Buonocore AECT ADDIE Reflection

Individual AECT/ADDIE ReflectionLisa Kolakowski BuonocoreEDET 722 – September 2012

My goal for the past five years has been to have a master’s in instructional design. Since interning at a magnetic school system in my undergrad, I realized how I could incorporate my business background with my love of educational design. My first summer at the internship, I learned about the master’s degree and the various ways the degree could be applied. Since my undergraduate degree was business management, I knew that I wanted to start in a corporate environment but never rule out moving to K-12 or higher education. Now that I do work as a corporate sales training, I am loving educational technology and receiving this degree even more. My goal for this course is to understand the principals and standards behind instructional design to build upon what work experience I have thus far. I want to apply what I learn in this course and all my courses to my job. I want to always find ways I can improve training created at work and also help my team members learn new ways of developing training. I have been sharing new things, like the AECT standards and the creativecommons.org site with my team members. Anything I learn that can benefit them as well, I try to pass along. Since we collaborate on many projects, and we might work on a training one year, and the next it is picked up by someone else, I want to make sure we are all one the same page. Through this course and the degree, I hope to achieve an understanding of instructional design in both the corporate environment and educational environment to open doors in both markets. I hope this degree will advance me in my corporate career, hopefully moving into management level positions. I find the project management side of instructional design particularly fitting with my personality and skills. However, I enjoy learning about the K-12 side of instructional design because I am very early in my career, and I do not want to shut any doors this early on.

The AECT standards relate really well to my current position. The section on Performances Indicative of the Development Standard – 2.0.1 Select appropriate media to produce effective learning environments using technology resources relates to every training created. We use a variety of training delivery methods, depending on the goals of the training. Standard 2.0.8 Develop school media collections focused on curricular needs, including a full range of print, non-print, and electronic resources relates very well to our current system. We have a fulfillment area that houses all of our printed materials available upon request from the field, those same materials are then housed on our intranet site that can be downloaded at any point in time. We recently started making the electronic versions interactive, with a “click and point” table of contents to move our field more towards the web version. We also have a video training library that consists of best practice videos to demonstrations. We have an audio files library that has recorded webinars and MP3s of scripts that the field can use while they are driving in the car. Then, we have our self-paced curriculum, most of which has a facilitator led version that can also be used. Without me or my team realizing, we have already been using the AECT standards but now that I know about the standards, I will make sure we incorporate them into all aspects. Having these standards allows each member of my team to pick up each other’s

1


projects and know how to finish them. One of my favorite things about instructional design is that we always have new and exciting projects. Each project is different and we are not a subject matter expert on any one topic. Often times on our team, I may be working on one project but then another project may come up that I am requested to work on. Because we follow the ADDIE model and AECT standards, any of my team members can complete the training. I think our detailed timelines also help with this process.

In my profession, we already follow the ADDIE model; however I now know where we can improve – implementation and evaluation. When we created our process map (see below), we realized what we need to do in these phases but we have done little to change this. For implementation, we usually have the training deployed to our intranet site or sent to fulfillment, sometimes both. We often let our field instructors know about the training, but we do a poor job of communicating to the rest of our field, those who primarily should use the training that it exists. We have begun involving corporate communications when training is available to include it in our weekly sales update. We also have a revamped intranet site that allows for a carousal with featured content, as well as a news feed with new features on the website. I think these “advertising” methods should be incorporated with every training we create. As for evaluation, we have begun including an “email us with your feedback” option on the last slide of every training. However, we receive very little feedback. We need to do more field visits to see how the training is being used by our field. Is it being used with how we initially intended? Do we need to revisit this training? Does it meet the needs of the learner? We have done some survey feedback on our classroom training, but it is hard to have the participants take the survey once they leave the class. I hope through this class, I will discover new and better ways to implement and evaluate our training.

Process Map:

2


3


4

Documents

Buonocore AECT ADDIE Reflection