As Albert Einstein said, “In the midst of every crisis, lies great opportunity.” The global COVID-19 pandemic has certainly been the crisis of many of our lifetimes, but it has shed light on an area of great opportunity in the online learning and technology landscape.
Online learning and technology have been a growing, rapidly changing environment for many years, but it has never been as critically important as it is today. From K-12 classrooms, to colleges and universities, to business and government sectors, the seamless and effective use of technology has enabled work and life to successfully continue on despite the pandemic.
Villanova University’s new fully online certificate in Learning Design and Technology is a non-credit program created by two professionals at Villanova with over 30 years of combined experience in the field of instructional design and technology — Andy-Guoqiang Cui, Ph.D., associate director for eLearning Pedagogy and Ankit Desai, MS, director of Learning Technologies.
“One of the major challenges educators, faculty and corporate trainers have faced over the past year is to deliver consistent quality education during remote teaching,” said Cui. “We created the Learning Design and Technology program to address this very challenge by equipping program participants with the skills needed to work with teachers, with faculty, with organizations, to design quality training materials and ensure a high quality learning experience. Practical and authentic activities and projects were designed to meet a wide variety of training and education needs. The curriculum is broad enough to benefit anyone building online education, whether that be in the K-12 space or a corporate training need.”
The field of instructional design is critical and the need is greater than ever for this skill set, to provide support beyond “emergency remote teaching” to quality online learning, detailed in this EDUCAUSE Review® article.
Desai explains, “When building an online course/training or a course/training intended to be in person, the basic pedagogy is similar. The same questions are asked; what do I want the students to learn? How am I structuring my course? How am I going to assess the students on the learning outcomes? What makes the role of an instructional designer so critical is their ability to marry both online learning pedagogy with an expert level knowledge of the current learning technologies available to reach those various teaching goals and deliver an exceptional online learning experience.”
In looking to the future, Desai says “We anticipate that K-12, higher education institutions and corporations will want to further develop their infrastructure for online learning and training, so the opportunity is there for highly skilled instructional designers. The beauty of this program in particular, is that in just eight short weeks you will be able to apply what you’ve learned to add value to your organization and increase your marketability in the field.”
To learn more about Villanova’s new Learning Design and Technology certificate program, offered by the College of Professional Studies, visit the program webpage.
Villanova University’s College of Professional Studies provides an academically rigorous education to high achieving adults who are balancing educational and professional aspirations with life’s commitments. High-rigor, high-touch, high-flex and high-tech, CPS offers learners of all ages an academically challenging and collegiate educational experience that is transformative.