Leadership Competencies for Instructional Designers: Identifying Critical Incidents Used to Lead Design Projects That Improve Performance

Even though an instructional designer may not have formal authority or direct reports, to be successful, they need leadership skills. Although the literature calls for instructional designers to possess several critical leadership skills, it does not consistently present the same important skills and often defines them very broadly. Further, authors who have argued that leadership skills are not taught to instructional designers in a sufficient way often call for more education on leadership competencies in graduate school, but the literature does not state where these skills are currently being learned and fostered. This qualitative research study used methods of grounded theory and the Critical Incident Technique (CIT) to identify leadership competencies instructional designers use to successfully lead design projects and to identify where they learn and practice these leadership competencies. In interviews, 25 instructional designers shared stories about successful and unsuccessful projects they led and where they felt they learned the skills needed to lead successful projects. After qualitative coding to determine common themes, the most frequently cited success behaviors are collaborating positively and communicating successfully with subject matter experts (SMEs) or stakeholders, continuous review with stakeholders or SMEs, completing a needs analysis, project management, and gaining support. Translating these success behaviors into leadership competencies resulted in four key leadership competencies necessary for instructional designers to lead successful projects: (1) positive collaboration and continuous review with SMEs and stakeholders, (2) completing a needs analysis, (3) project management, and (4) gaining support. These competencies match the research done previously on instructional design and leadership and align with leadership competencies identified by the Center for Creative Leadership. Instructional designers cited doing the work, having a helpful mentor or supervisor, or trying and failing as the most common places where they learned how to successfully lead design projects. This poses an opportunity for further research to be conducted on where these competencies can be taught to new instructional designers. Further research could also be done to define these competencies further or to do similar studies for specific industries or experience level of instructional designers

CONSULTATION EXPERIENCE IN PUBLIC HEALTH

The following portfolio is an overview of my consulting experience in public health. My experiences include making frequency tables, producing summary statistics, conducting Chi- Square and T-Test, and reproducing a demographics table. Working with investigators, I have conducted a power analysis for a pilot study, assisted with a study design consultation, used the Kappa coefficient to test for inter-rater reliability, presented survey results with answer distributions, and produced summary statistics for an investigator’s research poster. Working in the Applied Statistics Laboratory and with investigators has taught me the process of consulting. It begins by meeting with an investigator and determining their research needs. This can be many things, including study design, data management, and data analysis. Some investigators come with data and a study design already in place, while others will come to the Applied Statistics Laboratory for each step of the project, from the beginning to end. After determining an investigator’s needs and at what point they are in their research, members of the Applied Statistics Laboratory are assigned tasks to assist investigators with their research. In addition to data management and study design, data analysis is often conducted so investigators can receive a report to use for their research results. Being a part of the Applied Statistics Laboratory and assisting with consultations gave me the opportunity to improve my programming skills. As seen in this portfolio, I wrote numerous SAS programs and utilized various procedures and statements, including higher-level programming with SAS Macros. I also had the opportunity to obtain real-world practice conducting data management and data analysis. An important part of working with investigators was learning how to interpret statistical output, which is found in the “Critical Thinking” portions of each project in this portfolio. In the lab I also had the opportunity to follow up with investigators and produce reports which displays data in a form that is useful to the investigator, such as tables and graphs. The final page of my portfolio includes a poster made by an investigator I worked with. She utilized tables and graphs which I produced in her results section. I enjoyed my consulting experience in public health and plan to use many of the skills I learned in consulting in the future. I expect to use the numerous SAS skills I learned at my future job, along with what I have learned about study design, data management, and data analysis

Knowledge Transfer Needs and Methods

INE/AUTC 12.3

A Framework proposal for monitoring and evaluating training in ERP implementation project

During the last years some researchers have studied the topic of critical success factors in ERP implementations, out of which 'training' is cited as one of the most ones. Up to this moment, there is not enough research on the management and operationalization of critical success factors within ERP implementation projects.Postprint (published version

An exploration of the pedagogies employed to integrate knowledge in work-integrated learning

This article describes a three‐sector, national research project that investigated the integration aspect of work‐integrated learning (WIL). The context for this study is three sectors of New Zealand higher education: business and management, sport, and science and engineering, and a cohort of higher educational institutions that offer WIL/cooperative education in variety of ways. The aims of this study were to investigate the pedagogical approaches in WIL programs that are currently used by WIL practitioners in terms of learning, and the integration of academic‐workplace learning. The research constituted a series of collective case studies, and there were two main data sources — interviews with three stakeholder groups (namely employers, students, and co‐op practitioners), and analyses of relevant documentation (e.g., course/paper outlines, assignments on reflective practice, portfolio of learning, etc.). The research findings suggest that there is no consistent mechanism by which placement coordinators, off‐campus supervisors, or mentors seek to employ or develop pedagogies to foster learning and the integration of knowledge. Learning, it seems, occurs by means of legitimate peripheral participation with off‐campus learning occurring as a result of students working alongside professionals in their area via an apprenticeship model of learning. There is no evidence of explicit attempts to integrate on‐ and off‐campus learning, although all parties felt this would and should occur. However, integration is implicitly or indirectly fostered by a variety of means such as the use of reflective journals

