What I want to do when I grow up

The setting I am most interested in is higher education as an instructional designer. I currently work at a community college as an instructional coordinator, which was a recent promotion. Just before that, I was creating online classes for the college and teaching face-to-face classes in basic computer skills. I had previously taught a couple online classes that I didn’t create, but had been created by somebody else in which I felt the classes were not very effective in teaching the content to students. I feel like they had not been developed by instructional designers/technologists. When I asked around the college to find an instructional technologist to interview for this course, I discovered that there weren’t any, only Information Technology professionals. The Director of Distance Education at our college is not an instructional technologist either and is actually a computer hardware technician. Thus, I see a need at our college for somebody to design online courses using the theory and techniques I have learned in EDTC 6010.

When the online classes at our college were created before I taught the classes, some were created from scratch by instructors who were subject matter experts, not instructional designers. Also, most of these classes were previously taught face-to-face. These instructors would create the online classes exactly in the same way they taught their face-to-face classes. I feel there's a big difference in teaching between the two methods. Thus, I feel if I were the college’s instructional designer/technologist, I would redesign these online classes differently and more suitably for online learners, based on what I have learned in this class. I do wonder if other community colleges have the same problem of no instructional designers and use whoever just happens to be there that knows about computers. Or is this just an isolated incident at our community college?

Instructional Media formats

I currently use Smart Board technology in the face to face classroom when teaching computers and early childhood education. I have used it while connected to the Internet to show video from YouTube and interactive PowerPoint slideshows with links to websites and video. In my online classes, I can still use YouTube videos but I think I’ll be using TeacherTube.com more, thanks to the link provided by Dr. Sugar. I spent at least an hour looking around in there after reading about it in the lecture!

I would like to use more podcasting of my lectures in the future along with wikis. When my EDTC lesson plan group created a lesson plan, we used a wiki, which was completely new to me, but would be great to use in an online class. I want to learn more about how to create them and use them for group learning. I teach a Learning Theory class for lateral entry teachers in which I have used a couple Webquests I found on the Internet to teach multiple intelligences and other learning theories, but I would like to incorporate a wiki into the class, similar to what we did in the EDTC class.