EDU 627 Project Management and Instructional Design

Welcome to my EDU 627 Project Management and Instructional Design Page!

For our final project for this class, we have been designing (through individual projects during the course) a project that integrates instructional design (ID) and project management (PM). The course has demonstrated how important PM skills are to the instructional designer and this is my opportunity to show you what I have created.

Overview of the Project

Image courtesy of Praisaeng at FreeDigitalPhotos.net

I coordinate and teach an online course designed to introduce prospective students to the world of physical therapy. This course was originally a face-to-face course but was translated to the online environment approximately 5 years ago. I inherited it from the original coordinator and was asked to adapt it to a new textbook about 2 years ago. As coordinator, I receive student feedback (both verbal and through surveys) that indicate that the students do not always feel that the online lessons and activities prepare them well enough for the text-based assessments. The course also does not take advantage of the new technologies and suffers from being translated from the face-to-face environment.

The proposed Final Project would address these issues by revising the course. The integration of the text, online lessons, learning resources, assignments and assessments is lacking as demonstrated by student feedback and low performance on assessments. It also suffers from the fact that face-to-face courses often do not translate well into online courses, especially if using passive instructional methods (Bishop, Hyclak, Yerk-zwickl, 2007). This project would address the “disconnect”, integratte newer technologies into the revision, and would also allow for input from the PTA faculty and College in making this a better course.

The Final Project addresses the areas of a project proposal, project work breakdown structure, a stakeholder analysis, communication plan and a risk analysis, all with the idea of bringing PM skills to bear on a course being designed. At the completion of the project, the revised course will be more effective in integrating the text, onli-ne lessons, learning activities, assignments and assessments while keeping in mind the PM principles of managing scope, budget and time.

Here are some resources about PM and ID:

Article referenced – Lessons learned when transferring a face-to-face course to an online course Bishop, M. J., Hyclak, T., & Yerk-zwickl, S. (2007). The clipper project: Lessons learned teaching an online economics course. Journal of Computing in Higher Education, 18, 99-120. doi:10.1007/BF03033415

Why instructional designers need to learn project management – Rooij, V., Williams.,(2010). British Journal of Educational Technology, 41 852-864. Retrieved from http://eric.ed.gov/?id=EJ894509

Great textbook on integrating PM and ID with lots of templates – Cox, D. (2009). Project management skills for instructional designers. New York, NY: iUniverse

Great slideshare summarizing PM for instructional designers – McKee, K & Klotz, K. (2013). Project Management for Instructional Designers [Slideshare]. Retrieved from http://www.slideshare.net/kgklotz/project-management-for-instructional-designers