A Day in the Life of an
Instructional Designer

Introduction

Your Task

The Process

Evaluation

Conclusion

Resources

Full Web Quest

Teacher's Notes

The Forum

Introduction

A Day in the Life of an Instructional Designer is a Web Quest targeted at college students who are learning about creating instructional material for classroom or training purposes. The likely audience are those students pursuing a degree in Instructional Technology and may have some exposure to the field already, but have not yet gone through a systematic design process for developing instructional material.

When the participants in this Web Quest finish their task, they should have a very firm foundation and understanding of the Instructional Design aspects of the Instructional Techology field and should be productive members of a team of Instructional Designers developing new learning curriculum. The students will have explored the foundations of Instructional Design from the definition of Instructional Design and Design Models to Learning Theories and Technology/Media utilized in instructional courses.

About The Process

The Web Quest attempts to recreate a common real-world experience by throwing the students into a fictional Instructional Design Company and having them face the task of returning the company to profitability through re-engineering the company's current design practices by adopting a well researched and proven Instructional Design Model such as ADDIE.

The Web Quest breaks up the roles of the new Instructional Designers into four dossiers. Each dossier aims to take the user from beginner to one who has given substantial critial thought to the topics in his/her dossier. To do this we repeatedly take each of the dossiers through a research cycle consisting of the following steps:

Once all the dossiers have been completed, the students will then come together as a group and jointly work on assemmilating their new-found knowledge with the team and produce a persuasive argument in favor of adopting the ADDIE design model for the company's standard methodology for developing coursework.

What shape the final argument by the students take is left up to the teacher and/or the students. Possibilities include Powerpoint presentations, essay style papers, or even writing a research style paper or magazine article suitable for publishing in a trade journal or magazine for Instructional Technology or Education.

Putting the Web Quest to Work

The web quest can be utilized in the classroom setting. The teacher essentially plays the role of George, ensuring proper teams are formed and that the students stay on track with the tasks they are to accomplish as well as promoting solid teamwork and critical thinking at each stage of the process. The teacher can also help students with guidiance on how to approach their roles and with learning how to formulate pursuasive arguments.

One way to integrate the web quest into the classroom instruction is to span the teaching of the various topics covered in the dossiers over several class periods and having students responsible for a role for a particular class period complete their task and act as the "team leader" that class period in working on in-clsas exercises designed to promote critical thinking and sharing of knowledge amongst the team members.

The final arguments can also be made "more real" by forming an ad-hoc Board of Directors amonst industry leaders or the school's teaching staff to which the students really will present their case to for adopting ADDIE.

The web quest could also be adapted so that defense of design models other than ADDIE could be explored and defended. Thus, each team could be assigned the task of defending a different design model. If there is an interest in doing this, write to me and I will revise the site to allow for models other than ADDIE to be defended.