She-who-drafts  

I’ve decided that my new job title should be “she-who-drafts” because that really does seem to be a consistent thread in this new job!  Besides, it’s much easier to say than “distance learning instructional design consultant”...which also does not cover everything I have been doing. =)

What have I been drafting?

·    A curriculum packet (learning objectives, course outline, readings & other resources) for a new introductory class, potentially to be taken by all new staff

·    One of the exciting, but challenging, things about my new role is that I get pulled into helping to design courses that I would never be asked to teach because I don’t have the necessary expertise. However, oftentimes, these brand new courses are really designed by committee, and committees work best when they have materials to look at, react to, and edit.  So that’s where I come in. I create the drafts, and they tweak them, fill in the blanks, etc. 

·  Course content

·    When I help people build online courses, they “own” the course, but I help by drafting course content or by adapting pre-existing course material to formats better suited for e-learning. Occasionally, these stay as I wrote them, but often the course owners find the editing online process to be much less intimidating than the creating process, and they will go into the site and tweak things. This makes the course more “theirs,” which is good, and also helps them to develop the skills to revise the course as needed.

·  Web pages

·    I never imagined that I would be drafting web pages, but it’s been an on & off again process for several months. My team is in the process of rethinking how our public pages, which explain the various training options, training tracks, etc. work. More recently, we've also started working on some of the pages on our internal site.