Hi and welcome to UWF. My name is Dr. Nancy Hastings and I'm the chair of the Department of Instructional Design and Technology, or ID. We offer a fully online bachelor of science program in Instructional Design and Technology, which from my perspective, is probably the coolest field you've never heard of. What we do is we prepare our students to go into the field and solve problems.

We call ourselves the problem solvers. Our field consists of three different aspects: instructional technology, instructional design, and performance improvement. 

Instructional technology is about integrating technology to improve performance. So it is about how do we use the iPad in the K-12 classroom, But it's also about how do I integrate a new software program in my manufacturing setting or how do we use this new technology?

How do we evaluate it and determine if we even should? And instructional design is all about designing effective efficient instruction. And again, this instruction might be used in a school or it might be used in any of a number of other settings. It might be in a health care setting, it might be in a business setting, it might be in the military.

But basically, instructional design teaches you how to really analyze a problem in an organization and determine who needs to know what and why. And then beyond that, what's the best way to teach them that? And the third piece of the field is where we get to the performance improvement piece or performance technology. Performance improvement takes a little bit broader perspective than instructional design and instructional technology.

We recognize that you can't fix everything in an organization through training. There are things that require different types of intervention. So IÕll give you an example. I can bring you into a classroom and I can train you all day on how to use this new computer system. But if you go back to your work site and you do not have that same technology, the training is not going to help.

So performance technology is really about looking at the whole system. We look at the organization, we look at the people, we look at what the ideal performance is and what the actual performance is. And we analyze that very carefully. So there's a lot of data collection, a lot of analysis here where I'm looking at where do I want to be?

Where am I? What's the gap between those two things and what's the root cause of that gap? Once I know that I can figure out how to best resolve it. It might be training, but it might be something entirely different. So as I said before, we're the problem solvers. Our goal is to help organizations perform better. Another exciting thing about our program is our diverse faculty.

So we reach all different fields, and it's important that we be able to talk to you effectively about that. So our faculty members, some of them come from K-12, some from higher ed, some from the business and industry side. So we have experts in every facet of our field and we find it really exciting. I hope you will, too.

If you'd like to know more about it, certainly reach out to us. We're always excited to talk about IDT and what it is we do. Welcome to UWF. I hope to hear from you and see you on campus.

Hey Argos, my name is Chloe Diehl and I am a graduate from the Instructional Design and Technology Program. If you are problem solver or solutions oriented, this program's perfect for you. You can take the degree across industries such as education, government or business to help others find solutions to problems that they may have. So if you're looking for a very versatile program, this one's for you.