Dennis Maxey, PhD, Associate Dean, College of Advancing Professional Studies (CAPS)

As the former Program Director, how have you seen the program evolve and change over the years?

The program’s prestige has grown due to the involvement of many of its graduates in the university’s online educational offerings.  Everywhere you look on campus, an ID graduate can be found advocating for better instruction through intentional design.

The second change is in how technology permeates the entire field.  When I was the director, we still taught folks how to turn the page of a flip chart.  Now not only do we teach how to create an online course but every course may be taken online!

Do you have any anecdotes from your time as director that you would like to share?

I still tell the story of one of the first summers on Nantucket Island.  We had two students who had started a relationship via email before they had even enrolled in the program.  During their first summer after matriculation they met face-to-face for the first time at the Nantucket field station…I sure hope that they are still together…or at least they continue to write learning objectives together.

Are there any words of advice or well wishes you have for current students in the program?

Instructional Design deals, at its core, with one of the most important questions of our time:  How do we learn?

The field has tried to build a science around that question but every decade or so, that science changes drastically.  So how do we embrace a discipline, a field of study that can change from behaviorism to constructivism to connectivism and back again and still find a grounded core?  Are the “take-aways” from the program still relevant with all of the changes?  Former Program Director Canice McGarry believed that the essence of learning rested not in a theory, but in human relationships.  I still think that her idea is the perfect grounding for any educator.