SLO 2 - Changes and Innovations

Candidates will apply theories of change to introduce innovations into educational settings.

Because education, and further, instructional technology, changes constantly, educational systems and companies may find themselves needing to adopt a new idea or technology. By meeting this SLO, students show they are able to understand and lead the process of introducing those new ideas and technologies into an educational environment.

Diffusion of Innovations Final Project

Understanding Virtual Office Hours Infographic

Rationale

Though these assignments come from the same class and are related to the same topic, they show different skills that are needed to implement change and introduce innovations in an educational setting. Ideally, you would have time to write up a full report with rationales, research, and a step-by-step plan for diffusion. This is demonstrated with the first artifact. However, sometimes you only have 5 minutes to present the whole process. By condensing the information into a quick infographic, I'm still demonstrating that I can apply theories surrounding the diffusion of innovations while being engaging and creative enough to convince stakeholders to implement change in a short amount of time.

Challenges

As expected, I faced challenges with working with a group such as time constraints to have meetings. The assignment was also done in several parts that needed to be consistent with each other, requiring constant revisions to previous sections. It was also frustrating only being able to collect data from one person, as only one of the team members could be highlighted. I think it would have been easier if we were all at the same school, but we managed to overcome the challenges regardless. I had some difficulty condensing all the information on the infographic to one page, but determining what would be the most essential information to present in a hypothetical elevator pitch helped me complete the assignment.

Reflections

I was able to make quite a few connections between this SLO and my role as an instructional designer on a fairly new learning and development team while completing this degree. We're currently integrating the learning and development team from India with ours and are "trading" innovations in a way. For example, the team in India communicated daily through Slack about their current projects to help track how long they took to complete each step. We implemented this while helping their team move over to the learning management system we use. It's been a long and sometimes difficult journey combining our teams and ideas, but this degree has given me a few ideas on easing the transition, especially from these artifacts.