Week 10 Reflection

According to chapter 22 of “Trends and Issues in Instructional Design and Technology” by Reiser and Dempsey who focus on instructional technology in different contexts. Through reading this chapter, I conclude two significant themes that I noticed across these contexts. Moreover, after finishing this chapter, I got some benefits that could help me in my current professional working environment.

First of all, the authors provide me rich information about connection business and education field together by collaboration. Really, I did not know about this information before reading this chapter because I have not an opportunity to see two or more teachers from different subject areas (or grade levels) truly collaborating on a curriculum (I think that happens in most of the schools). However, I explored that research faculty collaborates with other experts all the time, and business does it constantly in order to balance revenue and expenses, develop new products, and improve efficiency. P-12 teachers could really stand to follow this example of using collaboration to maximize their creativity and effectiveness when designing instruction and teaching students.

In fact, there are several experiences that I faced them makes me diligence on emphasize that in some situations, even faculty members show a state of reluctance to change their way of teaching, this would take me back to the notion of change resistance. I remember a teacher has a twenty years experience in teaching history, but she refuses using technology in her classroom or changing her traditional way of teaching, which is lecture because of she absolutely convinced lecture is the only effective method of teaching history. Even though the students show boredom during a class time and she got several tips from the administrators to renew her teaching method, but she still believes there is nothing best lecture method to teach history and technology does not fit to integrate with teaching. Through that example, we can see it on a more advanced and open-minded level when a Higher education faculty developer likes Brenda Litchfield describes her hardest part in this respect by saying: “Many (faculty members) are reluctant to admit they want or need help with their teaching”. So this notion seems overwhelming in whichever the setting is.

In my opinion, the collaboration between faculty members is an important condition to success the school. Also, I will be happy if some teacher helped me especially if he/she is an expert in teaching. That definitely would make me feel successful at work because I learned from them how I will treat some difficulties that they faced, best solutions for common troubles in the classroom, and the most effective ways to teach current subject or lesson without passing in the same situation.

The another issue that attracts my attention in this chapter is the multitude roles for a technology-based instructional designer in higher education context we can see him playing an important role in faculty development in terms of students and learning contexts, design, and development of instruction, innovative methods of implementation and evaluation of teaching and learning. In point of fact, I did not know about the enormous tasks that doing by instructional designer, but now I realized that is an essential element in every school because he/she can prepare for faculty development, the need for other skills like negotiating skills, presentation skills, dealing with difficult participants and integrating technology into curriculum could be another requirement, which in turn expand the range of responsibilities Higher Ed instructional designer may encounter. In addition to the roles of teaching, we see him contribute more to research and consultancy roles.