Ron Charest's Portfolio

Training and Instructional Design

Artifacts of My Instructional Design and Technology Graduate Program

Table of Contents hide

1 Artifacts of My Instructional Design and Technology Graduate Program

1.1 EDIT 704 - Instructional Technology Foundations and Theories of Learning

1.1.1 Educational Autobiography

1.1.2 Instructional Design Challenge

1.1.3 Training Aid Concept

1.2 EDIT 705 - Instructional Design

1.2.1 Group Project - Course Design

1.3 EDIT 590 - Educational Research in Technology

1.3.1 Research Proposal

1.4 About The Photograph

“I did then what I knew how to do. Now that I know better, I do better.”
– Maya Angelou

EDIT 704 - Instructional Technology Foundations and Theories of Learning

Educational Autobiography

Reflections

The EDIT 704 syllabus listed three major semester projects, of which this was the first one due. Given this was my first semester of Grad School, twenty-three years after my last college-level class, with another project simultaneously due for my second class that semester, I had sudden second thoughts about being in college.

The topic itself was difficult as reflecting on my past educational experiences wasn’t particularly pleasant. As I relate in my narrative, I still carry scars from my K-12 education and dredging up old memories were painful. On top of this, I was coming to terms with my recent diagnosis of Attention Deficit Hyperactive Disorder – Primarily Inattentive (ADHD-I), and if I was to write an honest narrative I’d have to disclose this condition, as it has had a significant impact on my lifelong learning experiences.

I also recognized that covering nearly sixty years of continuous learning experiences including social, economic, and cultural context along with my reflections of positive and negative experiences, and learning technology of the time, meant a lot of writing that my professor was going to have to read. And grade.

I determined that the primary design challenge for this assignment would be to find a way to present a sixty-year narrative in a format that covered all the requirements and still kept the reader engaged. A web page was my first choice for format given it was something that I already knew how to do. I ultimately came up with a “pull” approach format, a format that allowed readers to decide what they wanted to read based on topic lead-ins.

This was the most sophisticated web page I’d built up till that time and I’m pleased with how it came out. I think my use of tool-tips, accordion paragraphs, and pop-up sidebar content has real potential for technical writing and online course design. I was also greatly encouraged by my professor’s very positive reaction to my narrative and disclosing my ADHD-I condition. Her feedback was a massive morale boost and built my self-confidence moving into the next assignments and beyond.

Show less

Artifact

My Educational Autobiography

Note: The version presented in this portfolio has been modified from the original submission. It has been reformatted and some content edited. Revisions were made based upon feedback from my original submission.

Go to top

Instructional Design Challenge

Reflections

By the point in the semester when I needed to start developing this project, I was confident I could come up with a viable concept. My struggle was in working with an audio/video format. Although I’ve been an enthusiastic amateur photographer since the late 1980s, I’d only taken a brief dip into video for a few years in the early 1990s when I owned a VHS-format camcorder. I’d also studiously avoided doing any work with audio/video files as a blogger and website developer. Now I had no choice about learning this medium.

The concept for a human-powered watercraft skills/safety course came together quickly. Finding ANSI-certified learning standards provided my validation that this was a viable course. But, when I finished writing my design brief I still didn’t know how to build the presentation.

After extensive research a friend suggested the PowerPoint Show format. Although I’d been using PowerPoint I did not know it had this particular capability. I poked around with it, figured out how to work it, and built my presentation. I tackled the audio narration as a simple PowerPoint-based lecture and built a set of cue-cards with talking points tied to each PowerPoint slide. It took me over a dozen attempts to get my recorded presentation down and within the ten minute time limit. Then it took several more attempts to figure out how to upload it into Blackboard correctly.

Building this presentation did give me a lot of self-confidence in working with an audio/video format. I think my final product came out reasonably professional-looking even if my voice narration was a bit shaky. Overall, having worked through this project I feel much more confident in tackling my next audio/video presentation. I’d also like to pursue my learning concept at some future point and work it into a real-world training program.

This also became a second learning experience when I decided to include it in this portfolio project. It took considerable research and testing over way more hours than I needed to spend, to work out technical details of embedding a large PowerPoint Show file into a web page. My solution, converting the file into a video, uploading it to YouTube, and linking the YouTube clip to my web page, came about through a lot of trial and error. Next time, I should be able to work this much quicker.

Show less

Artifacts

Human-Powered Watercraft Skills Course for Adults Design Brief

Human-Powered Watercraft Skills Course for Adults Presentation

Go to top

Training Aid Concept

Reflections

This was given as an extra credit assignment and I’m all for making extra points whenever the opportunity presents itself. The assignment was presented as rather lighthearted, so I decided I would have some fun with it.

