Part 1

My portfolio is a collection of practical instructional designs, accompanied by my reflections on the design considerations. Most of my learning in this course has come about as a result of objectives in my initial plan so that’s what I’m going to focus on most in this summary. In doing so, I think I will touch on the answers to the other two questions.

These were my initial objectives, in the order I listed them on my Flight Path page:

1. Team-based approaches to instructional design
2. Experience design
3. Interface design
4. Learning analytics

I am going to discuss each of them in descending order of importance to my learning here:

Learning analytics: This was not an instructional objective of this course material, and I didn’t see any opportunities to incorporate it into any of my projects so I didn’t advance my knowledge on the topic

Team-based approaches to instructional design: like learning analytics, this was not one of the instructional objectives of this course, and I didn’t see any opportunities to incorporate it into any of my projects. The group project(s) that were assigned in this course could not be considered a team-based approach. In fact, in every course I’ve taken so far in the MET program there has been a group-project component like this, and they were a major feature of my business degree as well, but none of them have been anything like the kind of interdisciplinary, team-based environment I work in. I realise that genuine team-based projects would be logistically difficult if not impossible within the constraints of this program or most academic programs, even though it would be very useful to learn about research-based best practices and pitfalls of this approach. But even in the absence of this, I think more benefit could be derived from the group projects if they had more structure, maybe as project or inquiry based learning, where groups would form based on similar interests and go through the different stages of the inquiry, but the final product could or would be an individual project.

Interface design: This was one of the instructional objectives of the course, and I did learn quite a bit about it, in part from looking at other peoples’ work, but especially from the feedback from the instructor, which was prompt, specific and really useful. It is invaluable to have the practical opportunity to test out designs and to get an immediate response from an audience in terms of making them more user-friendly. I appreciated the input and the opportunity to revise. That was one of the most beneficial aspects of this course.

Experience design: This is something I am very interested in learning more about and I was able to find an opportunity to incorporate it into Assignment 3. In the original design for the course, we had proposed multiple choice quizzes to test for mastery of basic information, and case studies requiring participants to apply and integrate that basic information. Because the case studies would require application and integration, the course was intended to be more than just information delivery for the purpose of the organization’s risk management plan.

My original intention was to design four scenario-based online case studies in order to give participants lots of opportunities to practice applying and integrating the information, but developing the scenarios was time consuming in terms of completing this assignment, and would be prohibitively expensive in a real-world working context. So instead, it occurred to me to create only one case study, but then to create a second course for staff supervisors which would involve familiarizing them with the material in this course, and giving them some instruction on how to support workers on site as they applied what they’d learned in the course. In this way, workers would continue to learn as they gained experience working on site, and the course material would mesh with and augment that experience.

While it remains true that the rationale for putting this material online was to relieve staff from having to deliver this instruction, it is also true that workers still require supervision and guidance in applying and integrating the concepts from the course when they get to the work site, regardless of how many multiple choice questions they answered. The training for the staff would be simply to ensure they were familiar with the information presented to the workers, and able to remind workers of that information if the need arose. It would be less costly to produce, it would build capacity in the organization, and it would ensure that workers mastered the content that the organization wanted them to know in a systematic way without placing an undue burden on the staff in terms of basic information delivery. It is kind of exciting to think about actually implementing such an integrated program of instruction.

 

Part 2

Working with WordPress as an LMS is something I’ve wanted to do for a long time. It’s the leanest option, and I think there are a lot of small to medium sized organizations who would find it a perfect fit. I really enjoyed what I learned, and getting hands-on with it was great experience, but I found that the lack of admin control I had over the UBC implementation was a major drawback, preventing me from accessing a lot of the functionality of plugins and themes. I’m going to try again in the near future, but I will make sure it is with an installation of WordPress that I have better control over.

Digital tools are a big part of my current practice at the moment, and I enjoy any chance to work with them. However, I’m used to being able to design with activity and user tracking, so I had to get creative about how to ensure full activity completion by designing a password system, something I’d never considered before. For ease of access the password system is only partially implemented on my course prototype, but the live site would have it everywhere.

I’m pleased with the digital work I created, and I found the instructor’s feedback about providing instructions and clarification to be very helpful. It’s easy to design something for yourself, but much harder to ensure everyone else will know what you’re talking about. It’s very helpful to get input from a critical audience.

 

Part 3

The reading materials, the discussions, and the assignments were all very useful to me. In fact this is one of the more practical courses I’ve taken in this program. See my comments on team-based approaches above for my experience of the group work.

See the information above on experience design for my reflection of emergent effects of learning I’ve experienced.

In terms of the split between WordPress and BB Connect, while I really liked the interface of WordPress, especially when looking up information on assignments or readings, I spent much more time with BB Connect and it occasionally became confusing as to which information was on which site.