Health education has been a hot topic in the world of education for the past few years.  Schools are beginning to see the important role they can play in their student’s health.  I spent a few years working for a health education company designing curriculum for junior high students.  I began to see how using printed media in health education could be a hindrance, since the information in this field changes rapidly.  I decided that online lessons would be a better delivery method for lessons in health education.  After researching what health subjects are taught at the high school level in Texas schools, I decided that nutrition, exercise, and drugs would be the three areas that could benefit the most from hybrid online lessons.  My past experience with the curriculum company taught me that there is a massive amount of information online about these subjects.  My main challenge would be to narrow down this information and focus on what would benefit the learners most. Below are a few lessons that I have learned from the development of these lessons.

One of the first things that I learned in this class is that the instructional design process can be foreign to many school teachers.  In fact, in my own background as a school teacher, I don’t think I was ever trained in any instructional design process.  Looking back on this, I think I would have sat down with the teacher involved in this project and explained the entire instructional design process from top to bottom, including an explanation of why I was doing each stage.  The instructor that I worked with on this project (my wife) is very familiar with graduate level work and was therefore very understanding of why I needed to go through different steps.

Even though she was very understanding of the steps that I needed to go through, several of them did need explanation.  The instructional design step that probably needed the most explanation from me was the formative evaluation stage.  This stage was especially hard because my target population is teenage students.  Teenagers are not always known for being verbose.  Also, many teenagers are only available for evaluations during school hours, so I never really had access to them for the evaluations.  Since I had to rely on the instructor to deliver the evaluations, I also had to learn how to explain in detail what kind of information and feedback I was looking for in the students’ responses.

My background in online instructional design and the work that I did for the curriculum company were my greatest strengths while I was working on this project.  Since I am able to quickly put together websites and online tools, I could focus more on the lessons themselves and not the delivery methods.  The Moodle Learning Management System tool that I used also helped immensely for this project.  I was able to put together tools and lessons very quickly using this program.  Also, my specific experience with health education in the past was also a strength, since this helped me locate resources quickly. 

As suggested earlier in this paper, the greatest weakness in this project is the fact that I didn’t have access to the target population directly.  Also, due to my lack of experience with high school students in general, I wasn’t quite fully prepared for the first step of the formative evaluation.  I was able to correct this for the second step.  However, the fact that the formative evaluation took so long, I was not able to get a field trial completed before the end of the class.  I will accomplish this in January of next year.

If I had the opportunity to go back and do this project again, I would definitely have created a way to gain access to the target population from the beginning.  This would probably have meant that I would have worked out a way with my boss to take an early extended lunch on a regular basis.  I would also have planned a way to work a field trial into the evaluation period in some way.  The biggest hindrance to this was the fact that the lessons were designed to be delivered over a 12 week period, with at least one week of time between each lesson to allow students to gather information.  If I had had enough time to work on it, I could have created mock results from previous lessons, allowing students to work on the current lesson with these results.

Also, I noticed that many of the students were unfamiliar with the concept of a blog.  I would probably also have included a sample lesson at the beginning that allowed students to explore what a blog is before they use it for the lesson.  I am still not sure if this is a problem with not knowing exactly what a blog is, or if students are just not able to connect prior knowledge of blogs to the blog tool being used in these lessons.  The field trial will probably shed more light on this.

Overall, the project turned out to be a successful process that will end up being concluded within the next year.  There were many lessons that I learned about the instructional design process, and I was able to apply much of what I have learned throughout the entire degree process to project.  The lessons that I learned during this particular practicum project will enable me to complete the next project I take on more smoothly.