Page 17 - Campus Technology, March/April 2019

“They may come to talk to you about setting up a Canvas site,” she said, “but end up speak- ing with you about assignment design.
Like many colleges and universities, Dart- mouth has people who work on instructional design located in individual colleges as well as a small centralized organization with four instructional designers who work mostly with undergraduate programs. Also, DeSilva noted, you won’t find people at Dartmouth with the actual title of instructional designer. “We call ourselves learning designers here,” she said. There is a connotation to instructional design that comes from the corporate world, while a learning designer is more focused on the user experience, she explained. “We really wanted to indicate that the student was the center of our focus and not the material development. We have some learning experience design training, but we also have training in motiva- tional interviewing, which is a therapy tech- nique and which is probably used in our work as much as the design stuff.”
Build a Network
A former middle school science teacher, Sara Davis has been an instructional designer in the Teaching and Learning with Technology Department at Pennsylvania State University for three years.
When she first started at Penn State, her job was to help faculty migrate from the old learn- ing management system to Canvas. “Because we were migrating to a new platform, it opened up the door to have conversations about the way the course was designed — because we had to restructure them anyway,” she explained.
Davis said she realized early on that it would be important to network to develop relation- ships with people whose expertise she could draw upon.
“There is so much technology in use now that it is impossible to be an expert on all of it,
so you need to find people who are experts and build a network,” she said. “One of the first things I did as an instructional designer was to seek out professional development in project management. That helped me make a lot of connections with people who were project managers in IT and other areas. I am fortunate that our department is full of people who are not just instructional designers, they also have expertise in OER, research and multimedia. Those colleagues have helped me improve projects I am working on because of their knowledge and expertise.”
Davis said she hasn’t become an expert on anything yet, but she is interested in learning analytics. “I have made that known, so I am able to sit in on conversations and learn more about it,” she said.
Establish Trust
Todd Conaway, an instructional designer in the Office of Digital Learning & Innovation at the University of Washington’s Bothell campus, said traditionally instructional designers have not done a very good job of going out to meet faculty where they are. “The first week of every semester we used to invite faculty into our office for coffee and cookies, and we would be there to address any questions about pedagogy or technology. That was fine. But we have found that it is much better to take the food to their offices. We go to their office with a basket of cookies and a thermos of coffee and cups. That is just good customer service. You want the auto mechanic to come out to your drive- way and say, ‘How is your car running?’”
When faculty members express interest in a topic, they say things like, “When are you going to have a training session on that?” And Conaway always responds with, “Right this second! Come sit with me and we will discover all kinds of things.”
Conaway, who came to UW Bothell three
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