UF TREEO Hurricane and Tornado Assessment Course

Advanced Outdoor Water Conservation Online Course

Course showcase: DMT

A little bit more about my background...

and an exciting project coming soon!

Slide Rule course

Please, check out the Slide Rule online course I designed with Dr. Alex Green.

Is being an engineer a roadblock to becoming an instructional designer?

I am a mechanical engineer by training, I hold both a B.S. and a M.S. in mechanical engineering, and I am a Ph.D. candidate in chemical engineering. Well, you might think that I am working on something related to engineering, but actually I strayed a little far from the engineering field. I am an instructional designer for the major university at the state of Florida. How did I end up here? We will have to sit down with a cup of coffee and have a long chat about that story, but I can tell you that it was completely fortuitous. Now that I have these two years of experience and more than twenty online courses designed and completed from scratch for semester-long classes, I can tell you that I could not have had better luck in finding this job. See, my training kicks in every time I am confronted with the task of creating an online class, triggered in part by the type of content we have to put out there for an online class. I am a problem solver, and not much of an art person, so my first course designs were very functional but not much aesthetic, or pleasing to the eye, if you will. They got the job done, but later on, I had to learn the online course also require some eye-candy, it is part of the engagement experience that the learners have to go through. But I also learned that too much candy also destroys the purpose of the online course, and it becomes more a website than an online class. It was after some time that I started to understand the subjective parts of designing an online class, and the theory behind them. I have educated myself with the latest publications and textbooks on instructional design out there so that I can apply that knowledge to my own projects. But every time I come across a new project, the engineer in me kicks in and I start seeing the technological problems and challenges I will face and how I plan to tackle them, I don’t worry too much about the instructional part until later on, when I see that my concept actually will not be effective in an online environment, then I worry about the candy at the end. Now, this process might seem messy and rough to many designers out there but I wonder if any has ever bumped into a converted ID that had an engineering training before jumping into this field, and heard them describe a similar case. On the other hand, after looking at resumes and experience sheets of many established professionals in the field, it is clear that having a background in education or specifically in instructional design is more desirable than the experience of doing the job and learning while doing it, as proven by the hundreds of job descriptions and requirements I have scanned in the past three months, and of course, the dozen or so interviews I have been able to land recently. Now the question I want to throw out there: Is my background in engineering putting me at a disadvantage in the ID field? I would love to hear opinions and comments.

A successful MOOC may require a great development team

I believe the above is true. I have had the experience of being close to where MOOCs are being developed for Coursera. It requires a team to complete such a course, it requires a team to run the course, and it requires a good team to begin with. This team is interdisciplinary, and its members do not usually have the same background. It is usual that the instructor is a faculty member to the university, and there is a group of instructional designers, graphic designers, video producers, computer programmers, and many others (including teaching assistants that help the instructor) that help him during the course design and production, and afterwards, when the course opens. It would be burdensome if one person is in charge of running the MOOC course (unless that is his/her only job), that person needs the help and the support to deal with the multiple challenges that come up during the duration of the course. If the instructor has experience in the online environment, then the rest of the team will have no problem designing the course since the instructor understands what is needed in order to accommodate the content into the MOOC platform. But in some cases, the instructor has not had the experience of teaching an online course. This can be a difficult and tricky situation. The instructional designers know what works in the online environment and what doesn’t. Instructors could feel that their experience and long-held views on teaching are not being considered during the design process, and egos can be hurt during those planning and follow-up sessions, which won’t help the course design process at all. The instructor has a vision on how the course should look like, and the instructional designers need to accommodate this vision in the process. Instructional designers and instructors need to understand each other situations and give respect to each other experiences and accomplishments. Each side complements the other when designing the course, and if the team learns how to work effectively together the process will be a smooth one. One important attribute of the team is the ability to communicate ideas. It is important that each member speaks the same language during the process, this is especially so when the course is reviewed for the last time before the release date. If there is a disconnect in communication between the instructor (or instructors) and the instructional design team, then the course will not fulfill the instructor’s vision, or worse, the final product will not work at all when released. It is very important that every team member is updated on any changes to the course (even last minute changes). This is especially true for the instructor, who has to approve the final design. I believe that the source of trouble, in most of the MOOC courses that have experienced major setbacks (which have been widely discussed on the Internet), can be traced to problems within a dysfunctional team that failed to communicate to each other, or which had members that did not acclimate to the work dynamic of the team (either intentionally or due to a clash of characters), and as we know, those courses suffered the consequences (along with the corresponding MOOC entity) of having a design team whose member could not work together for the common cause.