Tuesday, August 9, 2011

Instructional Design

For those who may be interested in the Instructional Design aspects of my writing, I have currently published two training manuals - one on Surviving Stress, Recognition, Reduction and Management for Public Safety (E-9-1-1) Telecommunicators, Crisis Negotiations in Public Safety Telecommunications, I have been on the committee which wrote three other training manuals, and I have had several articles published in industry magazines for Public Safety (E-9-1-1) Telecommunications.   Further, I have written numerous articles for a statewide industry related newsletter.

My background includes years of working in the E-9-1-1 Communications Center environment, as well as working as a law enforcement crime analyst, intelligence analyst, and assisting those assigned to Investigations Division.  I was raised in a Fire Fighting family, and did volunteer for several years.

I came across Instructional System Design and the ADDIE model at a very young age, young enough that the Dean of the College asked me how I even knew that was what I wanted due to my age, not realizing that at that point I had 10 years in the business. 

I think that designing appropriate training materials, recognizing the target audience and appealing to their specific needs is a challenging vocation.  The learning must be very relevant, and the target audience is accustomed to working at a fast pace and they are very multifunctional so they will disappear in a second if their attention is not drawn continually into the class, and if they are not allowed to continually be "doing."   Another challenge of this particular target audience is that they are very used to processing at the synthesis level, so learning that occurs below that level is slightly, shall we say, insulting to the learner. 

Once the training manuals are created, then I work to create the live and on line versions of the course, testing, etc. for a comprehensive training program for the client.  It's an amazing challenge.

1 comment:

  1. I am so very excited for you and what the future holds.

    ReplyDelete