Re-Cap of 2006 AECT PacifiCorp Design & Development Award Competition

By Huang Yao

The six-month journey has truly become a perfect combination of informal learning and formal learning.

I never imagined one day I could give a presentation at AECT international convention. When I gave the presentation, I was only a Master Candidate in the filed for 13 months. The moment I decided to participate in the competition, I only began my second semester in the program of Instructional Design & Technology in the University of Memphis.

I had a little difficult time seeking a partner. My first partner, Jada, a Ph.D freshman in the same program, quitted because of her busy study schedule. About three weeks later, I met my second and final partner, Will, an Industrial Organization Psychology student. It was one month before the deadline of the 1^st round.

With insufficient instructional models and theory stored in my mind, we were unsure of ourselves at first. However, we got great support from Suresh, “You can always learn great things from doing project.” Thanks to him, our journey began. We finished the first round in a hurry because it was the end of a semester. And we all had our own school work to do.

One and half month later, when I thought we couldn’t make the second round, we were told we made it. We were assigned by a mentor, Loretta Donavan, from New York. She is an experienced Business Consultant and owns a company by herself. One lucky thing before I started the second round competition was that in the summer school I learned systematically about leaning theories and instructional models which contribute to my work on the project. During the six weeks, we had a lot of reading and learned how to analysis an ill-structured problem. While we were reading the reference, we gradually cultivated our own ability to analyze, select, and synthesize. I value the extra readings very much because this is where learning takes place outside of classroom. And it became part of my knowledge gain.

I learned not only from the readings provided by Loretta, but through conversations with her and my partner Will. Each week we had an online conversation with her, which was a challenge for me in both ways of language and knowledge. I appreciate Will’s background, Organizational Training. Through the conversation and project, I learned there are more things I need to know to contribute my future career in training.

From the viewpoint of knowledge gain, I listed what I have learned through the competition that can contribute to my ken of knowledge. First of all, my thoughts of what Instructional Design can do have been enlarged. ID can design as small as a one hour Web-based Course to as large as a five-year training program. Secondly, evaluation is an expensive but essential part of design, which, unfortunately, cannot be learned thoroughly from the curriculum in my program. Thirdly, for the e-Learning technology standard SCORM, I can perceived it from the poin of view of instructional design. Fourthly, by the comparison of other teams, I found the place that I need to improve.