 I think it's very important to work with an instructional designer when designing an online course. Instructional designers have a wealth of knowledge on learning theory and best practices at their fingertips. I can claim expertise in the subject area that I teach, but it doesn't mean that I always know the best approaches to help students to learn it. And there are so many tools and activities that can be deployed. For example, if it was not the suggestion by the instructional designer that I work with, I wouldn't have known the lesson tool in Moodle. It greatly simplified the organization of the course materials and resulting in a very clean and simple interface for content navigation. One of the advantages of having an instructional designer is that you have someone there who knows what's happening in other courses beyond your own. And that was one of the things that was most valuable to me. As I sat down to think about how do I translate my in-class course on information technology and information management, that was a lot of discussion, easier to handle with open-ended questions in an in-class environment, easier to do group work, or at least I felt it would be. And sitting down with an instructional designer and saying, how do I translate what works for my in-class? How do I translate that? And really what are the best practices? So even though I'm comfortable with the technology, say the course management system and that I didn't feel like I needed a lot of help with, you know, here's how you structure things within the system and here's how you add an attachment and kind of basic stuff, what I did appreciate was the ability to sort of peek into other courses and find out what worked. So I could borrow, for instance, a strategy used in an English class, even though I taught a business class. And the instructional designer was able to give me that perspective. And I found, you know, that to be really helpful, as well as just the knowledge of other tools that were out there so it wasn't so focused on just doing what the learning management system could do. But if I said I want to achieve, you know, X in the course and maybe, for instance, I wanted them to do more collaborative writing and the tool in the course management system wasn't great. So what are my options? What have you seen work? How could I do this on our platform? Or streaming media, right, the platform, yeah, I can put a link in there, but are there other ways that I can get them access? So I think the instructional designer sort of being that Swiss Army knife of knowledge but also awareness of the tools and then how to integrate that into the system of the institution that you're teaching at is really valuable. I was fairly creative designing face-to-face courses and I thought that creativity would move over without too much challenge. The creativity moved over but the actual implementation was much more involved than I had imagined. And so I had to sort of live the whole course in a different way. I had to live the whole course before I taught the course. So I had this very different experience with the course as sort of a narrative. And I had to develop the whole narrative and see it through and understand the derivative elements of it even before I met the students, which was a very different experience for me. And then of course there had to be enough flexibility built into it so that when I met the students it wasn't so locked down that I couldn't accommodate for the students I actually had in the class. But the designers that I worked with were great in that regard because they understand how people function in the online environment in a much better way than I did initially. So they were able to guide me away from some overly ambitious kinds of forays into more manageable things that I could actually do. And we started simple and they did a lot of the loading, conversion to HTML making sure that things were in the right places while I was learning how to actually do those kinds of skills myself. So I say the first course I did maybe 10, 15% of all this locating, moving, placing and a lot of ask, ask, ask, ask, ask, ask. Could you do this? Could you do this? Could you do this? Now I'm more capable of doing things and I don't think I'm going to break the whole thing if I make a mistake on one thing. I think that's very typical of my generation and tech generally. Tech is not like furniture for me, it's still like a miracle. So I'm still of the mind that if I break something it will never be fixed because the designers are like, oh, don't worry about that or whatever. So they have a bigger picture on the overall complexity of things. Now I've got a different relationship with the designers I work with because they see what my strengths are and what I'm willing and confident to do and I know what I'm bad at, like I know what I'm really still not great at. So I have no issues asking for help. And they've really helped me say, well, these are the problems, I say to them, these are the problems I'm having in this course and they will say, well, now this instructor is trying this, that might work for your gang because they tried it and it seemed to work and I go, oh, that's a good idea. Or if you're going to do this then this might happen so maybe you should have this kind of a plan. So they forecast much better than I do but I'm getting a little bit better at forecasting. Working with somebody else, it means that you have to be ready to offer ideas but also receptive to other people's ideas. And sometimes you might want to try something and people say, well, perhaps you should consider something else because it might not work and so on. So it does become that kind of partnership. So it's kind of moving away from the solitary kind of stereotype of the professor conceiving a course on his own or her own versus being responsive to other people that work. There are real pressure, for example, if you want to create, we wanted to create those video. It took a terrific amount of coordination to get those done. And that happens only if you can work with the partners that are on the team, basically. I think that that helped the students a lot because the one thing that students look for in online learning environments a lot of the time is certainty about what their expectations are, what my expectations of them are. And so working with the instructional designer was really positive in that sense because it imposed a sense of organization on the course that the students were really looking for and really responded well to you. My own belief and my own experience teaching online is I've had the benefit of working with a team of individuals and supporting my online teaching, particularly on the design side. And for me, and in my experience, it's been hugely beneficial. I'm a content expert. And I'd like to think that I'm a good teacher. But teaching online for me was a new experience and working with people that understand how to organize aspects of my course so that I would be able to reach and have my learners interact with the material, to learn the material, to achieve the outcomes that we had defined was hugely satisfying and the process was informative not only for the course but for my other aspects of my teaching experience. Because it got me thinking about my course in ways that I wouldn't necessarily have thought before. In some ways it's like having a conversation and being able to bounce ideas off someone whose experiences are directly related to what works really well in terms of teaching online. And so it was a hugely satisfying experience. That being said, I know online educators that are so successful and so accomplished and so experienced that they haven't necessarily needed an instructional designer or they've only needed a little bit of guidance here and there. Because online teaching is new for so many people having the ability to bounce ideas off, to have someone structure and work and support your teaching was hugely beneficial but some educators don't need necessarily those types of interactions. Working with an instructional designer on my course was a fantastic experience. It was incredibly useful for me to be able to see what options were available and to quickly move beyond what I think on my part were fairly naive assumptions about how this was supposed to work. I was thinking very conservatively or rigidly in terms of just trying to translate what I was doing in my regular class online and the instructional designer was there to say well wait a minute there's all these other options available to you as well both pedagogically and technologically and I think they're great for being able to combine those two sides to balance those two things out and to give you a very good idea of what the benefits are of something from a pedagogical point of view and a technological point of view and to really help you navigate through that process because with all of these things there can be a fairly steep learning curve and a time commitment that's required to adopt any of these new things and so they're very good at sort of helping you work through that process and make sure that you know what you're doing you're consciously choosing things for good reasons and then to help you work through the workflow itself.