My career has been centered around education; thus, I have experience operating within educational systems. In its most simple definition, a system “is made up of parts called elements, which connect with one another to form relationships.”1 Educational systems are part of what are considered “social systems,” made up of people connected through different units (a school, a classroom, a family, an institution, etc.) all of which have their own rules, processes, and characteristics in order to function.2 The interactions among the system’s units can be studied with system design theories and principles. My interest in design of instruction connects educational system design, instructional design, and curricula design with the socio-cultural aspects that affect the system.
My beginnings in instructional design
As a teacher, I started designing lessons and courses without much formal training. My formation as an educator was more focused on theories and “didactics” as we called pedagogical practices in Argentina. However, after years of working as a practitioner, my design skills improved, and my interest picked. I started enjoying and learning more in a very self-taught process.
As mentioned in the Teaching section, I created and re-designed a course that I teach at USF School of Information. Being an elective, the School gave me free reign to re-design it (under supervision, of course) and the result was a new model of designing curriculum. However, I am more interested in how the course fits into the program curricula, and into the bigger system in the School of Information.
As a Reference & Instruction Librarian, I designed lessons for different types of learning contexts. These different modalities and settings required different plans, and also different instructional design principles. Creating an interactive tutorial is very different than assessing the same outcomes through a quiz, for example. At the State College of Florida (SCF), I quickly became the unofficial “instruction coordinator” (we didn’t have a position just for that) among the librarians, and with the Library Director, we worked on an Information Literacy Assessment Plan. This required carefully evaluating our library’s instructional system, assessing its strengths and weak points, and re-designing its components and relationships.
As part of the work at SCF Libraries, I designed many lesson plans for one-time sessions (which librarians call “one shot”), usually between 45 minutes to one hour. These lessons have very specific pedagogical requirements, such as: determining the appropriate SLO (student learning outcomes), designing the presentation, delivery, and assessment for short sessions, while also satisfying the requirements of the assignment created by the instructor. I also created asynchronous lessons with tutorials and in many cases with video recordings of lectures or demonstrations, followed by activities. Some of the “Learning Objects” that I have created are: videos, quizzes, tutorials, or specific content put into library guides (what Springshare calls “LibGuides.”)
As the instructor of record in online courses and as a student, I have experience using different Learning Management Systems (LMS). I have used Blackboard, Canvas, and Moodle, to create (and deliver) online courses, synchronous and asynchronous.
My doctorate path in system design
While I focused my learning in educational systems, the coursework for my doctorate program provided with a broader understanding of system design, that I found invaluable. In the Human Computer Interaction (HCI) class that I took as a doctorate seminar (ISLT 9460) with Dr. Joi Moore, I acquired important skills to understand, evaluate, create, and improve systems. Education being a “social system” (as defined above) the components have the added conditions of social interactions, not only between individuals and the system, but also among individuals and institutional settings.
An exercise on evaluating a system and proposing improvements that we conducted in ISLT 9460 was critical in helping me understand how the theory and principles of design impact the actual efficacy and user experience. This was a mock design to improve the fare machines in the WMATA train system in Washington DC. While this was just an exercise, having to do complete Task Analyses, use principles from design theory, and make the decision on what improvements were needed, was an excellent preparation to later apply on other systems.
One project that I personally conducted for this class was about Activity Theory. Under this theoretical model, a researcher can analyze a system with a set of descriptive tools for “interpretation of the individual, other people, and artifacts in everyday activity”3. For my project, I used a system diagram from a study titled “Moving courses online as a catalyst of pedagogical innovation: An activity theory-based view”4. Using Activity Theory is a good example of how design principles can be applied to educational settings, which in this topic of pedagogical innovation, fit perfectly.
Another project conducted in this course was related to evaluating the mobile application of a Learning Management System (LMS) such as Canvas. With a team of classmates, we conducted interviews and surveys to study students’ self-efficacy around the use of the Canvas Mobile App. This project relates to my interests in pedagogical applications and their relationship to social and cultural contexts.
You can see my design projects below, and continue with a section on Curriculum Design:
Mock Evaluation of Fare Machines (screenshots of Task Analysis)
My doctorate path in Curriculum Design
Based on my previous experience designing instructional opportunities in different contexts, throughout my coursework in the doctorate program I looked for opportunities to enrich my curriculum and instructional design skills.
At the USF and the SCF Libraries I completed training on Quality Matters, a DEI Certificate, and Online Teaching Certifications, that are required to teach online courses.
Some projects that I completed in ELPA 9442 and ELPA 9448 allowed me to apply theories to the design of lessons, activities, learning outcomes, assessment, and also courses and programs. The project in ELPA 9442 with Dr. Wren required me to design a whole program, a certificate. For that project, I created:
- Plan of Studies
- Courses Learning Outcomes & Syllabi for Courses:
- “Issues of Diversity in Libraries & Information Centers” (Master Course)
- “Diverse collections for Children and Youth”
- “Diverse collections for Adults”
- “Cultural Competence in Library Services”
- “Diversity in Leadership”
- Master Course: Assignments and Assessment
- Curriculum Design Evaluation
- Curricular Map
In ELPA 9448, we looked at theories of education in order to design activities, authentic assessment projects, and other elements of a curriculum. We also looked at theories such as “Backward Design” (based on the model by Wiggins & McTighe)5 in educational settings. In this course I also had to create a Syllabus, learning outcomes, assessment of prior learning activities, authentic assessment (CAT), etc.
Below is an example from the curricular plan’s alignment. You can also see a presentation about my design in this VoiceThread video:
Project: Design and development of 12-hour credit certificate: “Diversity in LIS”
Presentation available at: https://missouri.voicethread.com/share/21394564/
Curricular map
- Gonzales, M. (2020). The social system and education. In M. Gonzales (Ed.), Systems Thinking for Supporting Students with Special Needs and Disabilities: A Handbook for Classroom Teachers (pp. 33–47). Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-33-4558-4_3
- Id.
- Kaptelinin, V., & Nardi, B. A. (1997). Activity theory: Basic concepts and applications. CHI ’97 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 158–159. https://doi.org/10.1145/1120212.1120321
- Khanova, J. (2012). Moving courses online as a catalyst of pedagogical innovation: An activity theory-based view. Proceedings of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 49(1), 1–4. https://doi.org/10.1002/meet.14504901258
- Wiggins, G. & McTighe, J. (2005). Understanding by design, 2nd. ed. ASCD.
Alicia K. Long 