Instructional Technology Internship at LeapFrog
Aniruddh Mukerji
Spring 2004

With my final semester in the ITEC program approaching, I was looking for internship positions primarily to get an opportunity to apply the Instructional Design (ID) skills I had acquired at SFSU in a real-world situation. While there were opportunities in some of the courses I took at the ITEC department to collaborate with corporations and non-profits, all the projects I had worked on were situations where I defined the problem (role of client) and I created a solution (role of ID). Therefore, I felt an Instructional design internship was a key piece in my goal to transition from a career in visual design to one in instructional design.

I felt an internship would clarify a few key questions in my mind:
· What is the role of an Instructional Designer in an organization and what value do Instructional designers bring to the training design and development process within an organization?
· How are Instructional designers perceived by Subject Matter Experts?
· How is Instructional Design practiced in the real world? What is the impact of time and resource limitations on the ID process we are taught in School?

I was pleased to be accepted at LeapFrog’s Instructional Technology Internship Program along with two of my peers from the ITEC department. Our first assignment was to document the production process for a new product. The process had been refined and had evolved over the past two years and there was a need to document it at this stage of its evolution in order to train larger groups of people both internal and external to the organization. There was also an expressed need from people external to the organization that wanted to get a broad overview of the production process to understand their role in the process.

The first step in documenting the process was interviewing employees working in different functional areas of product design and development. It was an exciting yet often perplexing experience for our team. We were thrust into a world of acronym, labels and processes, commonly used at LeapFrog and completely unfamiliar to us. In a week or two of conducting interviews we gained familiarity with some of these terms and a broad understanding of the process. We worked collaboratively to map out the process created a preliminary version of the production process document. Through an iterative process we fine-tuned and refined the document. We received a lot of encouragement and support from our supervisors and subject matter experts who were excited at the development of such a process map since it was the first time that it had been done for this new product.

The finalized process document was the basis of the first piece of training we created. This was a paper based pre-instructional guide for the new product. The guide was to be distributed to both internal and external developers for the product prior to classroom training. The purpose of the document was to explain their role in the production process. The document also included guided activities that would help developers understand key features of the product and introduce them to online resources they could access for tools, help and documentation related to the product. The guide was distributed and we received positive feedback from both the developers and experts.

The next project we worked on was a classroom-training module for the new product. This involved in-depth interviews and discussions with Subject Matter Experts (SME) from different functional areas involved in product development. This was a particularly exciting experience for me. I was assigned one functional area of the production process and worked over the period of a month with a subject matter expert and developed a session of the classroom-training module. The training produced was in the form of a printed guide for learners and a trainer guide for the session. This experience helped me clarify the role of an Instructional designer. I was fortunate to be assigned a SME who was open to suggestions and was committed to improving his delivery of the content. The key take away from this experience was that Instructional designers play a key role in the effectiveness and delivery of training. Their distance from the Subject matter to be taught can often be an asset as they can offer their insights on the learnability of the content, style of delivery, and ways to improve learner involvement with the content delivered in training. This classroom-training module was delivered multiple times over the course of our internship. The delivery of each module was followed by debrief meetings with trainers and managers. The feedback from learners and the debriefs were used to refine the module.

The final task we undertook at LeapFrog was specifying the software and infrastructure requirements to transform the classroom-training module into a remote training module using information and communication technologies. We collaboratively outlined what our requirements were and evaluated a wide variety of content authoring and synchronous and asynchronous remote training delivery tools.

I think the internship experience at LeapFrog was very rewarding. It did give me an opportunity to practice my ID skills in a real world situation. Priorities and Deadlines often changed at LeapFrog and I believe it was a true reflection of the circumstances in which Training Departments at fast growing corporations operate. I felt our work at LeapFrog was appreciated. The work environment was excellent and I particularly liked the fact that we were surrounded by cubicles that often erupted in laughter. In conclusion, I highly recommend all students in our program, especially those who are transitioning from other careers, to seek out internship opportunities in the Instructional Design field.