I am very excited to be teaching our introductory course this semester, entitled Instructional Systems Design. It’s a challenging course because it is introductory, but also because there’s so much I want to cover! Even though the syllabus is a reflection of what I think is important for someone entering the field, I want to highlight the main objective, which is to introduce students to the practice of instructional design and to enable them to become better learning experience designers.The syllabus is embedded below, but feel free to download it from scribd as well. If you’ve taught or taken a similar class in the past, I would love to hear your feedback!
Category: courses
One of the new activities that I tried this semester was to ask my MA and PhD students to submit their final papers to a (well-known, well-attended, international) conference. To do this, I aligned the requirements for the final paper to the requirements for the conference submission. The reasons for doing this are plenty: (a) authenticity isn’t just something we should pay lip-service to, (b) we require our students to present at a conference prior to graduating, so this activity allows them to fulfill two requirements at once, (c) this way, students can easily see that their work has implications beyond the confines of our classroom and university. And, while the process of conference submission is more important than the outcome, I can’t help but be content with the outcome shown below:
Congratulations to the students – I am looking forward to taking pictures of you presenting at the conference!