At the end of the previous class in the program, I felt that my project was at a good place and felt confident that I was going to spend most of my time thinking about activities to include during the second class, but a lot changed in the few months between classes. The first thing that surprised me after coming back to it again was the amount of library jargon in my learning objectives; it still made sense, but I had been trying too hard to incorporate ACRL’s Information Literacy Framework into my project when I should have been focusing on objectives that learners could actually achieve. This was only the second week of the class and I already had to make a major change to the project. Far from being an unwelcome realization, I was glad to see that there was still work to be done. Since I started to think about this project, I had wanted to create a resource that addressed the processes learners would have to know in order to find, evaluate, and use information effectively, rather than focus on the types of formats that learners would have to use in order to find information. In addition, by focusing on process, there are more opportunities to foster transferability of skills and encourage critical thinking when using information. I feel that by making this change, I showed some awareness of my audience; in design terms, I was trying to design something that I wanted to teach, and not something learners might need or want to learn. Depending on my workload, I hope to begin to implement a project similar to this one at work, and when I do so, I will follow design best practices and first talk to students, librarians, and faculty about what should be included so that I know what potential users hope to learn and how they might use a resource like this one.

As we transitioned to assessment and formulation of activities, I was presented with yet another challenge. By deciding to work on a self-guided, online project, I was already giving up some control and freedom when it came to assessment and the type of activities that I could employ. When I began to think about assessment ideas, self-assessment activities, like quizzes, were the only activities that came to mind, and thinking that was not going to be enough to fulfill the requirement, I decided to pretend that I would be doing this in a classroom setting. The feedback that I got told me that I should not “... apologize for self-assessment. Sometimes it just has to be that way.” While I was glad to hear that, I was still a little concerned since I would not be able to fully monitor and assess the progress of the learners. At the same time, I took this as an opportunity to find other ways for students to learn the content, assess their own learning, and connect previous knowledge to the new information that I was provided. In the end, I was satisfied with the activities that I chose because they fit the model that I was developing, but when we started to explore the topic of Universal Design, I questioned the approach that I had taken and began to ask myself if I was still providing instruction if I’m not fully in control of the learning environment. I would say that I am since I am the one developing the content, but at the same time, there is a little part of me that thinks something needs to change, but for now, I am happy with the progress that I made; not just when it comes to the project, but also with the realizations that I had to made along the way.

Even with all the progress that I made, this class has shown me that I might need to reconsider the method of delivery. On the one hand, if I only want to organize a set of tutorials and information about library services, the approach I have taken seems to work since I am able to break down topics into categories and use alignment charts to map objectives. But on the other hand, if I want to focus more on the assessment of learners, I need to look for an alternative. That alone is the biggest takeaway from this class. Having gone through the analysis stage during the last class, this class has forced me to only think about the design aspect of the project and to let the project take shape on its own rather than shape it to my preferences; in other words, there were times that I wanted to think about the user interface and the user experience (development stage), but I had to step back and only think about the content and how to align the activities to provide better learning opportunities for users.

What comes next is the development stage and I feel confident the progress I have made will let me continue to grow. I want to focus more intentionally on assessing learners because that is the most difficult part of the design process and because that’s the part of the design process that pushes me to grow and improve. Looking back on the challenges I had to work through the past few weeks, it seems that I really do need to change direction. I would not only be improving as an instructional designer, but I would also be providing a better fit for the instructional plan and the content that I have developed so far.