Work & Academics

Instructional Design

This one-hour workshop will take place at the upcoming staff meeting. These meetings typically span two full working days during which staff members share progress on their research projects and also receive project-related feedback from other staff members. The total desired attendance would be all 47 potential participants; however, since a considerable number of the learners are abroad, the in-person attendance is expected to be 30 participants. All learners are equipped with an internet-connected laptop. Prior to the workshop, password-protected user accounts will have been created for all learners and the MediaWiki software will have been installed and tested on the research institute’s webserver. The conference room used for these staff meetings is equipped with a projector and a screen.

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Instructional Design

At a certain research institute, many of the employees collaborate on documents intended for publication. Documents range from short (1,000 to 2,000 words) articles for website or newsletter publication, to longer (20 to 80 pages) reports and working papers. The authorship and editing process is sometimes shared by up to four people. The problem is that these groups of authors working on papers together often have a difficult time managing version revisions of their co-authored papers. Often, the authors are uncertain about which version is the most recent version of the paper.

Most of the learners in this setting are in their mid- to late-twenties. Most of them live and work in different parts of India, but some of them are visiting PhD students or project interns who also spend part of their time abroad at their primary university. In all, there are 47 learners, including the local researchers, the visiting PhD students, and project interns.

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Instructional Design

We have all worked somewhere, perhaps under someone else’s supervision, where we have had the inclination to say—at least to ourselves— “If I were in charge, I would….” During those moments, we are questioning both the ability and the approach of the organization to meet different needs, objectives, and efficiency requirements. Conversely, we may have worked in an environment that was very productive and where objectives were often met—just not with the same level of quality that was intended. Projects produced in such an environment are submitted with a disclaimer like “It was the best I could do with what I had to work with” or something similar. Our critiques of the organization’s approach, or our subtle expression of our needs, may be well-grounded in our firsthand experience; however, these approaches are rarely systematic.

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Action Research

Preface: This paper is a sample “Action-Research Proposal” in which we were required to go through the complete process of designing the research and justifying it by a review of current literature. Ideally, we would have the proposal reflect our work setting; however, since I’m not in the educational setting these days, I worked with a combination of my past experiences. The community setting I have identified is the one I worked at while in Santa Barbara. The description of the student population, however, is a little bit more hypothetical and based more on observations from my other after-school experiences and from my observations of one of the sites that the after-school program was going to be expanded to. This paper also borrows certain elements of an earlier paper on program design for out-of-school-time programs.

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