Explanations of Instructional Technology Areas of Emphases

WSU's IT department offers three (3) areas of emphasis (learning tracks) from which to choose. This option eliminates the "one size fits all" characteristic of many graduate programs and allows students to select plans and develop skills to succeed in their chosen career path.

Performance Improvement and Training

This track is designed for persons interested in obtaining employment or advancement as instructional designers or performance technologists in a wide variety of settings. People come into this track with backgrounds in health care, engineering, business, education, government and higher education.

Performance technologists seek to work with organizations to fully identify performance problems so that appropriate solutions/interventions can be developed. By selecting appropriate courses, students can build skills to identify performance gaps, design instructional programs, develop performance interventions, and evaluate outcomes. Students can also take additional courses from the Interactive Technology Emphasis that develop e-learning skills.

Jobs commonly associated with this track include: Instructional Designer, Performance Technologist, Training Designer, Training Manager, Trainer, Instructional Technologist, etc.

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Interactive Technologies

This track is designed for persons interested in the design and creation of technology based instructional programs. People come into this track with backgrounds in health care, engineering, business, education, government, computer science and higher education.

Students in this track learn to design and develop multimedia programs, interactive web-instruction, dynamic learning management systems, and learning object databases. By selecting appropriate course, students can also build skills to become distance education specialists and e-learning specialists.

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K-12 Technology Integration

This track is designed for teachers who are interested in learning technologies available to them to use in their classrooms and want to create dynamic lessons integrating technology. The focus in these courses is on the appropriate and creative use of technology — not simply on the technology itself. Students learn how to use existing resources as well as creating new technology based materials. Projects include lessons /units for classroom use as well as in-services and curriculum planning. By selecting appropriate classes, students in this track can develop skills for becoming classroom technologists, technology coordinators, and distance learning specialists.


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