By: Yuri Pavlov
I have conducted 3 workshops on Instructional Design within one month. The first workshop was in Chicago at the North America Regional Conference organized by the Open Society Foundations (OSF) on March 16, 2017. The audience was graduate students sponsored by OSF to study in a variety of universities in the United States. My focus was on how instructional design can help us all with our time management skills. My main argument was that long-term priorities are informed by well-crafted objectives.
The second workshop was for 35 teachers of foreign languages at Belarusian State Pedagogical university in Belarus on March 30, 2017. The purpose of the 1.5-hour workshop was to introduce instructional systems design as a discipline and science that helps create cohesive educational experiences. Belarus relies heavily on didactics as the science that informs teaching and learning and does not know the field of instructional design exists. I combined the biggest ideas from our four IDE courses (621, 631, 632, 712) in a 20-slide presentation (available online in Russian) to show how instructional designers approach education and purposeful instruction. Learning theories, human performance technology, design process, model thinking, and differences between teachers and instructional designers were highlighted during the presentation. I gave Smith & Ragan’s Instructional Design textbook as a gift to the university and predicted that once instructional design becomes known and popular in Belarus, their pedagogical university will be the first in the country to train instructional designers.
The third workshop was at Belarusian State University at the department of International Relations for 12 teachers of foreign languages, translation studies, and law on April 11. I repeated the presentation shown at the pedagogical university. At this university, though, the audience was more prone to ask various questions most of which were about e-learning, discussion boards in online classes, and opportunities for a real application of instructional design in Belarus. The dean of the department, who also came to the workshop, asked specifically about an alternative to lectures in large classrooms of 70+ students, to which I offered a flipped model and some time for group work during classes, because a lecture is not always a negative thing. I later followed up with a suggestion that Tom Angelo gives in his workshop Deeper Learning by Design at one university: to employ a prediction element within a lecture and let students engage in thinking about what they are about to learn.
I have also conducted a session on studying abroad to the first- and third-year students of my undergraduate studies department of Translation Studies at Belarusian State university on April 03, 2017. I argued that one doesn’t have to be the smartest person in the country to win a scholarship and pursue a career that one has always dreamed about. A lot of times, the application process is more about discipline and investing enough time to formulating ideas clearly so that they communicate unequivocally one’s goals and potential to a prospective university. And, of course, I advertised our Instructional Design program here at Syracuse University which enlightened and transformed my way of looking at learning and instruction.
No Comments