Looking Back: My First Instructional Design Project: AFJROTC TX-945

Looking back, I now know I did my first instructional design project in high school, when I was a Cadet Major in the TX-945 Air Force Junior Reserved Officer Training Corps (AFJROTC). It was my senior year (’96-’97) at North Shore High School in Houston, Texas. My instructor, Colonel Thomas W. McCay, asked me to create a booklet that could …

The Importance of a Proper Needs Assessment

I’m in the first cohort of the Executive Chief Learning Officer (ECLO) graduate certificate program at George Mason University. As part of my coursework there, I’m reading The Chief Learning Officer by Tamar Elkeles and Jack Phillips. I can’t tell you how grateful I am that chapter 4 of the book, “Align the Learning Enterprise with Business Needs”, is there. …

My Life in Video Games, Now that I’m an Instructional Designer and Developer

When I was a kid, there were few things that made me happier than playing video games. From even my very first gaming experiences, where I remember sticking cassette tapes into my grandparents’ Commodore to play something very similar to PONG, I was amazed at the thought of being able to interact with digital images on a TV screen. I …

Bringing a Forensic Training System Online

Introduction For the last two years of my life, the vast majority of my waking hours – nay, the vast majority of my hours – have been devoted to this project. I remove “waking” from hours for reasons that will be obvious by the time you finish reading this. A great quantity of my sleep has been sacrificed for it. …

Identifying Performance Needs and Changing Performance Assessment in an Aviation Community

I was a performance analyst working with my first instructional design mentor. I had just joined Harkcon and was working for a military aviation training center in Mobile, Alabama. My mentor was an amazing man who had spent the majority of his life either in training programs (as a student, a pilot, or an instructor pilot) or designing them from the ground up. …

Inspector Training for a Government Client

A government client needed a series of Web-Based Training modules to provide inspectors annual recurrent training. Inspectors once had to come back every year to the training site to receive this training. Rather than provide this expensive training in the classroom for all of its chemical inspectors every year, the client decided to provide this instructor-led training only to new inspectors and asked Harkcon to …