By Tiffany A. Koszalka, Ph.D. | IDD&E Professor
One of the final courses in the IDD&E M.S. program is a capstone experience—IDE 737 Advanced Instructional Design. This course is based on a school-to-work design that helps students take what they have learned in the program and apply those competencies to their current or future work, weaning them from instructor/peer scaffolding and into social networks with those they will be more engaged with in the working world.
In this course students are charged with bringing together all of the competencies they developed in the 8 previous courses to design a two-hour instructional unit. Students identify a learning gap and select a topic. Using provided scaffolds, they develop a detailed design that includes narratives, flow charts, content hierarchies, and storyboard screens to create a unit blueprint. Based on this blueprint, unit instructor and learner materials are then secured or developed. Along the way students prepare a reflection journal documenting their process and thinking experiences while working on their capstone. Each student was required to consult with someone outside of the course who may be a supervisor, content expert, instructor, designer, or perhaps a target audience member. In the end, students critique the final unit with a set of provided guidelines and instructional principles checklists and rubrics. All deliverables (designs, materials, critiques, journals) are posted on a Capstone Showcase Website that students create and link to their M.S. digital portfolio.
The summer session is nearly over, and the variety of projects-in-process demonstrate diversity of ideas and experiences, high quality instructional-design thinking and skills, and abilities to apply their learning. Design documents and storyboards have been thoughtfully laid out to include cognitive strategies that engage the audience in deep learning. Reflection strategies engage the audience in thinking about their own learning. The units are populated with plans for interactive sessions, live/online, synchronous/ asynchronous, with multiple types of resources, and individual/team work. The breadth of design solutions is great, indicating creative and purposeful instruction.
There are two sections of this course being conducted this semester. One is with our traditional residency program and one is with our fully online students that includes a cohort of 10 fellows from the U.S. Army Sergeants Major Academy at Fort Bliss, TX, and 2 student veterans who are now engaged in contract work with the military.
The residency students have been working, under the supervision of Dr. Rob S. Pusch, on projects like Arabic sentence structure; plant lifecycle; potato lightbulbs; English past tense; French preterite tense; English for 3rd-grade Chinese students; testing fundamentals; position-specific football safety skills; student athletes’ time management; the “define” phase of project management planning; technology training for teaching assistants; remediating course *.pdf’s; designing infographics; and avoiding heroin.
The online cohort of fellows and veterans have been working, under the supervision of Dr. Tiffany A. Koszalka, on projects like testing for fuel system icing inhibitor field blending additives into commercial jet fuel; army combat fitness test training plans; army combat fitness test leg-tuck event; joint sustainment operations training for sergeant majors; new expert infantrymen badge instructor/grader instruction; explosive ordnance disposal team leader certification preparation; global combat support system—army GCSS-A training; F107 sustainable readiness—army force management; S302—department of professional study work measurement and efficiency; human trafficking awareness training for cosmetologists.
Student comments suggest that this course engages them in thinking deeply about instruction beyond the ideas of bringing together text, graphic, and learner interaction into a profession that is complex, dynamic, and multi-faceted. It is a real test of their abilities and confidence to do the work of an Instructional Designer. Instruction is purposeful, its purpose is to facilitate learning—to close knowledge, skills, and attitude gaps based on principles of learning, instruction, communication, media design, instructional strategies, and other factors related to learning. If anything, this course has given each student an opportunity to bring together concepts, ideas, experiences, and different modes of thinking to help others succeed.
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