This course will repurpose how instructional media is approached and designed for learners. It offers opportunities to plan for, design and evaluate instructional media and is one of the courses that boasts the diversity of the field as it can open professional avenues for learners’ futures including graphic designing, website authoring, and video production among others. The course encourages purposeful and meaningful instructional media design that is learner-centred which encompasses high usability and functionality among others.

Learners who take the course will benefit from social learning which will help them to make wise decisions as it relates to instructional media design. Peers will critique, suggest and inspire other participant’s works and discussions. Moreover, it was in a discussion forum with participants on file formatting where I realised that instructional media does not have a right or wrong stance. On the contrary, it is about making decisions and being able to justify either with design principles, theories or experiential or background knowledge to support your choices.

To bring learners up to the requisite knowledge and skills, the course begins with a look at each media component singularly. At this point, there is emphasis on design principles. Learners then go on to create these artefacts individually. As a Spanish language teacher who used technology before entering the course, there was a vast difference in how my technology use had changed by the end of the course. Not only had I left with the skills of designing media but I had revisited the way how I carried out certain actions, for instance, feedback. After the course, feedback for me was not only relayed verbally or in text. I created it digitally and included screen recordings, added background instrumentals and summarised so that learners could retrieve it for future purposes. These were done through careful planning.

As the course progresses, it gels each media together to form a cohesive learning environment. This aspect is important as it shows how meaningful instructional media is once positioned with instructional design theories such as Gagne’s Nine Events of Instruction. By doing this, learners will have a strong underpinning of what a learning environment is and would avoid technology replicating face-to-face environments but rather would use it meaningfully to achieve an instructional goal. In addition to this, in this type of environment, the course also showed us how important internal and external evaluation is toward our products as it facilitated ways for peers to provide feedback on our work and vice-versa. This experience is useful as it opens a designer’s eye to different perspectives toward the design’s usability and functionality.

Select the artefact that follows in order review my personal website for this course. The course was designed to house all of my artefacts for each assignment of the course. Some pages, mainly the first page, along with elements such as tables found on the site were built using HTML coding. The second artefact is an illustration of the course’s influence on my profession and shows how I created a feedback video for posterity to aid in my student’s learning.