Without noticing, I had been walking the path toward Instructional Design (ID) for quite some time now. Beginning with a few Coursera courses on educational theory and assessment, I was already thinking about how I could use learning theories and instructional objectives to better help students through my library practice. I had always known what ID was and how beneficial it could be but because I did not have a strong writing and education background, I avoided ID and instead focused on Instructional Technology (IT). Eventually, I always came back to ID since there is little you can do with technology alone if you cannot support it with educational or learning theories. After some extrinsic motivation, I finally decided to give this course a chance.

It was back in library school that I had the idea of putting together a resource where students could go to and find answers to the simple (and not so simple) questions they have and don’t always know how to ask or don’t always want to ask. Back then, my technological and theoretical knowledge were not what they are today and nothing really happened. As time passed and I began to learn more about web design, library practice, and learning theories, I kept coming back to that idea. It is fair to say that I am not the first person to have thought of this; in fact, I can probably think of two libraries that have done something similar to what I am trying to do. But in the end, I felt that it could not hurt to flush out what I was thinking and to really look at my practice and what I have learned from many hours talking to students about their information needs.

Going into the first week of the class, I had a good idea of where I wanted this course to go. Many of the concepts presented to us since the first week were already familiar to me, but the intended focus on ID and the design process made them interesting again, and I challenged myself to look at these concepts as if I had just begun to learn about them. It wasn’t always easy, since I often take a top-down approach to problem solving, but I was able to keep myself in check by consciously thinking about the design process. Still, when it came to the project itself, I already had an idea of how I wanted this to look like, and that made some of the design decisions challenging at times. Luckily, the way the class is structured forced me to change my approach and to think more systematically.

Once I established a clear foundation and an aim, my perspective on what a resource like this one can do for students—and for my practice—really changed. So far, I have just begun to scratch the surface, and I am certain that as we continue to move into the Development, Implementation, and Evaluation parts of the design model, I will be able to put together something that is meaningful to me and useful for those who use it. As this progression occurs, I will be moving onto the more practical parts of the project and, I think, I will be in a better position to shape this project. As I said before, I sometimes tend to approach projects with a top-down approach and that may work against me in certain situations, but at the same time, I am able to conceptualize where I want something to go. In part due to this way of thinking, I was a very careful when writing instructional objectives, but the way our goal analysis was done proved to be really helpful in this regard. At the same time, I don’t think that I will come up with a final list of instructional objectives at this time. I expect that, in the future, each of the terminal objectives that I have outlined so far will need its own task analysis and/or goal analysis in order to really flush out what a student will learn from this resources and how to best approach that using the method of delivery that I have chosen. For now, this class has given me the chance to explore something that I have wanted to do for a while, and to my surprise, I like the direction it has taken.

From the beginning, I always saw motivation as the main driving force behind this resource. Seeing how students aren’t very good about going to librarians for help, this project seems to me like a good middle ground; they might not be coming to us, but we are providing students with a service that they can use. From there, it will be the user that decides the value of the resource. Personally, I wish I could have had something like this when I was learning to do research, but that just reflects my independent and self-driven approach to learning. By now, you could be asking: Is he just doing this as if he was the intended user of the resource? At first, when the project was just an idea, I think it was true, but as I started to think about it more throughout all the class assignments, I began to see how I could incorporate other theories and deliver content that is not just useful, but also meaningful.

I was first introduced to Vygotzky and his Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD) theory a few years ago while I was in grad school, and I immediately tried to adopt it and make conscious use of it when I worked at the reference desk. For the most part, I don’t think that ZPD can be used directly in a project like this one since it requires a social component, but the main idea behind it can, and in fact, that’s what the project is trying to do: students have already been given some knowledge by their instructor, and this resource is just providing that extra help to push them a little bit further into their learning. Instead of just using ZPD as the central theory, I really had to consider who I wanted the target audience to be; once I knew that, I was able to select some learning theories that could work to encourage learning. First, using constructivism was an easy choice since I wanted to create knowledge by using knowledge that students already have; plus, I will also be able to use that thinking when I get to design an interface. In my CDD, I also talk about Information Processing Theory and chucking and how that can be used to present information that will be useful, relevant, and can be retained. At this point, it is just in paper form, but that type of thinking will be very useful once I start thinking about what type of materials I want to include in the tutorials. Similarly, I will really have to think about the ways student learn, and I thinking Gardner (Multiple Intelligences) and Davis & Arend (Seven Ways of Learning) will be other theories that will be good to consider as I continue to develop this idea.

As far as the future is concerned, I am not entirely sure what I still want to learn about ID. During the course of this class, I have come to see the benefits of ID and its systematic approach to instruction, but at the same time, I have yet to see it implemented in a more educational setting as opposed to the more business-like setting we have been reading about. That being said, the concepts that we have been introduced so far will be helpful in the future as my practice continues to evolve, and as long as I continue to education myself, I will be able to improve and help those that I serve knowing that I have a strong foundation to build upon.