Trends & Issues Various Settings

Chapters in Section V identify trends and issues in IDT in various contexts: business & industry; military; health care education; P-12 education; and post-secondary education. Select at least 3 of these 5 contexts and compare/contrast  the IDT trends and issues. Then explain how they are similar or different from the IDT trends and issues in the context in which you work.

The three contexts I chose to focus on are business and industry, military training, and health care education. I think that in all contexts of these diverse areas, they face many similarities. Each of the contexts all focus on solving issues that are current and focus on problem-based learning atmospheres. Problem-based learning has become widely used across all contexts because it provides the most real-life experience and solutions to those issues. Another commonality is that all three specialties focus on a diverse group of individuals. The US within itself has become more diverse as a population, it is common to have a cross-cultural make-up in a given organization (meaning a company, service perspective, or class). With that being said, as the instructional designer, we must understand our audience when creating IDT and understand the material delivered is sensitive to all stake-holders. The main goal of each of the three contexts I focused on is effective learning. 

Although the business and industry, military training, and health care education face similar trends, they also face different types of issues within the same spectrum. The first issues is that of funding for such IDT. Business and industry tend to have less constraints than that of the military and health care. Business and industry are funded from within, where as military is funded by the government, and health care has been affected by the rising costs of healthcare and managed care. In the business and industry spectrum they are focused with the pressure to  provide "better, faster, and cheaper" and this drives the type of instruction. In the military and healthcare spectrum, they are focused on learning communities that are more difficult to assimilate. The environments in which each of these contexts work in vary differently in the way that business and industry are more organized and military and healthcare are more of reactive environments. Which leads to the main difference in each of these contexts is the end goal: profits, security, and education. 

I work in the middle school level of education so I do experience some of these trends and issues. I too have to work with real world instructional design. It is important for my students to have access to technology because they learn better when they are focused on (i.e. learner-centered). While focusing on my students, as an educator I have to recognize that all students are not the same learner. This is important to understand because in order for my students to learn, the material has to be meaningful to them as well as adjusted to their learning styles. Every time I prepare a lesson, I have to keep in mind the diverse groups of students that I teach and apply that to my lesson. I also have to take into consideration that I work in a Title 1 school so the socioeconomic background of my students must be taken into consideration as well. Nothing shuts down a student faster than when they are limited, but still expected to perform at the same level as everyone else. A prime example of this would be for me to assign homework and demand that it be typed and submitted online. By knowing my students, I need to give students options for turning in their work as all of my students do not have internet at home, let alone a computer. 

When looking at issues in comparison to the contexts I reviewed, education is funded by the government. This becomes an issue because as an educator, we are required to produce a quality education regardless of funding and availability to resources. In my area, we do receive special funding because of our status of Title 1. This does allow us to have special funds outside of what we are given to further assist our students educational needs. A lot of the time these funds are used to buy more technology to help our students learning experience become more meaningful. So the instructional design is benefited because of this type of funding. 

Chapters in Section VI discuss global trends and issues in IDT. As the world's population grows exponentially, we face unprecedented challenges that have implications for learning. How and can we prepare our youth to address the problems of living in a world with 9 billion people when the earth's resources cannot sustain that many? Does our current education system, curriculum, and instructional practices help learners foster the complex problem-solving skills necessary to tackle these issues? Are there methods and practices used in European and Asian countries that we should use here in the US? Why or why not?

After reading these chapters, I noticed a universal commonality...continuous learning. Currently, we understand so much more thanks to innovation and technology advancements, just to name a few. If we focus on long-term solutions, instead of quick-fixs, we could really be successful in regards to problem solving. A main feature that must be present is complete buy-in from all stakeholders. If all invest, then we could work together to create great solutions. When working with continuous learning, it is important to continuously improve and modify because what may be true yesterday, could be very different today. I believe we have began to really focus on problem-solving skills with our students by the use of performance-based activities. This is vital because it takes away the rote questioning and gives real-world experiences meaning. I believe that this does provide a gray area in the sense of state testing. State testing, in my view use to be a joke. I felt that a student didn't really apply advanced skills except basic knowledge and understanding, we missed the application process. As we have moved to more "applied" scenarios in testing, I believe we are moving in the right direction. If we could come together and collaborate on a larger scale, then just imagine what could be produced. I do believe that e-learning communities are important because what you learned in high school has changed and we need to continuously update our knowledge. E-learning should comprise of not only updating your knowledge, but fostering an area to collaborate with other individuals in the same field. 

I do believe each of the countries I viewed in these chapters did have something right. In Japan, the late night talks between older and newer teachers fostered time for growing. I see this as vital to instructional design and because collaboration and feedback from others is how we create and learn. If we are continuously visiting the evaluation cycle, then improvement and advancement will prevail. Also, the fact that teachers are very competitive creates an internal motivation that should be present in instructors to provide the best education possible. It is also important to note that teachers are the instructional designers within their content. Who knows better about the subject matter than the teacher. In Korea, the government is supportive in e-learning and instructional design. So much to the point of providing funds to help establish such a community of learning. This is very important because the government is recognizing that this needs to occur and supports learners advancement. An important factor to note is that Japan and Korea are very centralized in the way of culture. Whereas, in Europe and the US, there are many different cultures within these areas. I believe this makes these countries unique because they cater to cross-cultural issues and have experience with working with more culturally diverse issues and have a greater chance at solving-problems. 

As in Japan and Korea, instructional design was present, but not to it's fullest. We need to make sure that when creating environments of e-learning, we are not "dumbing down" material. I like Helen Parkhurt's "Dalton's Plan" in the fact that education is geared towards a students aptitudes and abilities. This is important because this is geared towards learner-centered ideas and really relates to individual learners. I also found that J. S. Bruner had great ideas that it is you can teach anything to anyone at any time as long as you continue to reinforce basic ideas, until the learner forms a complete concept. To continue, his idea of "spiral curriculum" holds intuition and creative thinking to be of high importance in learning. This is important because every student has the ability to learn, we just need to reiterate and continuously keep evaluating the way we teach and create a circular way of revisiting knowledge of learning.