For the final project that tied all the skillsets learned in the course together, four other classmates and I chose to develop a training program for Adobe Buzzword, an online word processor that allows multiple users to collaborate on text documents and review and comment on them online (similar to Google Docs). Our final project included all the skillsets we had previously learned as stand-alone assignments: creating needs assessments, performing learner and contextual analyses and topic and procedural analyses, writing instructional objectives, determining the types of learning, instruction and materials needed, and then creating and implementing both formative and summative evaluations.
This course clarified the development of a training program from start to finish and made me realize the importance of all the planning involved to provide a quality program for adults. Throughout the semester, however, I was really thinking that though I had learned a lot, I didn't anticipate that a lot of the material would ever be relevant. And was I ever wrong!
In late April, I was approached by my administrator at the Columbia Area Career Center and offered a position where I would be working with teachers instead of being in the classroom. One responsibility of this new position will involve providing professional development to especially new and novice teachers. I firmly believe this course has provided me with a solid plan for designing effective instruction for these adult learners. I'm so glad this was part of my degree program.