5130 - IMD Final Reflection

Joni asked us to post a final reflection in the eCollege course shell, but I wanted to post it here as well. Great course and learning experience. I'm psyched about Instructional Design (never thought I would say that).

Here are Joni's questions and my responses.

1. Revisit your original "In My Life" post (where you shared an instructional message from your home or work). Please make three recommendations to the designer that will enhance her or his instructional message.

Seems like the diagram could benefit from some major refinement.

a. “Consider what occurs when the individual ideas are coalesced around a central character – the client.” Or the student, in this case. Check out Duarte, p. 60 – 61.

b. The diagram is boring. Create a diagram and/or images that move people. With feeling. Show influence or impact.

c. Replace most, if not all of the text, with visuals. If some text is necessary, use the “headline” approach. See Duarte, p. 151.

d. Final recommendation – read Duarte’s book.

2. What aspects of the course helped you feel connected to your course colleagues? To me?

Twitter was a big part of my connected-ness, with course colleagues and with you. Even though I didn’t post a lot of tweets, I watched the Twitter dialogue. It made the connections stronger and helped me learn more about folks in the course and you. And, Twitter led me to some great resources. Thanks, Joni, for being such a responsive Twitter-er.

The discussions and peer reviews were helpful as well.

3. How has this course contributed to your instructional design skills?

I have learned more about ID in this course than any other. The things I learned in this course would have really helped me when creating the EdWeb in the certificate program! The readings, I thought, were really good. I especially like John Medina’s work, and felt that I learned quite a bit from his rules. The skills learned in this course are directly applicable to my work, which made this course especially powerful for me.

4. What was the most important and intriguing thing(s) that you learned?

For me, writing the design scripts was most important. I had to really understand the reading and apply it. I have never had to do this before, and I learned a lot from it. I also really liked the “We’ll Show You, Tufte” assignment. It was challenging to find just the right images for the speech, and the assignment did a nice job of preparing us for the culminating project. I also enjoyed becoming more adept at using presentation tools (other than PowerPoint).

Great course – thanks!