-: My name's Richard Smith
and I'm an instructional designer here
at Southern Wesleyan University.
I've been at Southern Wesleyan for three years
and I'm transitioning into the instructional design role
and I'll be working with on campus faculty to help ensure
that the course materials and the course layout
is consistent, that it meets our goals and objectives
here at Southern Wesleyan University
and all of the online facets of their classes
are set up correctly.
In our post-pandemic world, education has shifted in a way
where people that were once reluctant
to use online platforms for learning are finding that
that is a much more effective and efficient way to learn.
And so the instructional designer role
is all about helping our content experts,
who are professors, be able to better teach their students
and better present their content
so that the students can learn from it.
We work with things like assessment,
we work with activities, different things like that
to make sure that everything in a course
is contributing to the success of our students.
Working with our professors is gonna be the,
the primary part of it
because our professors know the material
and they're used to teaching in classrooms
but sometimes we have to provide guidance to them
for how to do it using the online tools
and the learning management system.
We want things to be consistent across courses.
We want it to be consistent across programs
and across professors.
So providing that overview for them
and being here as a resource for them.
We're not here to tell them how to teach or what to teach,
we're here to aid them in making sure
that what they do and how they do it is effective,
and again, is something that the students can all use.
Some of the projects that I've been able to work on
are working with people who are designing courses
where they have content that they want to put forward
but they have to have somewhere to start.
And so we begin by mapping out the objectives of the course.
What exactly are you trying to accomplish
inside of this course?
And from those core objectives,
we then build out the content and the format of the course
so that everything flows back into those objectives.