I was already versed in building PowerPoint presentations, but never actually built one that was humorous. My choice of topic – a just-in-time learning aid for fishing – came to mind as it’s something I could actually use to achieve my goal of learning how to fish. My content was a bit of play on the recurring themes of the semester readings on “the modern learner expects to use technology for a modern learning experience. “

Building this presentation gave me a chance to exercise a bit of gratuitous creativity. I now recognize that the use of humor – something that I am not normally encouraged to use while training in a corporate/government/military environment – can add to a learning experience if done correctly. The humor can help hold the learner’s attention, and present topics without being “threatening” or overwhelming.

Show less

Artifact

Learning To Fish: 21st Century Fishing

Go to top

EDIT 705 - Instructional Design

Group Project - Course Design

Reflections

While I was building my biography and an instructional design and other artifacts for EDIT 704, I was also part of a three-person group developing a data-driven course in EDIT 705.

This project marked the first time I worked in a collaborative online team. I literally had never used Google Docs or Google Hangout (video service) prior to this class. I was nervous that I wouldn’t have anything to offer my team mates and they’d end up “carrying me” though the project.

As it worked out, our three-person team nicely complemented each other. One person had previously worked for Google, so he breathed the technology and was able to quickly bring me up to speed. Our other teammate was then working as an instructor teaching the veteran’ Transition Assistance Program (TAP) and had a lot of good ideas on how to improve it. My military background, and the fact I had been through TAP as a transitioning veteran some 23 years earlier, provided useful insights to my team as we developed the course-ware package.

But my real group contribution turned out to be my technical writing skills, and my ability to keep a focus on the overall assignment and juggle everyone to meet our deadlines for each piece of the assignment. Although my teammates did take most of the load while I was finishing up one of the three big assignments for EDIT 704, I was able to step in during other times when my teammates were distracted with real-life issues.

In the end, I think it all balanced out. I came away from this project with the self-confidence that I could work in an online collaborative environment and offer something of value to my teammates. I also came away with new skills working in collaborative online teams.

Show less

Artifacts

Benefits Education for Transitioning Service Members

Note: This artifact is a set of five documents comprising the entire courseware package.

Go to top

EDIT 590 - Educational Research in Technology

Research Proposal

Reflections

I took this course over the summer with only the one-credit course EDIT 710, “Online Teaching Essentials,” so I was mostly able to focus on this course and the semester project.

I’ve always enjoyed performing research assignments and technical writing, so this assignment fell right into two of my core skill-sets. The learning skills new to me were using peer-reviewed journals and APA-formatted citations.

I chose this particular topic as an outgrowth of my personal learning on ADHD-I. Over the months prior to this class I had been researching ADHD symptoms and developmental issues and joined online adult ADHD support groups. One observation was that some ADHD adults had managed reasonably well in their lives. Then there were other people in my support groups who had never managed to succeed at anything. I started wondering how it was that some people were able to excel in their personal, academic, and professional lives while other people could not, even though all had common ADHD neurodevelopmental issues. I chose to write my research paper on this topic.

I chose the Triarchic Theory of human intelligence as my learning model (Sternberg, 1987) ^[1]. It seemed like a viable approach when first reading about this theory.

Through my review of literature, I was surprised at the general lack of existing literature on ADHD adults. Most research was focused on children with the remaining studies mostly focused on college-age students. I was also surprised at the superficiality of available research that did focus on college students/adults. My perception was that the researchers fundamentally did not understand the ADHD condition.

My learning experience from this project was that there is a massive lack of existing knowledge on ADHD adult learners. It was from this project that I expanded my original goals for Instructional Design to include developing training programs suitable for adults with learning issues. Should I have the opportunity to pursue a research project in the future, it will be on the topic of common traits of high-performance ADHD adults. I would also chose a learning model other than the Triarchic Theory to use for my model, although I still believe a multiple intelligence theory is viable.

Show less

Artifact

Beyond Medications: Identifying Learning Techniques in Adults with Attention Deficiency Hyperactivity Disorder

1. Sternberg, R. J. (1985). Beyond IQ: A Triarchic Theory of Intelligence. Cambridge University Press.

Go to top

About The Photograph

Ron’s introduction to training was as a technical instructor at Submarine Training Facility (SubTraFac), located at the Point Loma Submarine base in San Diego, California. Ron taught and developed training curriculum there from 1982 to 1986.