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Thinking of Entering the World of Instructional Design?

Instructional Designer Activities
Source: Ashley Kontos; Pintrest (Click to Enlarge)

Growing up, I never heard a guidance counselor mention the instructional design field when describing career opportunities. As an undergraduate student thinking of a career in education, I thought the choices were limited to working as an instructor or as administrative staff. After a little bit of luck and a lot of hard work, I found that I have a passion for instructional design. I’d like to share how I found myself in the middle of a great instructional design team at UW–Extension’s CEOEL, some things I learned about the instructional design field while coming from an outside perspective into the instructional design community of practice, and some tips I picked up that may be of help to those interested in pursuing a career in instructional design.

Community of Practice

I began my entry into the instructional design community of practice as a student worker. I remember realizing that instructional design was a career I was interested in because of how excited I was to do the very basic tasks (e.g., link checks, quality assurance) required by my role.

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OERs: A Curator’s Perspective

It’s a busy time around here! With the fall semester starting and new competency-based program development in full swing, everyone is working hard to deliver the best learning experiences possible. Back-to-school season is exciting but challenging for learners, instructors, and those of us in supporting roles. Part of that hard work is curating learning resources—open educational resources (OERs). Today’s post will explore how some of our faculty are approaching OERs.OER logo

In the midst of all this preparation, I’ve recently heard conversations about how important thoughtfully curated learning resources are to a student’s success, and it occurred to me it might be interesting to look back at the transcript of a conversation I had with Kim Kostka about using OERs. Kim and her colleagues Tom Neal and Tony Millevolte assembled and annotated an array of OERs for one of our Flexible Option competency sets.

Here are some of the highlights from my conversation with Kim.

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Studio Learning for Faculty Development

Today, I introduce Fred Baker, an instructional designer at the University of Tampa. We have a common interest in openness in higher education, and I recently learned that he took a compelling approach to faculty development. Because we are in the process of designing an onboarding and development program for our faculty, I wanted to learn more about what he did.

Cover image of "Creating Significant Learning Experiences"The project was originally conceived of as a studio learning experience in which faculty would read and discuss L. Dee Fink’s Creating Significant Learning Experiences, then create tools and course components based on principles from the text, receiving feedback from peers along the way. In consideration of the busy schedules of most faculty, the experience was divided into two phases, with Phase I focused on reading and discussing the book and Phase II being the hands-on portion. Intrigued by the idea of offering something like this for our faculty, I was eager to learn from Fred about the logistics involved, and about how things went. His answers to my questions were enlightening and encouraging so I wanted to share a bit of that interview with you.

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Conference Connections

I once heard that fall is “conference season.” At the time it didn’t mean anything to me, but for some reason it

Making professional connections - Eileen at OLC 2015
I found this picture in the OLC Conference gallery. I remember this breakfast conversation! We were talking about differing support models for faculty who are developing or teaching online courses.

stuck in my head. This past year I got a taste of what this means. By happenstance I had the opportunity to attend two conferences back to back in October: the OLC International Conference and UPCEA Central Region Conference.

OLC is huge. There’s no doubt about it. This is both good and bad. It’s good that there are a lot of high-quality sessions to choose from, and it’s good that there are a lot of people to connect with. On the other hand, it’s so large that one’s ability to absorb knowledge is compromised by the din of all the activity, especially when poster sessions are held in the exhibit hall, as they were at OLC. The focus of the conference is online learning. The UPCEA regional conference was small and intimate with a broader focus of strategies for continuing and higher education institutions. It was special because it was local and celebrated the 100th anniversary of the first UPCEA conference, which was also held in Madison, WI.

So, why am I writing about these conferences today?  From these two very different events, I was reminded of a couple important things.

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