Steve Giersch Portfolio Introduction
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This CD contains a collection of artifacts from my course work in the Instructional Systems program at FSU, submitted for evaluation as my Master's Portfolio.

My initial motivation to enroll in the Instructional Systems Design program with major in Open and Distance Learning was based on career credentials reasons. With an undergraduate degree in the physical sciences, I had progressed through a professional trainer career of over 20 years with no formal education in the field of instruction. During the previous 10 years, as my career evolved into an instructional design role with management responsibilities, I increasingly found myself in positions or applying positions where an advanced degree would be considered an advantage. Although I felt fully equipped to perform instructional design responsibilities based on personal experience, trial and error, extensive reading and professional seminars, I found myself facing a dual employment disadvantage--advancing age combined with lightweight academic credentials. Therefore my initial intent was to let my credentials catch up with my career. At that point a "buy a degree" program probably would have met my needs, but I felt that if I was going to invest the time and money, I should seek out the best possible educational experience. My early work in distance education led me to the belief that DE represented the future of corporate training, so I decided to find a program in instructional design that emphasized distance education. I was fortunate to discover that one of the most widely respected such programs was at FSU and was conducted 100% online. This addressed my concern with structuring the education around my career, and provided double benefit. The program of study would not only address the subject of distance education, but would also be a case study in distance education.

By the end of the first month of the first semester, it dawned on me that this program would offer much more than professional credentials in the field of instructional design and distance education. In fact I began to feel consciously incompetent in the field of ISD, recognizing that although I had practiced many effective instructional techniques based on mimicking others or trial and error, I really had no idea why those techniques worked. The exposure to instructional theory and formalized instructional design processes throughout the three years I have spent in this program have transformed the way I think about instruction. In each course, I made every effort to apply the course content to my current occupational endeavors, and I believe that the cumulative effect of the course work has significantly improved my professional skills. I am now able to reflect back on work done long ago with insight into why it did or did not work. Some of the issues that have had particular impact on my professional work include:

• Keller's ARCS theory, which turned my ideas about "motivational instruction" upside down
• Dick and Carey approach to ISD, representing a time-tested straight forward ISD model that I now use religiously
• Collaborative learning, which I now apply regularly to learning situations where peer coaching is appropriate
• Mager and Pipe's performance analysis, enabling me to finally understand the main reason why training doesn't work (it is being applied to a non-training problem)
• Gagne's events of learning, which I make sure are incorporated into every course I design

My professional plans upon graduation are to incorporate the concepts I have learned in this program into my work, as well as to continuously advocate professional instructional design in the workplace. The latter is certainly a full time job. It is my observation that in corporate training there is an increasing tendency to make "ready, fire, aim" decisions, and to engage in costly programs without much forethought. I plan to take every opportunity to influence management in whatever position where I am employed to exercise discipline and a systems approach to the training process. By demonstrating small successes, I have shaped and will continue to gradually shape the instructional process at my employers into one that is effective and efficient.

I also have gained a much better appreciation of the challenges associated with distance education, and the reasons why so many distance education efforts in corporate America have met with such limited results. I have become convinced that the answer lies in the reintroduction of instructor-learner and learner-learner interactions into distance education, realizing that Vygotsky's views of the social nature of learning are every bit as applicable to distance education as they are in face to face education. I am excited about recent technological advances that promote collaborative learning, making distance education more like its classroom counterpart instead of simply an electronic book or human-machine interaction. I look forward to designing courses that make full use of these emerging technologies, and plan to continue evolving my own instructional designs to keep pace.