DAPHNE'S LESSON LEARNED: 

     The biggest lesson learned when creating this artifact is the importance and essential need to effectively communicate with key stakeholders such as the subject matter expert and understanding the audience.   This course wasn’t designed with a specific directive by a client; this was a challenge for me - I typically always have a directive to start with; creating something just because of my interest helped me grow as an instructional designer in a number of ways as  I encountered a lot of challenges developing this artifact. 

     For instance, the terminology - as a product manager I performed many of the tasks (eg, persona development, market analysis) to create high return on investment software; however, the instructional material terminology - instructional analysis flow diagram, learner analysis report,  performance objectives and instructional material - these terms were all new to me. I was able to draw correlation between these terms to what I had already understood. This increased my confidence in my ability to develop instructional material. For example, I now understand that persona development is equal to learner analysis.  This instructional material is the first of many that I plan to develop. I understand the value of instructional material and the usefulness in helping instructors meet the objective of teaching; additionally, I understand how the material impacts the learners ability to gain the knowledge that they seek to understand.  

     From this experience I was energized about having the ability to create not only content for learning but also instructions for the instructor for a given learning activity. 

     Curriculum design is an area of interest for me - the development of this artifact gave me hands-on experience.  I would like to continue to explore this area, as I see it as a necessary component to effective teaching; additionally, I would like to continue to expand my skills in the area of multimedia design - to me, that is the FUN part!