I’m doing a pair of e-learning subjects in my masters this semester so the next couple of months of posts will probably be centering around what I’m learning there, interspersed with the odd rant about Flash, as I’m doing a 2D animation elective. I just finished reading through a paper from the American Society for Training and Development that was meant to allow you to assess your competencies in a range of areas important to an e-learning designer. However I think I missed the point of the paper. The way the subject works this semseter is that being that the students come from such a diverse range of working and educational backgrounds, one must assess their own background, skills and current state of knowledge and then determine where they want develop from there and what skills they will need to acquire to do so. The ASTD paper appeared to be useful in that at first it had several pages of competencies and a sliding scale of 0-6 with 0 meaning you knew nothing and 6 making you an expert and then a rating of 1-4 as to how important the skill was for your future career progression. However in the end there was no assessment, no collation of scores. What would have been nice is a way to rank yourself, for example if you scored between x and y then you should investigate resources about p, q and r, for example. The paper was useful to list some of the competencies that do exist for an e-learning or instructional designer but for me at least it seemed to stop there.
In a similar vein, I read a chapter on Instructional Design Competencies and found it much more descriptive and helpful. In a nutshell it showed me that through my web developer and scientist background I already have a great number of the skills required by an e-learning specialist (which is ultimately where I’d like to head, career-wise), but the skills I did lack were those that crossed over between e-learning specialist and an analyst/evaluator role. Which made sense because this role focuses on needs assessment, identifying the learner’s needs, goals, and the environment they’re best able to learn in and then communicating this to the e-learning specialist or instructional designer, whilst still keeping the goals of the business/institution/stakeholders/corporation within the plan as well. So ultimately I think the areas I need to focus on are looking at incorporating learning and instructional design theories and methods and applying them to what I already know about technologies, adult and social learning, and learning communities.
References
Richey, R.C., Fields, D.C., Foxton, M. (2001) Instructional D?esign Competencies: the standards. ERIC Clearinghouse on Information and Technology: Syracuse, New York. Chapter 5: The Competencies and ID Specialisations.
American Society for Training and Development (1998) ASTD Models for Learning Technologies: Roles, Competencises and Outputs. American Society for Training & Development: Alexandria, Virginia. Note the updated 2004 Competency model available at http://www.astd.org/astd/Research/competency_study/competency_study.htm.
