Week four : The Internet and the impact on education

I see a pattern in the reading as a new technology emerge, the great predictions in education, industry, etc. made for spectacular changes on the horizon. For example, Thomas Edison in 1913, predicted “Books will soon be obsolete in the schools…It is possible to teach each branch of human knowledge with the motion picture. Our school system will be completely changed in the next ten years.” This of course has not happened. I do believe there has been major advancements though in instruction design in recent years, and the profound uses we have for computers in education, industry, entertainment, to name a few, certainly there is a major shift in instructional materials and how they are delivered via the computer.
A good example is in higher education with the explosion of online classes available. The Internet has changed the way our education institutions can deliver a course. I can speak for myself when I say, it satisfies a nitch--giving students outside the standard college, university demographics, now have the opportunity and/or a choice to go back to school. Are we concerned the online education model will replace the traditional face-to-face classroom? I’m not worried. Although the growth is enormous right now, I’m not sure what online education will look like in ten years. Just as a “motion picture” can add to the education objective, online classes will continue to become more sophisticated in the ability to deliver course materials that are more interactive, interesting and hopefully a great learning experience.

I was able to apply a bit of the technology we’ve been learning in class to a real world application the other day. As we are exploring how to create, use, hyperlink a podcast into a course. I have begun to apply this technology particularly, how to embed an instructor introduction video in the course. I use a MAC at home and (PC at work) which has Garage Band installed -- learning this software to create podcasts, and learning how to edit has been a lot of fun. I look forward to working with instructors to help create high quality videos or audio podcasts, and learning more about the editing phase in the future. Very cool! As podcasting is a technology that can be downloaded and kept on your computer and this is unrelated to our lesson on Podcasting, this was an interesting site that I’ve found a website similar to YouTube called vimeo.com. Create a video and upload, just like YouTube, it has a create flair to it.

Human Performance Improvement
When I started my job as an instructional designer one of the technical requirements was I would eventually become an expert at using the course managements system called Blackboard Vista. On day one, I had no experience using Blackboard. A training program would have been fantastic to have in place. It took me 4-months to feel as if I could troubleshoot, and create online courses with relative ease. As talked about in the chapter, having a training program in place would help with the demand to produce a technically good course sooner. So that said, to have procedures in place and clear expectations, and regular feedback would have reduced my frustration level as well as my co-worker. These are great ideas, and with the right resources in place. I think there are companies that create practices and procedures that are relevant to their workers and maximizing an organization’s bottom line. My analysis, or to break down the need for ID training, I see it this way. There is the human factor, us that make up the department. We work toward a goal, the performance itself, and then the learned task or the end accomplishment, or end mission, through “systematic, systemic” approach to meeting the demand of supporting online courses.