Student Testimonies form “IDE 990/830 Advanced Seminar in Design and Development”
D. Garmondyu Whorway (Liberia), IDD&E doctoral student: “For someone taking their first independent course, walking into IDE 990/830 was full of uncertainty about the course pedagogy and workload. That said, one thing could be clearly predicted: The course was going to be engaging with professor Tiffany A. Koszalka who was leading the instruction. As it turned out, the course was engaging and I came out of it knowledgeable and informed. There were intellectual dialogues between the professor and my colleagues, we discussed research in the instructional design field and our own research interests. As per the course design, I plunged into the scholarly literature and gained insights which led to discovering my identity within the research world of instructional design. What appeared to begin as uncertainty ended with illumination and a sense of direction towards what I can do to contribute to the field.”
Zeenar Salim (Pakistan), IDD&E doctoral student: “The course began with a plethora of pre-work, where I read about the flagship events and important movements in the field of instructional design. I was intrigued to see how development of media tools contributed to the development of new ways of teaching and learning. The course allowed students to choose the sub-stream within instructional design and facilitated the in-depth understanding of research in the sub-stream. Through this course, I got the opportunity to dig into the history of faculty development and different models of training higher education faculty in teaching. I realized that it all started with sabbaticals, moved on to long and short courses, workshops, and one-to-one consultations. I also realized how scholarship of teaching and learning became an emerging and attractive model for faculty across disciplines as it provides the faculty with an opportunity to engage in self-reflections, read research around teaching and learning, and contribute to research on teaching and learning. Overall, I would recommend the course to my peers who are interested in getting exposed to the literature in their field and want to know key journals in instructional design. If I were to do this course again, I would develop a personal learning contract with the advisor detailing my responsibilities (titles and key headings of the papers to be submitted, number of words, and key resources to read [identifying journals, databases, articles]), professor’s responsibilities, and specify the key milestones that I would wish to achieve. Such a personal learning contract at the beginning of the course would have provided me a sense of direction throughout the course.”
Lei Wang (China), IDD&E doctoral student: “The course has made a significant change in my life. I was excited and anxious in the beginning, looking forward to this IDE course that has the numerical value of 990 in MySlice—the biggest that I have ever taken at SU. We started by reviewing the history of instructional design and writing up its summary. Then we were prompted to review the top journals in our discipline, summarize the trends that we found in the past 5 years using rigorous formatting provided by Dr. Tiffany A. Koszalka, and reported our thoughts in class. I did not believe it was such a huge project until it took me one full day to review only one journal—and I still didn’t complete the revision by the day’s end. I was worried if I could successfully continue it, but I persevered. The assignment helped me develop a good habit of reviewing journals with a critical eye on them and evaluating where I fit in our field. For the next assignment, Dr. Koszalka broke us into two groups to design two projects. I worked with Garmondyu on a project management work plan with the ADDIE process as a framework, and after putting considerable effort, the project was not accepted, and we had to redo it according to the professor’s feedback. In an iterative cycle, we were shaping our research minds by thinking, reading, and redoing. This cycle became the theme for our course, guiding us throughout the entire learning experience. The strenuous work finally paid off, and the resulting project crowned my first-year doctoral career journey.”
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