Bridging the Instructional Designers and Lecturers in Technology Education

This chapter examines an initiative to create educational technology (ET) Champions and leaders within a higher education institution in Singapore. It examines how the concept of communities of practice was applied to an initiative for transforming teaching and learning through educational technology. Instructional designers coached ET Champions in the principles of creating learning objects who later returned to their respective colleges to work with other lecturers. ET Champions progressed through five stages, which included peripheral, legitimate, core, strategic and transformational membership. Each stage required support and guidance within the community.

Strategies and Heuristics for Novice Instructional Designers as They Work with Faculty Content Experts in a University Setting

Universities increasingly expect faculty to integrate technology in their teaching and deliver instructional materials in innovative ways. The responsibility for creating technology-enhanced instruction typically falls on faculty who want to deliver instruction more effectively and efficiently and on students who are hired or assigned to assist them. In creating an instructional technology product, faculty members usually serve as content experts and students often serve as technology developers. In this chapter, we describe the development process we have used in training and working with student developers and faculty-student project development teams. We outline critical issues instructional designers face when working with faculty content experts, and provide suggestions for becoming effective designers and overcoming the obstacles in this academic setting. We hope the strategies and heuristics discussed will assist novice instructional designers to become better prepared, avoid pitfalls, and find the design experience to be both challenging and rewarding.

Instructional Design, Development, and Context Expertise

The work of instructional designers in the current higher educational context is part of a complex process that traverses a range of professional relationships and communities of practice. The requisite professional skills include the ability to operate and communicate effectively across these different professional cultures. The term “culture” is used in a novel way to reflect the “academic tribes” concept described in the literature, and to highlight the complexity of working relationships in teams that are often transitory. This chapter presents a model that situates the instructional designers’ role within the process of educational design and development. The model is derived from many years experience of managing development teams of different size and composition. Representative case studies provide evidence of its effectiveness across a range of projects and situations.

Instructional Designers' Perceptions of Their Agency

Instructional designers provide more than service in the design and development of instruction; they also act as social change agents. This chapter draws on the stories of instructional designers to develop a model of change agency that includes interpersonal, professional, institutional and societal dimensions. The model provides guidance for the development of new skills in instructional design, for serious reflection by instructional designers about their own influence as agents, and for graduate programs in instructional design to address agency.

Moving Toward the Digital Learning Environment

This chapter reports on a case study that examines the process of implementing an e-learning management system (ELMS) for learning science in secondary schools in Hong Kong. It describes the challenges, issues and problems associated with creating science content and then integrating it with both a diagnostic and an open-content marking tool. The study had two broad objectives: (1) to analyze and document the process of designing and implementing the ELMS and (2) to evaluate the overall impact of these practices. To achieve its purpose a team of instructional designers worked closely with content and technology experts to digitize science content for online delivery. The system facilitates timely and dynamic diagnosis of student weaknesses. It is argued that when teachers are actively involved in an implementation of a technology-rich environment, they begin to see the benefits of teaching science differently. Given the opportunity to use the online system, students also tend to take more responsibility for their own learning. Data from participants indicate that the ELMS provides added value to the teaching of science. Lessons learned from this case study should assist others who wish to implement similar systems in the future.

Exploring the Nardoo

This chapter examines how instructional designers work together in teams to solve problems. It examines the advantages and disadvantages of a team approach to instructional design. This case will explore how a team of instructional designers worked together to create Exploring the Nardoo, a multi-award winning CD-ROM developed by the University of Wollongong’s Educational Media Laboratory (emLab). The case describes key issues related to the design and development of the package from the perspective of a faculty-based multimedia unit, which was established with a strong emphasis on advancing research through innovations in design.

Delivering Online Expertise, Online

This chapter describes two strategies for delivering educational design expertise and online professional development via the Internet. The issues and difficulties pertaining to the design and application of online staff development are examined in terms of the factors and needs that were observed during the implementation phases. The professional development initiative focuses on staff development Web sites which aim to inspire instructional design staff to understand the implicit teaching and learning goals used by lecturers and to assist lecturing staff to increase their awareness of instructional design methodologies. This approach allows participants engaged in online developments to share a common pool of understanding and expertise. The chapter concludes by identifying the potential advantages of the Web-based professional development strategies.

The Changing Role of an Instructional Designer in the Implementation of Blended Learning at an Australian University

This chapter presents a case study that reflects on the changing approach of an instructional designer at an Australian university. The designer moved from one-to-one interactions with subject matter experts in the design of traditional print-based distance learning courses to adopting a pedagogical framework that guides the use of technology in hybrid course design and encourages the subject matter experts to design their courses in a way that emphasises what Wenger (2005) has called the “horizontalisation” of learning. The subject experts were encouraged to experience some of the benefits of a community of practice (CoP) approach for themselves. The study contrasts the traditional approach to design with the framework used here, in which social constructivist principles of learning were offered to the subject matter experts in a way that was immediately engaging and usable for them. The chapter presents the subject experts’ evaluation of the effectiveness of the approach described.

Creating CoPs During the Development of an Online Classroom-Based Simulation

The purpose of this chapter is two fold. First it reports on the research associated with the development and implementation of prototype versions of an online classroom simulation. It looks at how the use of these simulations helped to develop a community of practice among pre-service teacher users. Second, it reports on how a team of researchers, an instructional designer, programmers and graphic artists worked within a community of practice as the simulation software was created.

A Great Wall of Difference

Instructional design is typically viewed as a process for identifying and solving instructional problems. However, for designers who work on international development projects, the “western” assumptions of instructional design may pose particular challenges as project participants work together to find solutions to teaching and learning problems. The challenge is to find culturally sensitive ways to create resources and provide training for individuals who have different cultural backgrounds. After almost three years of work on the project shared in this article, there are still a number of questions. For example, why has there not been the development of a community of practice around instructional design with the project members? In addition, why has the Canadian project team been unable to encourage our Chinese colleagues to value the instructional design process? This paper offers a number of musings and insights about the field of instructional design within the Chinese context.