Trends and Issues In IDT
Part A
Issues and trends facing Instructional Design Technology
seem to overlap. I decided to consider the trends and issues in the context of
business and industry, military, and health care education. These areas are
very different in their content, but share some concerns, trends and
issues.
One common thread I found in my reading was the need to make
content work cross-culturally. Businesses train and employ people from all over
the world and they need to make sure that they choose words, phrases and images
that do not offend. The same is true in the
military. Many allied forces come to the US to train and therefore the material
needs to translate and work in many different contexts. In all these cases,
working with a subject matter expert is essential.
In business, “better, faster, cheaper” is the goal. “This
phrase has become a mantra for many organizations as they seek to tackle the
problems associated with a constant changing society and the workforce that
must perform in response.” (183, Reiser 2012) This has led to rapid prototyping
which allows the project to be designed and written at the same time, reducing
the need for costly redesigns after the content has been created. Technology
based training delivery has also come from the need to be better, faster and
cheaper. The same program can be used
multiple times in any location.
Military Instructional Design comes with many issues.
Funding is a major issue when designing for the military. There are most likely
going to be “trade-off decisions…in order to stay within budget.” (189, Reiser
2012) A trade- off might be to use a low- tech approach instead of a costly
high-tech approach in order to keep the project on budget. Other issues faced when working with the
military is the wide variety of needs, uses and delivery environments.
The medical field is a whole different box of issues and
trends from business and military. High tech, project based simulations are the
trend in the medical field now. With computer simulations and 3D models comes
great cost. In order for the medical field to pay for the training needed they
are forced to spend less time training and more time seeing a high volume of
patients.
I work in an urban elementary school as a librarian. The
trends in elementary education instructional design are flipped classrooms,
where teachers record their whole group lessons and the students will listen
and take notes at home and spend their time at school working on practice and
projects. With this type of instruction, a learning management system is
needed. Cost, implementation and training teachers how to use an LMS are all
issues.
Part B
Chapter 25, Instructional Design in Europe, resonated with
my current views of Instructional Design in Education. Many of the issues and
suggestions made by the author are things that my current school is trying to
fix and implement. My campus is going to be a personalized learning campus this
year. That means that we will employ an LMS, or learning management system to
create learning paths for each of our students. We will use a blended
rotational model in the classroom which allows students to work on their
learning paths as well as have time for creative group work and one on one time
with their teacher. The technology portion of the blended rotation will be
maximized using programs that require mastery before the student moves on to
other objectives. There are extensions and differentiations to help the
students with their objectives. The
students will go to a design engineering class as part of their specials
rotation. Within this class, they will learn problem solving by focusing on an
issue that affects their neighborhood and design solutions for these
issues. I believe that the personalized
learning model makes it possible for students to learn how to think and problem
solve and eventually be able to find answers to global issues. These students
will be taught where they are and not at the level of the average student. This
means that growth and mastery will be attainable for all students, not just
those who are currently on target. I’m excited to be a part of a personalized
learning campus. I truly believe it is a mix of all the best things going on in
education today.
Reiser, R. A., &
Dempsey, J. V. (2012). Trends and issues in instructional design and technology. Boston: Pearson.
Personalized learning is the future of education. With access to the technology that all students have (even low income students have smart phones) this is going to be huge. Instead of doing the practice as homework and getting it wrong they will be able to do that in class with the teachers help. I think this is going to be the way that we train our students of today to be the thinkers of tomorrow.
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ReplyDeleteYou brought up many of the same points regarding the business and military industries that I did. I think budget and having the money to get things done will always be a big thing anywhere you go. Designing for a cross-cultural context is truly very important. You mentioned that when training and employing people from all over the world, you need to "choose words, phrases and images that do not offend." I think designers and instructors definitely need to do some background research, so they can avoid these pitfalls. Sometimes even if you research, you'll miss things. That's why you need to look at multiple sources. If you just work from guidebooks or you don't know what questions are the right questions to research, you might not discover something is offensive or 'not-done' in a certain country until you are actually over there and you do it...then people react badly. I've actually experienced this to an extent. When I was in Taiwan in 2011, we often had lunch with a group of staff members and student assistants at the college where I was teaching. In the USA, it is fairly common to stick a utensil into your food when you're not eating. So I very innocently stuck my chopsticks into a bowl of noodles. Cue the discomforted looks! I didn't even know something was wrong until one of the student assistants told me that having chopsticks stuck in food like that was actually the way that they presented food as an offering to the dead. It was very taboo to do that elsewhere. This wasn't in any of the guidebooks I read, but when I went online to Google later, I found many other foreigners had discovered this when they went to Taiwan.
ReplyDeleteI like that your school is implementing an LMS. It's a direction I've thought before that it would be good for lessons to go toward. With smaller class sizes and some specialized programs, I tried to implement a sort of personalized learning system in my classroom in the past. Part of the issue with normal instruction is that we are often told to teach to the middle or teach to the bubble kids. Then the kids at the top wind up bored and the kids at the bottom are lost. If we need to make things simpler for the kids who are struggling, then the middle are bored and the top are off in la la land. Personalized learning would allow us the ability to teach every kid at his/her own level. One possible hiccup I could see with this is kids not doing well on placement/diagnostic tests and being placed below their actual level.