Section 7: New Direction in Instructional Design and Technology

This section of the textbook addresses new directions and emerging technologies for IDT. For your final post, reflect on how you might apply each of the following in your current or future position in the IDT field:

Distributed or eLearning environments

eLearning is a large portion of my job and my previous job. Prior to coming to work for the Dept of Mental Health, I was a K-12 online curriculum developer and teacher. This environment was originally all asynchronous, but evolved into a blended learning environment for most of the districts. While I do not feel that eLearning will replace traditional classrooms, I do feel it is a wonderful alternative for 21^st century students. As far as my current job, eLearning is going to be one of the main things I do. Now that I have the face-to-face training program up and running, my focus has been on a needs analysis of the eLearning options we current have and what we will need. This learning environment means that we can easily (I use that term loosely because nothing is easy about eLearning) reach all facilities around the state as well as some external client needs.

Reusable design or learning objects

This is currently what we are doing in my job. First, we are evaluating every eLearning and training that has been previously developed. We are updating what we can and turning other things, such as trainings that we don’t want to present face-to-face anymore, into eLearnings in order to continue to use the information that we was already developed and provide the information to a larger audience. Our eLearnings are stand alone learning objects, non-sequential, self-contained, and do not link to other objects. Not only does this ease the development time for us, it is also more cost-effective and reduces our maintenance costs.

Rich media

I feel that rich media is essential in any training or eLearning. I used it heavily in my classroom when I taught middle/high school students, and I encourage the use of it in our current trainings. We use different videos to illustrate points and appeal to different learning styles. I can use rich media for developing my eLearnings in the form of interactions, audio, games, interactives, etc.

Emerging instructional technologies, such as artificial intelligence, cybernetics, Web 2.0, virtual worlds, electronic games, etc.

It’s funny that this is part of this week’s chapter. I was just asked to participate in a workgroup for developing a mobile app. Web 2.0 allows collaboration and interaction and can include social networking sites, blogs, wikis, and many other items. While I don’t use it much in my own training and eLearning field, we tried to incorporate it in my past job as a curriculum developer in an asynchronous environment. We would use Google Docs and Hangout for collaboration, developed a mobile app, used social media to encourage communications, teacher’s had blogs, and they were evaluating how wikis could be used effectively. We even used grading companies that would plug in many samples, use rubrics, and the computer would grade the paper. It was almost scary how accurate it was.

I find virtual worlds fascinating and can see how I might be able to use them in my current position in the eLearnings for a few topics. I think they’d take a tremendous amount of time to develop and would be costly, so this is probably not something I’d ever attempt (but never say never). I feel that all of these items will be in our future, and they will be needed to keep the younger generations engaged and connected.