Honestly, I knew nothing about Instructional Design before I started attending Walden University. But I did know that I wanted to get involved in education and training. Once I read through some websites and the information on Walden, I knew that Instructional Design was the perfect fit.
When I was doing my research, here are some of the sites that I reviewed:
http://www.instructionaldesign.org/
This website contains a wealth of information related to Instructional Design. It provides a clear definition of instructional design, which helped me tremendously in moving forward with my decision to pursue a career in this field. There are also a list of recommended books related to instructional design and focuses on the biographies of some notable instructional designs from the present and the past. This was possibly my favorite website to review as it had all the information I've needed all in one website.
http://www.elearnspace.org/Articles/InstructionalDesign.htm
This website also provides information on Instructional Design, but to a completely different level. It provides a very detailed definition of instructional design in a way that anyone can determine how it relates to them. It also provides an understanding of the different learning methods and opens up the idea of what Instructional Design is all about.
http://www.cogsim.com/idea/idea/isd.htm
This website was a simplified method by which to provide an understanding of Instructional Design. In my perspective, it provided ann answer to many of the questions that I had about the concept of instructional design.
I also reviewed the following blogs and websites recently:
http://www.infed.org/biblio/b-learn.htm
This website provides an interesting spin on the entire concept of instructional design. The website focuses on learning theorists and their theories. But it also provides numerous texts to reference some key understandings of the concept.
http://instructionaldesignblog.blogspot.com/
I truly enjoyed reading this blog. It gave me everything that I was looking for to get an answer as to why I should decide to pursue this field. I wish I found it prior to doing research for this course. Lauren Pressley (the blog writer) was in the same shoes that I was in, trying to determine if this is the field for me and wondering if this is really what I wanted to get myself into. Lauren submitted multiple posts on instrcutional design and information literacy, which provides a wealth of resources to research into this field further.
