Seels & Richey (1994) define management as "controlling Instructional Technology through planning, organizing, coordinating, and supervising" (p. 49). The AECT (2001) has identified management as one of five domains that define the knowledge base of and functions performed by instructional technologists.
The management domain includes four subdomains:
4.1 Project Management: "[P]lanning, monitoring, and controlling instructional design and development projects" (Seels & Richey, 1994, p. 50).
4.2 Resource Management: "[P]lanning, monitoring, and controlling resource support systems and services" (Seels & Richey, 1994, p. 51).
4.3 Delivery System Management: "[P]lanning, monitoring, and controlling 'the method by which distribution of instructional materials is organized' ... [It is] a combination of medium and method of usage that is employed to present instructional information to a learner" (Seels & Richey, 1994, p. 51).
4.4 Information Management: "[P]lanning, monitoring, and controlling the storage, transfer, or processing of information in order to provide resources for learning" (Seels & Richey, 1994, p. 51).
Management may be the domain in which I feel weakest because I am not currently employed as an instructional technologist at my school and have not been expected to plan or monitor budgets and personnel, select hardware or software, or even to establish goals for instructional technology. Because of my background in computers and technology, I was asked to participate in a committee designed to evaluate the current technology needs in our school and how well our instructional technology personnel was meeting those needs and to develop solutions to any problems identified as a result of the evaluation. I found myself relying heavily on what I learned in the ITMA program as I crafted a survey for our faculty and examined the results to determine possible solutions to problems identified by the faculty.
In planning my professional development program for educators wanting to learn how to create and use websites and podcasts in their classrooms for Project and Report, I was required to keep a timelog of my activities. The project needed to have taken a minimum of 150 hours to complete. I kept track of my activities by creating a Word document in which I typed my activities as I completed them. Meanwhile, I ran a timer as I worked and recorded the time in the log when I stopped. This document became my timelog. This timelog is an example of both Project Management and Resource Management because it enabled me to evaluate my progress on my project and also allowed me to monitor the time spent and resources used on the project.
My proposal for this project is a good example of Delivery Systems Management because it involved planning the method for which my professional development program's instruction would be organized. I had to think about the kinds of software I would need to create the project and the process of development that I would follow.
While taking Instructional Media, I designed several lesson plans, but the lesson plan for a distance learning course that I included as an artifact required more thought for me in terms of planning how the two classes engaged in the lesson would store, transfer, and process information.
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