The Future – Be prepared

Exposure to a group of dedicated Instructional Design and delivery professionals at OL  has provided me the opportunity to grow within the profession. In the future whether we design courses for co-horts or for individuals, I believe that our design choices will be about which tools engage learners most and the institutional constraints that are present.

I think over the next decade the prevalence of multimedia and video will continue to grow as infrastructure continues to expand; as devices become more powerful; as software makes development easier; and as people vote with their feet to enroll in programs or courses  that are challenging, interesting and engaging.

On one end of the creative aesthetic and design continuum, let’s look at an example from Michigan State University. The Zombie Apocalypse. The course provides a on-line experience where co-hort in broken into small groups. Each group is immersed in a video simulation and then must periodically decide their course of action and report to other groups. The team at MSU refer to the design methodology as Multimedia On-line Learning Immersive Experience (MOLIE). The team will be presenting at the Open Ed conference in Vancouver.

At the other end of the continuum is a continued presence developing and delivering open resources. Curating courses through the aggregation of open access material takes time and skill. Using Wiki Educator or other open access delivery platforms to offer courses or MOOC’s to reach a large audience.

I believe that OL is very well positioned to foster the develop of engaging courses based on the resources that we have available to us. I believe the team assembled has strong collaborative skills and is interested in pushing the bounds of our constraints in order to make OL a leading on-line institution.

As a tenured faculty member I would:

Personal:

  • Use the media resources of OL to continue to create learning objects for courses.
  • Research and analyze the use and effectiveness of these learning materials.
  • Present data and analysis in journal articles and at conferences.
  • Become recognized as an Instructional Design professional with expertise in the use of multimedia and video resources.

Departmental:

  • Become a credible representative of the department by demonstrating an ability to work with others to achieve results. Working consistently and effectively with SME’s, to promote our work with others TRU faculties and departments eg. Trades.
  • Prepare to taken on a greater role in department affairs.

University:

  • Support the activities of the Director, Curriculum Development and Director, Innovation in their efforts to create open resources and work with OERu.
  • Ccontribute towards the advancement of the institution by participating in a variety of committees.

Community:

  • Become involved with local organization(s) that can benefit from development of distributed learning, e-learning delivery.