Online course

There are bunch of benefit we can get from online learning, the most obvious advantage is "convenience" because both students and teachers can work in their own times.

As my understanding, the first reason is served for students who live too far from the school or they can not go away from their places. In this way they can learn in online setting which is work just fine for them. students can still have real conversation and face to face options with teachers and classmate through web cam. Most of online class allow students review the materials they have learned so that they can follow up the contents and be in the same front row as students from regular classroom style. Online students can also post their questions and comments through the discussion board and read others' there.

There are so many online classes offered in almost university now. Students can have more option to earn the degree through it, however it is still a question that online degree can be viewed as equal to degree from traditional schools. It all depends on what kind of online school we go to. An online program that is run through a traditional, regionally accredited school is the best. If you choose a school that is only online, make sure that it is accredited by the proper regional association.

So as an Instructional designer, we should pay more attention to design particular online course in order to keep it as effective as the regular one.

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.

internet and education

According to advance technology nowadays, both teachers and students can take advantage from online resources to help them fullfill their lessons. For me, as a teacher, internet help me a lot to complete the curriculum, whenever I want to get more information about something, online resources never let me down because as you know, internet is the biggest information resource in the world. I can do such as creating lesson plan online, searching for the program tutorial, looking for some ideas for the next class, managing students' data, or doing grade book online.

Here are my favorite websites for educational technology resources

- www.hometown.aol.com/hackbarths/index/html
( There are so many links for educators such as search engine, web tutorial, online lesson plan, reading)

- www.rtec.org
( This web is belong to regional technology in education consortia (R*TEC) . The RTEC program is aim to help school implement advanced technologies to improve teaching).

- www.starfall.com
( There is everything for kids)

- www.education-world.com
( Creating web lesson plan, lot of activities for students, education news and announcement)