Gain Experience for Good

Through your participation in this course, you will further your own professional development in instructional design, while offering your service contributions to a grossly underserved educational segment of adult learners and instructors. In the US alone, 30 million adults do not have high school credentials, but less than 2 million are currently supported within federally funded adult education programs. (Links to an external site.) While we have a U.S.-centric focus on this project, support for adult education is a need around the globe (Links to an external site.) and the open educational resources (OER) created on on this project can be adapted for other contexts.

Participants who successfully complete this course will be invited to include their final projects in the Designers for Learning Adult Learning Zone group on the OER Commons platform (Links to an external site.). Instructional design projects added to the Adult Learning Zone group will be available to any adult educator or learner under a Creative Commons license (Links to an external site.).

Add to your Professional Development Credentials

As described below, upon successful completion of this course you will achieve:

• An instructional design service badge,
• A Certificate of Recognition from Designers for Learning acknowledging your service contribution, and
• Instructional design experience and artifacts to add to your CV, resume, and professional portfolio.

Earn an Instructional Design Service Badge & Certificate of Recognition

When you earn the Instructional Design Service Badge, you have demonstrated that you have completed an instructional design process to develop an instructional product to support a social need. In other words, you have gained experience for good! Upon successful completion of the Instructional Design Service Badge requirements (see below), you will also receive a Certificate of Recognition* from Designers for Learning recognizing your instructional design service contribution. Successful completion will be determined based on the following requirements.

Badge and Certificate of Recognition Requirements:

• Complete all course requirements in Modules 1 through 7.
• Submit a final lesson deliverable meeting all of the project and Design Guide requirements for upload to the Adult Learning Zone group on OER Commons within the Reflect | M7 | Final Deliverable Recap reflection in Module 7.

* Please note that we do not offer a letter of reference or other certifications based on this experience given the relatively short duration of the project (i.e. an estimated 40 hours of design work).

How to Update your CV, Resume or Portfolio

We are often asked how participants in our projects should describe this service-learning experience in a CV, resume, or portfolio. Some suggestions are to:

• Describe this course experience within the “service” section of your CV or resume.
• Include that you were a participant in a service-learning project facilitated by Designers for Learning.
• Note the scope and duration of the project, and the number of service hours you spent working on the instructional design project.
• Provide details of your specific contribution, and the outcome of your efforts.
• Given that all content produced within this project is released under a Creative Commons license, feel free to include copies of the work you produced on this project within your design portfolio.