University of Wisconsin Extended Campus

Archives for Instructional design

Instructional design

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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Designing for Self-Directed, Self-Paced Learners

BLE 200 Homepage
Homepage sample illustrating the standardized layout and support resources that contribute to student success.

At CEOEL, we are starting to work on developing a new degree for UW System’s Flexible Option. Before embarking on this new journey, I wanted to take some time to reflect on the last one. I had the opportunity to work with a great group of faculty and instructional designers this past year while developing UW–Extension’s first degree, a Bachelor of Science in Business Administration (BSBA). In this post, I’ll highlight just a few ways that this degree incorporates research-based recommendations for designing and delivering learning experiences to self-directed, self-paced learners. These practices address factors such as learner characteristics, assessment methods, and presentation of materials.

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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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Course Momentum

In this post, read about an online course that has great pacing and momentum to keep students engaged until the end. What follows is a description of five momentum-building activities from the course, as well as an interview with the instructor. Erin Ratelis developed and currently teaches HWM 335: The Worksite Health Environment.

Five Activities That Build Momentum in HWM 335

1. Photographs on the Discussion Board

Momentum buliders: Photographs of a road and a description of the photographs written by the instructor
Discussion Board Photo Activity (Author: Erin Ratelis)

What it is: Students take photographs of their health environment and post them to the discussion board in the first activity of the course. Erin shares what her environment looks like as well.

What I love about it: This activity does double-duty: an intro to the health environment and a social connector. By sharing their living environments in the context of the course, students are bridging the social gap that often comes with asynchronous online learning. This builds momentum by starting the course off with an activity that is exciting to students and inspires them to learn more in the weeks to come.

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