Available here is my internship contract, signed by myself and my mentor Dr. Linda Futch, confirming that I have completed the required 160 hours of service:
ePortfolio
Instructional Design Internship
The University of Central Florida (UCF) is dedicated to providing high quality online learning. This is why The Center for Distributed Learning (CDL) exists. The mission of CDL is "to support and develop the future of accessible education". CDL provides resources to UCF faculty so they can provide the accessible, productive, and engaging online and mixed-mode courses. They put it best on their homepage when they say: "As the central agent for online learning at UCF, we transform lives by making a high-quality UCF education available to anyone, anywhere, anytime through the innovative use of technology."
CDL houses support services including multimedia
(video, graphic, and captioning), technical (Webcourses@UCF
support services), and Instructional (Instructional Design). For
my internship I had the opportunity to work with and shadow CDL's
team of Instructional Designers. Instructional Designers at CDL
are unique among most other educational institutions in Florida.
Whereas it is often the role of the Instructional Designer to be
assigned courses to create for faculty, at UCF it is the
responsibility of faculty to create online coursework. The
Instructional Design team at CDL creates and maintains
relationships faculty in which they will offer guidance in the
creation and maintenance of online and mixed-mode courses while
promoting quality of online instruction at UCF.
Internship Details
Over the course of my ten week internship I documented my hours and tasks as well as a weekly reflection. This reflection can be found here:
Prior to the start of my internship Dr. Gunter had requested Dr. Futch's assistance. She noticed a wide variance her students taking EME6417 ability to create storyboards for eLearning they were building in her class. She requested Dr. Futch and CDL's assistance in creating a lesson for one of her modules to bring students up to speed with her expectations for an eLearning storyboard submission. Seeing as I had recently taken EME6417, Dr. Futch presented this as a project that I could work on during my internship with CDL.
The ASSURE model was a framework for this project. Throughout the process Dr. Gunter and Dr. Futch provided guidance and constructive criticism. Dr. Gunter's intern Crystal partnered with me on this project, assisting with editing content, providing voiceover in a video, and uploading information to Webcourses. Here is a brief account of the Instructional Design process:
- Analyze the learner: Students enrolled in EME6417: Interactive Online and Virtual Teaching Environments. According to the course description, this course "explores issues and trends in educational and human to computer interactions theories as applied to virtual and online participatory learning environments." By the end of this course students are expected to submit one module representing a whole online course, including a storyboard of the module used during the design process.
- State the Objectives: Utilizing this resource students will be able to develop a storyboard that plots out online lessons, modules, or entire courses.
- Select Media and Materials: Lynda.com has a lesson on storyboarding by Daniel Brigham. The lesson is a series of videos that add up to an hour and a half in length, which was much longer than the intent for this lesson. Key points would be drawn from Brigham's lesson to create a page and video for a module within EME6417. In addition, Connie Malamed's blog entry Storyboards for Elearning would be provided for additional reading.
- Utilize methods, media, and materials: Key notes from Brigham's lesson were brought together and addressed in a html based draft of the storyboard lesson that could be inserted into any module as a page. A storyboard was created for a proposed video that would be embedded in the page itself where notated. The draft and video storyboard (powerpoint) were submitted to Dr. Gunter, Dr. Futch, and Crystal for review.
- Require learning participation: Students will develop a storyboard for the module they are creating for EME6417.
- Evaluate and revise: Dr. Gunter and Dr. Futch provided feedback in for the initial draft and video storyboard. Dr. Gunter also recommended Crystal join this project for her exemplary video editing and voice-over skills. Crystal and I corresponded and updated the content, ultimately leading to the final product:
Final Product:Storyboard Lesson Page (keep in mind the formatting may change when imported into an LMS like Webcourses)
Final product: Storyboard Video- editing and voiceover by Crystal Harper
IDL 6543 is an award-winning course for UCF faculty provided by CDL. It is a mixed mode course that models effective online teaching strategies using a combination of seminars, labs, consultations with Instructional Designers, and web-based instruction.
Instructional Design may involve not just creating instructional content, but also maintenance of instructional content. It was my responsibility to look through the entirety of IDL 6543 and ensure that all of the links provided within the online content were still active, relevent, and effective.
UCF's quality initiative closely aligns with the State University System of Florida's 2025 Strategic Plan for Online Education. CDL is at the forefront of promoting a culture of quality by conducting Quality and High Quality Course Reviews upon request. Through a Quality Course Review CDL Instructional Designers may provide recommendations, both technological and pedagogical, as well as promote resources provided by CDL. Courses that meet UCF's Quality and High Quality online course standards receive: A digital badge which can be displayed within the online course, the opportunity for the course to be identified in the FloridaShines online course catalog, eligibility to apply for the Dziuban Award for Excellence in Online Teaching (High Quality only), and an acknowledgement letter from the vice provost of the Division of Digital Learning.
During my internship with CDL I had the opportunity to conduct quality reviews for courses at UCF under supervision of the Instructional Design team. Conducting these reviews gave me insight into what UCF, as well as the state of Florida, considers a quality online course. Included here is an example of a Quality Course Review that I conducted:
Instructional Designers at CDL are unique amongst most universities as their role is not to build courses for faculty, but rather consult, advise, and troubleshoot with faculty to help faculty build the online courses that they will be teaching. CDL Instructional Designers have a collaborative and social role and therefore it is required for them not only to have technical and pedagogical know-how, but also soft skills.
I had many opportunities to shadow consultations throughout my internship. I shadowed most members of the Instructional Design team at some point, and I could see how each member brings a unique personality and background to the team. I believe this makes their team stronger as if one member of UCF faculty doesn't seem to "click" with their Instructional Designer consultant, they may be given to a different Instructional Designer to see if their relationship might make for a "better fit." Being a student currently enrolled in online classes at UCF I was able to bring that perspective to some of the consultations I attended.
Throughout my Internship Reflective Journal there are many examples of consultations that I shadowed with notes and observations I made along the way.
One thing that became very clear early on in my internship was that the Instructional Design team at CDL have a wide range of responsibilities that encompass far more than just consultations with faculty. There are many initiatives being pursued with the ultimate goal of strengthening online learning for UCF and for the education community as a whole. One project that I was able to assist with was the development of an Open Educational Resource (OER). OER are freely accessible, openly licensed text, media, and other digital assets that can be used for education and research purposes. CDL has received a grant to make such resources for English and Anthropology classes. Being freely accessible and openly licensed these resources not only can be used by any institution, we wanted to promote them to Florida state colleges and universities to help strengthen our relationship with the educational community.