Senior Instructional Designer University College At The University Of Denver

Paul Novak Senior Instructional Designer University College at the University of Denver

Paul Novak is the Senior Instructional Designer for University College at the University of Denver. He also serves on DU's Courseware Faculty Advisory Board where he guides faculty and staff on the use of the university's learning management software. His diverse background and experience with both instructional design and technology training inform his current role at DU. I spoke with Paul over the phone. How would you describe your role at DU? What does your job involve? I do faculty support, mostly. I also teach, and I help with training faculty and staff on technology and courseware. I am on the Courseware Faculty Advisory Board where I give suggestions for appropriate technology to use given the content of the lesson. I also do curriculum consultation. Is there anything that you would like to tell me about online learning at DU? University College is the college of professional and continuing studies, and that's where most of the online teaching takes place. Other units are incorporating online teaching little by little, but 95% of the teaching outside of University College is still done on campus. How did you get into instructional design? Well, luck is part of it. I majored in history and journalism. In my first job out of college I worked with technology and I did video production. After a few years I ended up training new coworkers. I found the educational technology aspect of my work very interesting, and I decided to further my education. I got a master’s degree in Ed. Tech at Northern Colorado, and instructional design was part of that. How do you keep up with and incorporate emerging trends in instructional design? Much of the time I just do a Google search. And there are plenty of magazines. The Journal of Distance Education is a good one. There’s also Campus Technology, which is related to ed tech. When I come across information about different techniques and developments, I’ll do more research into them. What are some of the major trends as you see them? There's going to be more evaluation, more analysis of outcomes and reformulation of objectives, especially now with government programs such as No Child Left Behind. This is

where instructional design is important. You can’t get good data to evaluate the outcomes without instructional design. That is the single biggest trend I see in both the public and private sectors. Where do you see the field going in the next five to ten years? One thing that’s growing and becoming more important is the blending of instructional design with ed tech. More and more learning is not taking place in the classroom, so there’s a need to develop new and different ways to deliver instruction. What would you like to see that isn't happening? I would like to see a change in the perception of instructional design. It would be helpful if people recognized that we’re not just trainers or educational technologists. We do development, we analyze outcomes and develop instruction around that. We use process in developing education. ADDIE is essential to what we do. What is happening in instructional design that you don't care for? There are a lot of people who call themselves instructional designers these days, but really they design curriculum. That differs from the way I define instructional design. Instructional design is not just about designing courses and modules. There’s a bigger picture – you have to take into consideration what resources do you need, who needs to be involved, and so on. We use ADDIE a lot in this field. You’ve probably encountered it pretty often in your technology classes, haven’t you? Actually, I’ve just started the program. I don’t have much experience at all. Then you’re going to use ADDIE a lot. It is something that is used across every discipline that builds something. First, you’ll analyze the information that you have, and with that information you’ll design what you need. Then you develop it. You implement the thing. And then you evaluate the outcomes. Everybody who develops something follows this process. You are just going to use it for education. Do you have any advice for people who are just getting into instructional design? It depends. How did you become interested in instructional design? I used to have a small business doing freelance copy and technical writing. Through that I became interested in instructional design. Well, one thing I’ve noticed is that most instructional designers come from a non-technical background. Many of them have a liberal arts education, for example. So what I would recommend is that you brush up on technology. You need those soft skills, but you really need to be conversant in technology, as well. I was in journalism, but the technical training that I did

enabled me to work closely with engineers and others with strong technical backgrounds. You need to be able to talk about a wide range of stuff. Instructional design is one of those fields where everything you’ve ever learned means something. Another thing to remember is that development and delivery require different skills. You can have a technical writer who can communicate very eloquently on paper and get their message across that way, but their interpersonal communication is not that great. As an instructional designer, you will need to be able to communicate well through both development and delivery. And you should brush up on your web skills, because very little is done on paper anymore. There’s one more thing that I want to tell you. I don’t know you very well, but I know a lot of technical writers and they tend to be kind of take-charge people. In instructional design you really need to be a people person. You need to make sure that your stakeholders feel that they have some piece in it – in what you’re producing, so there’s got to be a lot of interaction. You also have to think about the people who will receive the end result. When you develop a bit of corporate training, there’s going to be someone who is going to take that and interact with a customer. At the end of the day, what you create has got to stick. Paul Novak’s diverse experience and educational background is of interest to me, as my own educational background is diverse. I certainly relate to his encouragement to “brush up” on my awareness of technology, as I have spent time in the last year networking with developers and investors of new technology in the Denver area, and I have found that not only is it important to be conversant in the language of technology, but also to recognize developers’ need to communicate with the end user who may not be adept with technology. In our conversation, Paul strongly emphasized the importance of being able to communicate well with people at varying levels of expertise, and not only regarding technology. While I somewhat intuitively recognize that aspect of instructional design in my own perception, Paul really seemed to consider it to be a high priority. The synthesis of instructional design and educational technology is also an interesting aspect of the field. It seems in many ways inevitable, and it’s one of the factors that led me to instructional design. As Paul perceived, I don’t have a strong background in technology, and my aim at first is to approach the field from a design perspective. However, I am intrigued by the creative possibilities when two young fields such as instructional design and educational technology combine. I was a bit surprised that his method for keeping up with emerging trends seemed relatively simple, but his prior knowledge of educational technology and its uses is obviously much stronger than mine. I was also interested in his comment that it isn’t possible to analyze outcomes without instructional design. That role for instructional design was one that I hadn’t considered. In all, although many of the key elements of instructional design that he mentioned felt familiar to me in a sense, it was certainly valuable to hear a professional instructional designer specify what he considered to be most important to him. What I take away as the most important message of this interview is that an instructional designer needs to be adaptable and able to diversify, and most of all be able to communicate across the spectrum. As a novice, it is instructive to hear that pieces of knowledge that I am beginning to synthesize are on the right track, and to have a sense of what areas are important to work on as I progress in the field. 

Kay Miller Practitioner Profile 26 September 2009