Week 7 - Instructional Design in Business and Industry

As I read chapter 18, I was amazed by the many connections to the teaching profession. Because we teach a multitude of students, we are encountered by a multitude of cultures and learning abilities (or disabilities), not to mention all of the family and emotional/mental situations behind the scenes. “Instructional design today encompasses much more than simply producing instruction. It is now associated with analyzing human performance problems, identifying root causes of those problems, considering a variety of solutions to address the root causes, and determining and implementing the appropriate solutions (Rothwell & Kazanas, 2008)” (p. 178). Immediately I thought of struggling students. As a teacher we need to identify where and why the student is struggling and from there implement a strategy to provide a suitable solution. Not only do we have the great responsibility of designing lesson plans and teaching, we also have the great responsibility of evaluating, revising, and implementing new strategies. Along these same lines is the fact that we are teaching cross-culturally every single day. “In one instructional event, numerous societal cultural factors may be present in the representation of a cross-cultural workforce” (p. 182). While it is not the exact same thing, we do have different situations we are teaching to every single day. Another similarity I found in this chapter from business to teaching is the idea of a client role. “One problem designers face when starting a new project is identifying the client with the primary decision making responsibility” (p. 180). So many times, a teacher will get different answers from different people, causing misunderstanding and confusion. It is great when the roles of each teacher and administrator are clear. Also in this section, it discusses “instructional designers may experience frustration when designing instruction due to the lack of client understanding of the instructional design process” (p. 180). If administration is going to be requiring teachers to implement something new, they themselves need to make sure they know what it is all about and are trained on it themselves. The next area I found that tied to teaching was the “Better, Faster, Cheaper” section (p. 183), particularly when it discusses technology-based training. We have recently implemented a one-to-one laptop policy this past year in order to expedite several different processes. The administration followed several different schools who had done the same thing in order to provide for a “prototype” for what our school would model.