Project Management for Instructional Development
Project Management for Instructional Development (768) was an ID course where I examined and participated in the initiation, planning, execution, and closure of instructional development projects. Foci included practical knowledge on managing project scope, work breakdown structure, schedules, and resources, including budgeting. Broadly, the course served as a holistic view of the instructional development project life cycle. This course, mimicking a real-world project, generated an enormous amount of artifacts. The highly abbreviated sequence is shown below.
PROJECT INITIATION & PLANNING
CASE STUDY INTRODUCTION
To begin, we students formed teams and sought to assess for and generate training for a Norwegian bicycle parts company. We began with a gap analysis: what was company performance, currently, and what did stakeholders want company performance to be?
GAP ANALYSIS
This analysis was achieved by comparing company performance to its stated goals. Primarily, our team distinguished what could and could not be ameliorated with training. The formal, prose analysis (available on request) came from a charted breakdown from our team.
PROJECT CHARTER
The charter is the authorizing, constituting document of the project. Our team made a number of important decisions here. The choices having the most downstream impacts were ones related to scope: what was in, what fell out, constraints, and dependencies. The sample below includes only scope-related criteria.
WORK BREAKDOWN STRUCTURE (WBS) & GANTT CHART
The WBS used the ADDIE cycle to sketch work tasks, and the Gantt chart forecasted a schedule for those tasks.
DESIGN DOCUMENT
All of our planning helped us form the instructional or course design document. The document represents a kind of middle planning phase, and we were set to begin the design and development of face-to-face and CBT instructional lessons and materials.
PROJECT EXECUTION & CLOSURE
INTRODUCTION
For the call center training instruction, we set a standalone RLO to serve as a primer and self-directed module of course content. This RLO was to be followed by classroom instruction where concepts and policies could be practiced, mastered, and assessed by human instructors.
CBT STORYBOARD
The CBT contains typical storyboard elements for our planned call center training RLO: style guide, slide templates, and instructional content. This storyboard additionally contains an objective-activity alignment concept map. The storyboarding itself we had all practiced in 767, but alignment done in the concept map was an adaptation of skills from 766.
FACILITATOR GUIDE
The Facilitator Guide is a document made by the design team for human instructors who would inherit and be responsible for conducting the call center training course in a face-to-face context. The guide formed activities from performance and enabling objectives, similar to the work done in EDUC 766.
QA & CONFIRMATIVE ASSESSMENT
The quality assurance rubric we crafted is nominally for use as a program-level summative assessment. With some tweaking, it and the objectives from previous documents could be used to initiate confirmative assessment. The standards found in our rubric were adapted from the Quality Matters Continuing and Professional Education Rubric.
REFLECTION