CECS 5210 Week 1 Question...

Given what you have read about instructional design, how important is it to what your future work goals are?

My career thus far has always contained a course design and delivery function. My true love is delivering technology education to librarians. No matter how I intend to accomplish this in the future, instructional design is one of the foundations of success to a good course. Making sure to analyze no only the material to be presented but also the audience which will be attending has often been the key factor to the quality of the knowledge transfered. Additionally, I have found that evaluation and closing the feedback loop to be instrumental to improving the effectiveness of not only my teaching style but the reference materials the students retain. I'm looking forward to learning about instructional design in a formal manner, as most of mine has been JIT or on-the-job training.

Starting my PhD -- Instructional Design Class

I am pursuing my PhD in the Information Science department at UNT. I live in Austin and will be in Denton two to three days a week. This year I've left the "real world" and dedicated myself to being a full-time student and Graduate Library Assistant over at the Willis Library. I've been in the "training" and "library" worlds since 1994 and am looking forward to formal instruction in Instructional Design. All of my knowledge has been through trial by fire or those professional development course I've been able to take along the way. I've done everything from Corporate Training, help desk support, IT management, to course development, professional development delivery, conference presentations, and website maintenance.

For those of you who have been following this blog a while, you'll start to see weekly updates from me on Instructional Design topics from my course work. For those of you classmates, you'll see occasional non-class posts from me and posts regularly from my very insightful co-author. I encourage you to enjoy them all.

Happy Reading!