When I Grow Up
Reflection on Chapter 3 of “What I Wish I Knew Before Becoming an Instructional Designer”
Here is the reflection question for the third chapter:
Think about your current skills within your position. What title best describes you?
When I realized I wanted to transition into the career of an instructional designer, I had no idea how broad of an area that title covered. This chapter of Dr. Hobson's book focused on the various sectors in which instructional designers work, how the position can vary based on job-specific factors, and how the instructional design skills for all of these compare. Some of the instructional design paths Dr. Hobson mentions are Educational Strategist, Course Architect, Educational Technologist, E-Learning Developer, Learning Scientist, Learning Experience Designer, and Curriculum Developer.
When I think about the professional skills I've acquired in my adult life, which has largely been defined by fourteen years of teaching in middle and high school classrooms, I believe I'm currently best suited for a role in curriculum development. I know educational standards and content, am familiar with how to create effective learning experiences for secondary students and have developed district-wide curriculum maps and course materials.
That said, I have begun to move more into an E-Learning Developer role. Over the past several months, I've become increasingly familiar with course authoring tools such as Articulate Storyline, Articulate Rise, and DominKnow One as well as tools to create learning resources and job aids such as Camtasia, Snagit, Affinity Publisher/Designer, and will soon start learning how to use Adobe's Creative Suite. Additionally, outside of my graduate work, much of the instructional design work I've done, both for Junior Achievement and Stride, has been taking preexisting storyboards and courses and rebuilding them for improved accessibility and a more positive user experience for everyone based on feedback from users and the quality assurance process.
Most of the projects I have ahead of me at Stride are continuing this process of migrating and improving existing courses, but I do look forward to the possibility of building my courses from the ground up soon.
References
Hobson, L. (2021). What I Wish I Knew Before Becoming an Instructional Designer. Independently published.
