Week 4 - Embedding Media

Since I am just getting started in this Master's program, I've had a lot of questions about what in the world Educational and Instructional Design is. What would I do with this degree? What are my goals? How is this going to be an integral part of your future career?

Even though most of my classmates are teachers of some sort, I would fall into the category of Corporate e-learning being that I am in Human Resources and my development goal is to grow into a Learning & Development Manager. I am also certainly a fan of the statistics in the below image that Instructional Designers are 67% female and well-educated with 87% holding a Master's degree.

Ant Pugh is an Instructional Designer with a Vlog and he shared a pretty good video about what an Instructional Designer does, and it's not just dumping content into PowerPoint. I also like the following video where he goes through the differences between Instructional Design and e-Learning. I always thought they were synonymous, but he makes a good point that they are truly different. Check out his clip:

Up until now, I had the idea that an Instructional Designer was kind of like the architect and builder of a house (foundation, walls, roof) and the e-learning was all of the contents inside the house (furniture, etc.). The ID is the end-to-end process of designing, developing and delivering learning while the e-learning is the content by which education or performance is enhanced.

My long-term goal with obtaining this degree is to develop a learning management system with my employer where we can have one central repository for all of the training needs, to be able to develop new training and to tie curriculum to our job descriptions and levels of leadership. If that truly comes to fruition, I will be relocating to our corporate headquarters just outside of Salt Lake City. See us on the map!