Before beginning my first course in instructional design, my definition of “instructional design” has been simply, “a process by which instruction is designed.” I’m certain that this definition will be revised throughout my experiences in this course. Up to this point, I’ve never put much thought into my expectations or disagreements regarding the concept of instructional design.

I currently work in the religious education field and direct the children’s ministries department of a church. A large part of my responsibilities in this setting within the local church deal with curriculum development and instructional design for volunteer training and classroom religious education for children. I subsequently have built an extensive background in curriculum development for elementary religious education, specifically within the Assemblies of God. In addition to my work within the local church setting, I serve as a national field advisor for curriculum development for the Christian boys organization “Royal Rangers” http://www.royalrangers.ag.org and have done extensive curriculum development work for the training programs for this organization.

I also am very intrigued with utilizing technological methods to develop engaging and accessible training opportunities for religious educators. I’ve begun making these online children’s ministry training workshops available online at: http://www.childrensministrytraining.org. I look forward to continuing to develop additional online training workshops and to employing the instructional design principles I learn. I plan to conduct developmental research to examine the development, implementation, and evaluation of online training for children’s ministers and hope to make this the focus of my dissertation.