General Goals: My original goals for joining the ISD program at FSU were to combine my previous masters degree in Biblical Studies with an ISD masters from FSU so as to become the ideal e-learning director for a seminary or Christian college. Due to the my present work as the director of a non profit organization, I will not immediately be moving to find full time work in the ISD or e-learning field for another six months to a year. I will however continue working with online projects in the mean time. ¹

Specific Goals:The first step I intend to take towards work in the ISD/ODL field will be the deployment of an LMS (Moodle or Joomla based) that small seminaries, Christian colleges, and churches can use as a platform for online education. Many small institutions can not afford the cost of a full scale LMS, the salaries of IT staff to operate it , or the salaries of professionals to advise faculty regarding e-learning. To fill this gap, I look forward to not only administering the LMS but more importantly on providing low cost distance education consulting to institutions that use it.

Should the above program take off I intend to eventually expand the provision of e-learning and faculty-online-teaching-readiness to larger colleges and private organizations. Throughout the entirety of the above venture I intend to keep an eye out for openings in university or college environments resembling an online-education director or assistant director. Such a position would provide a satisfying alternate path to the one described above.

Future Research Interests: Future areas of research interest include: preparing face to face college faculty to teach online, emerging technologies for distance education, language acquisition through online learning, low cost online learning solutions, and learning through gaming and simulation. Should I find the time and resources to do so I would study and create a diagnostic tool that reliably measures the readiness of college faculty to teach online. Such a tool would play a counterpart role to some of the diagnostic tools that attempt to predict the readiness of students to learn online. ²

Prior Competencies: Having come to the ISD program with a previous masters in Biblical studies, I can confidently say that I was already strong in the "Communication" set of sub-competencies this portfolio is designed to exhibit. Public speaking, polished writing, fostering community, and strong interpersonal skills are all keys to the world of Christian ministry in which I move. Furthermore, at the commencement of my MS program, I was becoming comfortable with the essentials of web design and graphic editing, both of which are essentials of online productivity. As a public school teacher I was familiar with concepts such as curriculum design, learning objectives, and instructional strategies. Apart from this, the other competencies (analysis, design & development, evaluation, management, etc.) were new to me, and thus were most welcome for the new strengths they fostered.

Competencies Needed: It is difficult to be brief in a description of the skills needed by effective distance educators. Online education has become one of the largest and fastest growing fields in recent history. None the less, certain general competencies crop up again and again in studies of distance education. These would include the capacity to redistribute and chunk face to face course knowledge for online delivery, the ability to communicate with teams at a distance, the awareness of which electronic (or print based) medium will best fit the instructional goals on hand, the ability to communicate course design with programmers and graphic artists, the ability to manage projects and teams constructing a distance learning program. One must be able to evaluate existing education programs, analyze the audience one is creating learning materials for, the environment they are learning within, and the whether or not the customers institutional environment can sustain the technologies being proposed as an answer to students needs. In short, the distance educator needs to be able to design the right method of instruction, for a known student profile, learning in a set environment, and do it all thorough technologies that can be deployed within a giving budget and timeframe.

At the risk of sounding cliche, quality (Westernized) distance education is simply quality instructional design set inside the context of computer technology and the internet. I am ready to admit that the individual who wants to excel as a distance educator, needs to acquire the same general ISD skills that have traditionally been taught in the ISD world. Once they inter a specific domain of distance learning, those general skills will be honed into a more specific focus. None the less, while not all distance educators will be involved in management, research, or HPT, the bulk of traditional ISD competencies are still essential for distance educators. In the end, the distance educator is still doing learning-place analysis, gap analysis, learner analysis, and needs analysis. He or she still develops performance or learning objectives. Certainly they align assessment items to objectives and pick the appropriate media for the need at hand. Evaluation is a home in distance education, as are the skills of management and communication. All such classic ISD skills still exist and demand to be put to the test in the digital dynamics of modern distance education.To this end I intend to present personal artifacts that display the same core competencies as traditional ISD students with a touch of technological ability brought in along side.

Competencies Gained: Rather than lengthen an already growing document, I have chosen not to include large paragraphs of text on how the documents I included in my portfolio demonstrate the above skills needed for successful ISD in the ODL field. Instead I have included brief audio recordings on most of the product pages where I mention the ISD highlights of the product and what skills each demonstrates.

Areas for Future Growth: Areas for future improvement of abilities as a distance educator include: cost analysis and ROI estimation, section 508 compliance, SCORM compliance, curriculum evaluation, rapid prototyping, knowledge of XML, Flash, and project management for distance education.

¹I have been asked for help in online course review by Clearwater Christian College.

² See www.readi.info as an example of a learner diagnostic tool. The author built a website that incorporated this tool during his tutorial.