Executive Summary

Recommendation:

Our Campus needs to provide our current and future students with learning experiences and learning environments that accommodate the different learning needs of the current Net-Generation. In order to achieve this we propose that faculty, with the assistance of instructional support units, redesign courses to create more engaging learning environments for students. This effort will be guided by research-based instuctional design principles.

Benefits for Our Campus:

• Improved student retention rates
• Increased student satisfaction
• Better prepared students for the workforce

Problem

Today's students come to our campus with different expectations and a need for more engaging and interactive learning environments. Because these expectations and needs are not being addressed at Our Campus student satisfaction levels and retention rates are declining. Today’s students are interested in social and collaborative learning and see technology as an essential component of learning and working. Therefore, in order to stay competitive as a Higher-Education institution, Our Campus needs to provide its students with ways to learn that take into account current technology trends. As technology continues to change rapidly, faculty who develop courses do not have the time to stay current with such developments and innovations. Instructional support units are better able to keep current. However, instructional support staff do not have the time and mandate to keep up with research and to distribute and apply this research.

Desired State

• Student retention and satisfaction levels increase.
• Course content will become more interactive and engaging.
• Instructional design of all courses will be based on research in effective teachning and learning.

Action Plan

1. Form a task force as an advising group with representatives from instructional support units, academic administrators, faculty and the Office of Student Affairs
2. Develop assessment measures in the form of benchmarks, formative and summative evaluations.
3. Form a standards committee
4. Establish a faculty development program
5. Establish professional development for instructional support units
6. Establish a plan for communicating and educating instructional support units

Costs

The initial cost will be a slight decrease in faculty support during the time the ID/IT staff and faculty volunteers develop the first projects that are research-based. After this initial phase that we assume will take around 6 months, the new-gained knowledge will help streamline support, will help faculty to make better informed decisions on how to revise their teaching, and thus will improve student learning.

Pay attention to data bits and quotes

Diana Oblinger's comment to "overwhelm them with evidence" is hitting home for me as our group is putting together our "Making the Case". I will begin keeping a list or collection of relevant research data or quotes that could be used for when I need to "make the case" for something on my campus.

Logistical Frustrations

I'm finding it difficult to keep up with all of the communication fora available for this institute. Part of this is due to time difficulties: between all of the meetings with my team outside of the sessions, and all of the sessions, just getting a chance to read all that is going on is difficult.

However, this has been made much worse by problems with the network in my hotel room. Even with a cable connection, I can only get connections intermittently. The hotel can only send a maintenance person to my room to try to help me. But the problem isn't in my room, so they can't really help. As a result, I can't do any reading or writing to the blogs or the team's twiki or even e-mail from my room. I have to come downstairs for all connectivity.

This means I'm spending some of my session time trying to read the posts, as well as follow the sessions. I can multitask a little, but this is a stretch. I'm also spending a lot more time finding places outside my room in some corner or other to try to keep this up. This is pretty frustrating.

Leadership alchemy

Some of the things I find myself needing to improve towards developing myself as a leader include 1. learning the language of leadership, 2. learning how to frame ideas ways that resonate with leaders, and 3. acquire a mentor to help me in this journey. When our group came up with the name “Instructional Alchemists,” I was think we were changing instruction to gold, but now I realize I need to change myself.

Streaching ourselves

Some of the important aspects of “stretching” ourselves beyond our comfort zone as instructional designers seem to be the need to get beyond thinking about what is realistic and pretty easy to wrap our heads around and to start thinking about what is strategic – no matter how fuzzy or potentially daunting. Several members of our group, myself included, are used to clear-cut, black and white initiatives or projects. We need to begin thinking beyond what is clearly “doable” and begin thinking of what is messy, politically complex and not easily understood.

revisoin of topic

While our stealth mission still is to improve the profession of instructional designers and instructional technologists by emphasizing the need to use research-based results in our design and work with students, we need to pitch this differently to our fictitious provost: What really matters is our backwaterish institution's need for keeping up with and teaching students of today and of the future -- and the best way we can do this is if we standardize our teaching knowledge and skills around techniques and pedagogical strategies that are research-proven.

Change of Topic

It has been an interesting 31 hours here at Penn State and we have discovered many commonalities among our diverse group. We have two members with institutions larger than 30,000 students, 2 with institutions smaller than 5,000 students, and 1 somewhere in the middle.

Even though we are vastly different in size, we all feel that we as Instructional Designers/Instructional Technologists need to invest our time in research instead of constantly reacting to technology. Our team has now changed the project to address this need. We are developing a strategy to promote research-based instructional design in our home institutions.

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Key for many of these sites would be to have a very distinct learning outcome associated with them so that students know what they are supposed to be doing. Of course, they will get lost in the activity, but they need to have something to get back to. I think the music creation would be useful.

Team Introduction

We, as a team, will work on a system to share learning objects, and even more importantly, the code of learning objects, among institutions. We are all interested in finding out what everyone else is doing and how we can learn from that.