Early Learning Innovation Fund Evaluation Final Report

This is a formative evaluation of the Hewlett Foundation's Early Learning Innovation Fund that began in 2011 as part of the Quality Education in Developing Countries (QEDC) initiative.  The Fund has four overarching objectives, which are to: promote promising approaches to improve children's learning; strengthen the capacity of organizations implementing those approaches; strengthen those organizations' networks and ownership; and grow 20 percent of implementing organizations into significant players in the education sector. The Fund's original design was to create a "pipeline" of innovative approaches to improve learning outcomes, with the assumption that donors and partners would adopt the most successful ones. A defining feature of the Fund was that it delivered assistance through two intermediary support organizations (ISOs), rather than providing funds directly to implementing organizations. Through an open solicitation process, the Hewlett Foundation selected Firelight Foundation and TrustAfrica to manage the Fund. Firelight Foundation, based in California, was founded in 1999 with a mission to channel resources to community-based organizations (CBOs) working to improve the lives of vulnerable children and families in Africa. It supports 12 implementing organizations in Tanzania for the Fund. TrustAfrica, based in Dakar, Senegal, is a convener that seeks to strengthen African-led initiatives addressing some of the continent's most difficult challenges. The Fund was its first experience working specifically with early learning and childhood development organizations. Under the Fund, it supported 16 such organizations: one in Mali and five each in Senegal, Uganda and Kenya. At the end of 2014, the Hewlett Foundation commissioned Management Systems International (MSI) to conduct a mid-term evaluation assessing the implementation of the Fund exploring the extent to which it achieved intended outcomes and any factors that had limited or enabled its achievements. It analyzed the support that the ISOs provided to their implementing organizations, with specific focus on monitoring and evaluation (M&E). The evaluation included an audit of the implementing organizations' M&E systems and a review of the feasibility of compiling data collected to support an impact evaluation. Finally, the Foundation and the ISOs hoped that this evaluation would reveal the most promising innovations and inform planning for Phase II of the Fund. The evaluation findings sought to inform the Hewlett Foundation and other donors interested in supporting intermediary grant-makers, early learning innovations and the expansion of innovations. TrustAfrica and Firelight Foundation provided input to the evaluation's scope of work. Mid-term evaluation reports for each ISO provided findings about their management of the Fund's Phase I and recommendations for Phase II. This final evaluation report will inform donors, ISOs and other implementing organizations about the best approaches to support promising early learning innovations and their expansion. The full report outlines findings common across both ISOs' experience and includes recommendations in four key areas: adequate time; appropriate capacity building; advocacy and scaling up; and evaluating and documenting innovations. Overall, both Firelight Foundation and TrustAfrica supported a number of effective innovations working through committed and largely competent implementing organizations. The program's open-ended nature avoided being prescriptive in its approach, but based on the lessons learned in this evaluation and the broader literature, the Hewlett Foundation and other donors could have offered more guidance to ISOs to avoid the need to continually relearn some lessons. For example, over the evaluation period, it became increasingly evident that the current context demands more focused advance planning to measure impact on beneficiaries and other stakeholders and a more concrete approach to promoting and resourcing potential scale-up. The main findings from the evaluation and recommendations are summarized here

Management learning at the speed of life:Designing reflective, creative, and collaborative spaces for millenials

This paper introduces the concept of "management learning at the speed of life" as a metaphor to inspire millenials. Millenials may face three major problems in relation to management learning: lack of concentration, lack of engagement, and lack of socialization. Management learning at the speed of life addresses these potential problems through three dimensions: reflective, creative, and collaborative learning. This paper illustrates the benefits of reflective, creative, and collaborative spaces for millenials using practices from leadership and personal development courses that were offered over seven years in Canada, Turkey, and the UK. These courses incorporated the latest technology that brought the course activities up to the speed of life

Built to Change: Catalytic Capacity-Building in Nonprofit Organizations

Summarizes the results of a broad survey of programs, and business and nonprofit experts, in the field of organizational effectiveness

Assurance of learning standards and scaling strategies to enable expansion of experiential learning courses in management education

In today’s dynamic globalized business environment, management educators must develop pedagogies that support students to manage and lead in rapidly changing business contexts. An increasing number of institutions use experiential learning as a component of their curriculum to address this challenge. Initially, a response to industry criticism that graduates were unable effectively apply skills needed to be successful, experiential learning has become a baseline expectation in management education programs. Students increasingly expect opportunities to practice and demonstrate competency in the theories they learn in the classroom by applying them in real-world projects. However, expanding such opportunities for students is limited by a unique set of complex administrative challenges inherent in this approach. To expand opportunities for students, institutions must overcome scalability obstacles resulting from the customized nature of the offerings. Business challenges where student teams work with external partners provide a real world learning experience. But they also pose difficulty in applying a standardized approach to assurance of learning. Course content must be redeveloped each time the course is offered, as external projects must be sourced, leading to input and output variation. Advising, monitoring, and assessing students is resource intensive, because at many schools each team is assigned a different business challenge. This article offers a set of assurance of learning standards that institutions can apply to project-based experiential learning courses and posits that greater cross-departmental integration in sourcing projects and better use of technology can increase the efficacy and efficiency of the courses to address the scalability issue.Educatio