ID in the large organization

It could be a challenge for an instructional designer who work in the large organization environment which have different culture, there are definitely a lot of burden and things to concern about; technology is one thing that would be the critical area since it changes rapidly and get involve in everything, we need to keep ourselves catch up with it. The surrounding atmosphere is not stable in large scale organization such as military, education or health care, so an ID should be active in the area of design at all time. when designed one project, it should be easily reuse and adapt in other projects because the designer need to make them within the budget since the large organization has so many training session all year round. When we design the training program, we should recognize the needs of learners in a variety of learning environment. Above all of these, the ID should be fast-learner, active, opened mind person and have some basic skills in order to work in such large diverse environment.

E-learning evolution

Instructional designers' jobs are in the building process: assessing, extracting, molding, refining, and revised the content for learning results. When a Subject Matter Expert finishes writing a course module, the Instructional Designer takes place. The building stage usually takes months. Each activity is part of the overall program design and must go through test and revised process before lunch it. In a well-designed training program, nothing is accidental, everything is on purpose. The "ID" identifies learning missions and make sure that learners get knowledge and take them into practice.

In this digital learning period, I try to find out instructional design stand point, the way we match it to the new learning styles which shifted from classroom training to e-training.

The multimedia revolution brings chance to improve the effective of training. For instance, distance e-learning programs can save cost in travel, space allocation, salaries, and time consuming. As a result, there's an opportunity to swap from formerly unstable classroom programs into something well designed that delivers the learning objectives and the answer is e-learning.

The importance of instructional design in traditional training development is even more critical when multimedia is involved. So Instructional designers need to pay more attention when they design the program because the multimedia training product now must serve as both content and instructor.

Electronic Performance Support Systems (EPSS)

Collaborative of EPSS make our works a lot easier than in the past, the program can adapt to support the performance of individual, a team and the whole company.

I always use one type of EPSS which is Microsoft office especially word and excel to run the document when I worked for the company in my country. Once I created my own template of the certain document. I can easily use it for the next document without to restart creating the whole document over.

To work as a team, certain EPSS program are installed on local network which the member in the group can share their work and make group conference to perform the given task. EPSS let member share the work, post articles, make comment to each other or discuss the issues within the system which allow all group member to see, edit and erase the information in the program.

In the large organization, EPSS are programmed into the organization’s network. For example, most of fine restaurants use touch screen menu system to place orders from customers included dining area, take out and delivery. It also can check available seat, edit and print bill with the name of the server, date and time be shown in the receipt. It can link to every screen in the restaurant.

Management and Leadership

Being a leader requires a lot of effort, experience and skill, but being a manager is easier than that, all we need to do is perform tasks according to the plan. In the case, we can say that not every manager can become leader.

I used to work in the Japanese Trading company in Thailand; a Japanese CEO there assigned the tasks to his sub coworkers in order to have the certain project done on time. Most of the projects under his control were usually success. We can consider him as a perfect manager because of his management skills (execute the plan, supervising staff, focus on production, staying within budget and meeting deadline).

According to the Hersey, leadership involves 3 interrelated elements (cognitive, behavioral and process skills) which I think he lacked a characteristic of the process skills in term of he use solid way to supervise and communicate with his employees, he always yell at them when they made mistake without investigate what real problem was. He had a bias toward his female staff about work. And most of all, according to his Japanese working style, he made the staffs work 10 hours a day without over time paid. Thus, his staffs never respect him at all and most of them refuse to work for him in the next project.