Reflecting on my successes and learning so far....

This is the final week of IT5660, Designing and Teaching in eLearning Environments As part of our final activities we wrote a course reflection During my reflection I realized that while I thought I knew what I was doing with Instructional Design, I have a lot to still learn. I realize that so many of us as instructional designers get caught up in the “hurry and get it done” mentality of our stakeholders. At least I know I do. I have allowed myself to fall into the mentality of what is the quickest way to get a program developed and delivered, and forgotten to apply what I know about effective adult learning. This is not to say the programs I have developed over the years have been ineffective… but I see where they could have been more so.

I took this course because I recognize that with the economy and so many companies cutting back on travel, elearning as a way to delivery education and training will become a critical success factor for them achieve their goals and objectives. I have been working with InfoPrint for 6 months, and as predicted, budgets have been cut and travel restricted, yet the need for education and training has increased. Their view of elearning had been offering webinars recorded in using WebEx (Cisco’s tool). These were very much one way flow of information and not in the least bit interactive. I have been able to influence the processes used to create these webinars, and incorporate a little bit of interactivity. I find that the SME who own the content and do the actual facilitating of the webinars are very resistant to interactive elements, because to quote one SME “I have too much content I need them to hear, and that idea [interactive activity] will take too much of my time.” Oh, how frustrating!

However, given a few small successes, I have been able to win a few battles here and there. I owe my victories to the skills and abilities I am gaining due to this program. The ideas I have gained by participating in my classmate’s webinars, from the readings of Horton, and studying the models by Horton, Kolb and our own class CIV’s. I look forward to continuing my journey of learning and gaining skills, and hope that the new information will become second nature to me….. and I don’t have to keep referring to the carts and diagrams I created during this semester that are plastered on my desk, and in the front of my program planning notebooks!