Section   5: Trends & Issues Various Settings

1.  Chapters in Section V identify trends and issues in IDT in various contexts: business & industry; military; health care education; P-12 education; and post-secondary education. Select at least 3 of these 5 contexts and compare/contrast the IDT trends and issues. Then explain how they are similar or different from the IDT trends and issues in the context in which you work.

I will compare the military, health care education and post-secondary education contexts.  As far as the military trends in industrial design, it doesn’t surprise we that future trends will be toward a greater multi-national training role and newer technologies.  During my Air Force career I had the pleasure of being assigned to a NATO unit overseas in the early 1990’s.  When I work at the NATO garrison, I worked with and encounter military members from various other countries including Turkey, Germany, Italy, Canada and England to name a few.  The commanding officer at the time was Turkish.  At that time, we had separate training sessions.  However, occasionally, one of the other nations military members would ask to sit in on a training sessions just to be exposed to the American military’s way of training.  Not in an official capacity, but just the exposure.  Also, I member going to flight training bases in the United States and see foreign flight officers attending training there.  Also, the military has always been on the leading edge of technology. The Internet was first developed for the military (secretly).  So it is not surprising that training military members to use the latest technological advances would be the latest trend.  Consequently, this would also be one of the major issues.  That issue being the large scale budget that that would be inherent with a project such as training a multi-national global military.  In comparison, the health care industry although not as large as a global military training project, can be a multi-cultural, large-scale design project endeavor.  The health care industry has become multi-cultural and if you think in terms of the Baylor or Methodist health care systems here in Dallas, you would be designing for geographically separated locations that could 20 -30 miles from each other.  The health care industry like the military tends to stay on the leading edge of technology, so designing an instruction unit that focuses on instructing the latest advances in radiology to several geographically separated units can be challenging.  Instructional Design for the military and health care industry contrast starkly to the post-secondary education.  Here instead of cultural, technological and global considerations, here there is more of a buy-in for instructional design from some of your fellow instructors that is the issue. Also, something that is really prevalent and I have encountered where I now work and I imagine in instructional designing in higher education is the political arena that exists in higher education.  At the institution I work at now, there has always been this subdued hierarchy that dictates an order of privilege.  When I was in the military, at least you knew what the ranking order was.   

     2.  Chapters in Section VI discuss global trends and issues in IDT. As the world’s population grows exponentially, we face unprecedented challenges that have implications for learning. How and can we prepare our youth to address the problems of living in a world with 9 billion people when the earth’s resources cannot sustain that many? Does our current education system, curriculum, and instructional practices help learners foster the complex problem-solving skills necessary to tackle these issues? Are there methods and practices used in European and Asian countries that we should use here in the US? Why or why not? 

Yes, I think we can prepare our youth to address these issues through the use of technological learning methods that can provide real-world simulations of the impending issues the world is facing.  One issue that we have to solve as a nation and on a global scale is that available technological educational resources do not exist at all economical levels of our society.  If we are to survive as a nation and on a worldly basis, we have to come together and share methods and practices globally, not just to a few privileged.  I do believe that there are some who are not making a concerted effort to make sure our youth receive the best education possible.  Those individuals make need to be re-educate on the implications for their children if they don’t get involved in their children’s educational endeavors, now and in the future.