Week Five Reflection

The primary goal of instructional design within the workforce is to create a knowledgeable workforce.  This has in recent years expanded to meet the needs of employers in many different avenues.  Two of the ways that instructional design is changing and shaping the workforce that I could see very beneficial in an education setting are; analyzing human performance and solving performance problems.  It would be great if we could develop a technology based curriculum which first and foremost would evaluate a student's learning style. Once this is established the entire curriculum would cater specifically to the student's learning style.  This program would then track the student's progress and identify weak areas.  Once these areas are identified a teacher/tutor would give special instruction in the weak area.  This process would help solve the "performance" problem; i.e. lack of understanding.

In chapter 21 the issue of technology integration is discussed along with the challenges.  I was not surprised to see that this is an area that requires much work.  I have mentioned before that my son just completed a year with an on-line charter school.  This was a first year start-up school with many problems!  The curriculum choices were minimal and I was not impressed with what he was doing.  The initial excitement was there when he received his tablet, but then soon lost the "newness".  After the excitement wore off and the expectation of regular school work was before them it became a boring and tedious process.  The school did decide to offer some "regular" classes to help with the monotony of being in front of the computer.  This proved to be successful.  Their vision for this coming year is to integrate two days of classroom instruction with the rest of the work being completed on your own.  We are excited to see if this helps the year to be more productive.  There appears to be a lack of excellent on-line curriculum.  This would solve many issue with instructional design.