Community Colleges | Feature

An Instructional Design Toolkit and Strategies for the Community College

A Q & A with Rio Salado College's Michael Medlock

Community colleges have always served diverse student populations, which instructional designs have of course taken into account. Today, though, instructional designers have new opportunities to improve instruction and service to students as their toolkit has grown to include an amazing array of Web 2.0 tools and new media. Michael Medlock (photo, right), the director of Instructional Design and Technology at Rio Salado College and Rio colleagues including Media Developer Jarred Truschke have compiled a short list of what they view as the key technologies and technology-enabled tools changing the landscape of instruction at community colleges: video, personal cloud storage, social networking, blogs, audio, mobile, note taking, photography, and open education resources (OERs).

These are areas that Medlock and Truschke consider important for instructional designers and technology strategists to explore in depth and map to the academic challenges faced by community colleges today. We asked Medlock about some of the overall design principles that instructional designers and a team of faculty, subject matter experts, and media developers at Rio follow as they leverage technology and create exciting new learning designs--a strategy that incorporates an evolving technology tool set and advances instruction at Rio Salado College.

Mary Grush: How would you characterize the diversity of students at Rio Salado College--I know you serve nearly 80,000 online-only students--and what is your overall strategy to address the challenges of this diversity?

Michael Medlock: Indeed, we design courses for a wide population. Even for gen ed courses, we know that we have every kind of learner from current high school students to people who have retired from one career and are retooling for another. We do know that the vast majority of our students are adult learners, but there is a very wide spectrum of needs represented in that group. And though we recognize all that variability, we embrace it rather than think of it as a stumbling block. And because we realize that the one thing that our learners all have in common is that they are all different, we are kept away from designing for the "middle student." This is a critical concept to grasp today, and we leverage our technology and new media capabilities to personalize learning.

In some courses, we can plan for a narrower range of learner characteristics and can design narratives or a story line that helps transition students from one lesson to the next, providing context. For example, we are doing some grant work right now, designing courses for the adult, displaced worker. But still, we are focusing our learning designs on strategies, normally enabled by technology, that allow us to personalize the learning experience for our students. That's a very, very important aspect of the teaching and learning environment at community colleges today.

Grush: With that broader goal in mind, how do you guide your choices of media for instruction?

Medlock: The crucial thing here is alignment. Regardless of the specific content, learning objects, course materials, media, or technologies selected, it's the alignment between the objectives, the assessment, and the instruction that will guide these choices. Once you have this alignment, it becomes a filter for the choices that you make--otherwise, you may end up wasting your students' time. Technology or not, good learning design is good learning design.

Grush: That said, what would be an example of a design principle you'd use at Rio when integrating new media into instruction?