Reflection & Synthesis

Perhaps it is my personal nature or the nature of instructional designers when it comes to reflection on a course or a program to think improvements are needed. Yet the program is not an end to learning, it is a beginning. In that respect, the Learning Design and Technologies M.Ed. program at the University of South Carolina provides an excellent foundation.

It has been my personal experience that learning is tough. I found that online learning could help and desired to learn how I might produce online learning experiences that would help others. To accomplish this, I learned I need organization.

Establishing goals first comes to mind. How would I define doing better? Keywords began to appear in my studies. Construction project management has a triad of cost, schedule, and quality. Similarly, I considered three goals of instruction. Effective, how can the learner comprehend the material better? Efficient, has two elements time and money. If the class moves too fast or too slow it is not efficient. Can we reduce the financial cost of learning? Accessible, goes beyond those with disabilities to include any barriers to learning.

Secondly, a process comes to mind. In construction, we don’t begin in the middle, the same applies to education. I learned about ADDIE and other instructional design models. ADDIE originally was portrayed as linear beginning with analysis and ending in evaluation. Yet the process is actually a cycle, evaluation leads to analysis. Remember, we desire to do better next time.

Productivity is a third element. Typically, the development cost of online learning is more expensive than it is for face-to-face learning. However, this is made up in scale as the cost per student goes down the more students that are added. I learned how the efficient use of tools helps to reduce this cost.

Appeal and Engagement are a fourth element. My earliest designs were plain, black, and white. I learned how to make the user interface appealing and the content engaging.

There is so much to learn – it is often overwhelming. I learned how “chunking” , Miller (1956) helps to break the complex into simple steps. This lesson can be applied to my presentations. Learning is like building a complex Lego model. Yet on the other hand it can be as simple as clicking one Lego block at a time to the next.

These lessons established a foundation on which I can build. I regret too little time was spent on authoring tools. I would like to have a “how to” course in full-fledged development  tool use. We did something similar with web design, Robbins (2012), but the time would be better spent on course authoring. This gap can easily be corrected by subscribing to and learning a quality full-featured course authoring tool. More learning by example would also have been helpful.

In short, the Learning Design and Technologies M.Ed. program at the University of South Carolina equipped me to begin the journey to making learning more effective, efficient, and accessible.