Week 6 R/D10

For your reading reflection, since you have now read for the past few weeks about instructional design/technology in three different contexts (business, P -12 & higher ed), identify 2 or 3 significant themes or differences you have noticed across these contexts and describe them. Is there a particular area or way that you believe your current professional working environment could learn from the other contexts described in these chapters?
First common theme that comes to mind is the money it takes to affect all these changes. The corporate world spends larger sums of money to organize and get fast results. Because if they don't make a profit there won't be a company. And that does happen. So there is more riding on those results. Evaluation will be watched. If the desired outcome is not realize, something better change and fast. Maybe someone is going to lose their job. Now it is not that people in education don't lose their jobs, but it is not a game of sudden death. We could learn from business by building in more monetary incentives. If my bonus depended on what you were doing, all of a sudden you've got my attention.
Second is evaluation. Educational organizations definitely try to judge the outcome of their efforts. But it seems like the land of second chances. And sometimes schools just abandon whole projects as fast as they pick them up. I had a set of textbooks that I used one year and the next year they were in the closet because we turned around and went with science kits. Who was evaluating the process that lead to wasting money on those books? In business when waste occurs it is addressed and tracked.
Third is training for future needs. A fully functioning staff is all too necessary and must be built to anticipate the workload in times to come. Educational institutions sort of react to holes in staff line ups that occur for various reasons. Businesses create succession lists to be ready for any eventual weaknesses in the leaders.
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