Today marks what I’d like to think for me are two pretty big events. First, I begins the semester in which I’m officially working on my masters thesis in instructional design. Second, I’m repurposing this blog to be a process book for my capstone. A blog is not required to complete this project (I’ll go over those requirements later), however I think this could be a helpful medium to keep a running archive of this process. After all, knowing and understanding the process of something is one of the many characteristics that make a good instruction designer, so with that in mind here are my goals for this blog :
- A place to post my thoughts
- A place share the things I learn
- A place to archive this experience
- A place to start and continue conversations
- A place for feedback
Now a quick background check. I have been working in online education in higher education for eleven years. I have gone through quite the professional transformation during that time. At first I was a videographer recording hundreds of lectures covering a wide variety disciplines. I used to call myself “Mr. Audit” because I sat in on so many courses yet never was assessed to any sort of measurable outcome. As time went on I began to move out from behind the camera to manage more on the online learning experience through synchronous and asynchronous streaming video. I asked the question “how do we bring in the distance student or distance instructor to the face-to-face session. This has allowed me to work more closely with instructors and most likely triggered my interested with instructional design. This curiosity lead me to pursue a MEd Instructional Design and am now this thesis away from reaching my goal. It has been an incredible experience working full-time and a student part-time because it has given me the opportunity to immediately apply the theories and strategies learned in the classroom. I was able to apply what I learned to real world scenarios making course work more relevant to me… hey, there’s another instructional design principle.
I’ve definitely been thinking about my capstone project for quite some time and have tried to put some things in motion cause let’s face it, academia doesn’t move all that quickly. Will four months may not be enough time? It’s a good thing I didn’t get too far down a path because as outline by the capstone syllabus here are some specific requirements being asked of me. I guess you could say this blog won’t be straying too far from these nine project objectives.
- Create and implement a needs assessment instrument
- Analyze and interpret the gathered data
- Identify an organizational problem for which training or performance support may be a solution
- Define performance objectives
- Design the strategy, the materials and assessment for intervention
- Create a project plan
- Develop plans for formative and summative evaluation
- Create and follow a project plan for an instruction design/development project
- Write at a professional level using APA citation style
There you have it. My first blog post focusing on my capstone. I guess I need to start working on my project proposal, which is due September 22nd. I’m hoping to post it here before then, so people can offer feedback, if they’d like. I’ve never really turned to the Internet for something like this, so I’m excited to see how this will turn out. Stay tuned and I look forward to learning with you.
