Tech @Work: After Action Review

What was expected?

This elective gave me the opportunity to take a course outside of the MET program through the University of Toronto with a specific focus on the impact of technology in workplace learning. This would give me an opportunity to work closely with other learning and development professionals who face similar obstacles in designing workplace learning.

What was the reality?

Part of the project work for this course required that we document our learning journey as part of a blog: scroll below or click here to launch the blog in a new window.

What went well and why? How did it support my goals?

One of the first things we discussed was the future of work and shifts in the digital revolution. This learning then motivated to pursue further research in this field in later MET courses as well, especially in my project work for the Workday Reality initiative. We also discussed virtual teams, the affordances (and constraints) of information and communication technologies, how technology influences androgogy and economies (gig, networked, sharing, on-demand, and more).

We also spent a lot of time studying instructional design principles for creating online learning, and specifically the work of William Horton. The adult-learning orientated design of this course supported my learning goals at all levels, as is detailed in the reflective posts above.

What can be improved, and how?

The content for this course was extremely interesting and I appreciated the teaching approach in this course. Like with some of my experiences with the MET, groups were each tasked with facilitating a week of the course as part of a group project. There were also some synchronous components which were well intended, but given that they were also recorded, I was disappointed that they were delivered in a presenter format, more than an open discussion forum, which I feel would have been more productive.

We also would have benefited from making our e-learning module project shorter; where we were asked to create a single module, it evolved into a three-lesson module which proved to be too much. If this were a real client project, this likely would have led to expectations that were mis-aligned, and delivering a project that was over time and budget.

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Reading List

• Quick Instructional Design that Works

• Re-imagining Work: Shifts in the digital revolution

• Technological determinism in educational technology research: Some alternative ways of thinking about the relationship between learning and technology