Week1-ExpertsSpeak

Three practicing experts – a fifth-grade teacher named Soraya, a corporate training manager named Cathy, and a college professor named Jim – will weigh in each week, giving you their perspectives on the practice of instructional design. Remember that for many people, movement through a career may include two or all three of these paths. Let’s meet them now….

Hi! I’m so pleased to be able to work with you in this course. My own master’s program taught me so much; I’m happy to share some of that with you now. When I took that first course on instructional design, I thought, “Hey, I do all this – it’s just lesson planning!” What I learned, though, is that while there are ** some similarities to lesson ** ** planning **, and most good teachers develop some ** “ID processes” intuitively **, there’s a lot more to instructional design than I’d thought initially. For example, I’d always ** written objectives **, but I ** didn’t really align my assessments ** to them at the end of a unit. Nor did I ** always take the time to truly analyze the situation and my students ** the way my ID course taught me to do. I guess the most important thing I took away from that course was a commitment to follow the process.
 * Fifth-grade Teacher Soraya **

I started out as a technical trainer, delivering the courses ** other people had developed **. Thinking back, some of those courses were pretty good and some of them – well, not so good. I realized when I began taking courses for my certificate in instructional design that the good ones addressed the kind of people who were taking the class, they were ** focused on important points – not “fluff” ** – and the ** activities made sense and helped the learners “get it.” ** In comparison, the ones that weren’t so good were either over my learners’ heads or so simple as to be almost insulting; or they were full of information that might have been interesting or fun but not really important; or they were so ** poorly organized ** that even I couldn’t figure out what we were supposed to be doing next! My ID courses made it clear to me that it ** was instructional design that made the difference ** – following ADDIE to make sure that ** nothing had been overlooked ** or just tossed in even though it ** wasn’t really relevant **.
 * Corporate Training Manager Cathy **

Well, let’s face it – I’m not an instructional designer. My field is business administration and, frankly, I’m a lot more interested in that than in instructional design. But, I have to say that I’ve come to respect what our ID team does, and I’m glad I’ve learned so much from them. When I first started to write a course on my own, I thought it would be a snap and I couldn’t understand why my department chair was pushing an “ID consultant” on me. I knew the content, after all – heck, I’d been in business myself – and I resented having someone who didn’t know anything about it trying to tell me how to write the course. So you know what I did? I went right ahead on my own, wrote the course and watched it go out to several other instructors to teach. The reaction from the other profs – well, it was brutal. What I’d produced was ** disorganized and so high-level that the students were just lost **. That was a hard pill for me to swallow, but I did what I’d done in business when things didn’t work out right – I admitted I’d messed up and went back for help from that ID consultant. I don’t think I was her first hard case – she didn’t give me a tough time, just helped me take a really poor course and turn it into the great one I’d envisioned in the first place. That’s when I gained real respect for the instructional design process.
 * College Professor Jim **